Quotulatiousness

July 31, 2025

“You can see what a monster this very dangerous person is”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray looks north to the Dysfunctional Dominion and our governments’ inability to deal with the narrative of the Residential Schools and the lack of actual evidence to support that narrative:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

Frances Widdowson is a cantankerous career academic, an evidence-first Canadian scholar who doesn’t suffer fools. Her personal disregard for sanctimonious performativity has gotten her in some trouble, and now she’s a former professor, though her termination was found to be improper. A few months ago, the CBC interviewed her for a story about how mean she is, because Widdowson has questioned the much-chanted sacred story about the dead children at Kamloops.

If you don’t know the Kamloops story, an anthropologist used ground-penetrating radar to supposedly identify the location of a secret burial ground for 215 dead children near the site of the long-defunct Kamloops Indian Residential School, uncovering evidence of what has been constantly called a hidden genocide. But no human remains have ever been recovered at the site, and the radar evidence of disturbed earth aligns well with the path of an old septic trench. More detailed background here.

Widdowson recorded the entire interview, so we can hear the inner workings of the sausage factory.

Throughout the discussion, CBC reporter Jordan Tucker, speaking with the obligatory vocal fry and upspeak, keeps warning Widdowson to stop shouting at her, which Widdowson obviously isn’t doing, and to watch her tone. She’s presumptively pre-outraged by the existence of a Very Bad Person, conducting an outrage-performance in the form of asking questions.

But then Widdowson flips the script. You can hear this excerpted two-minute high point here. Tucker argues that government officials say there are bodies buried in the apple orchard at Kamloops, so is Widdowson somehow making the outrageous claim that government officials might be wrong? “Are all those different governments lying? Are all those different people just not telling the truth, or they’re going along with these stories imagined by people, by indigenous people?”

Government says, but still Widdowson doesn’t concede. You can see what a monster this very dangerous person is. “How is it that all these government officials have been so connived?” Tucker asks, obviously flabbergasted.

Widdowson responds with an argument about evidence, and about the standards of evidence for the claim. What do we know? What have we seen? What would we need to see to prove a claim of this type? Who has the burden of proof?

And then: “As a journalist, are you satisfied with the evidence?”

The response to this question — just past the 1:30 mark in the excerpted video linked above — is remarkably telling. It produces, first, a short silence, and then a long burst of stammering and high-pitched incredulity: “I am. Of course I am.”

Widdowson, sharpening the direct question: “You think there’s 215 children buried in the apple orchard at Kamloops?”

Listen to Tucker’s shaking voice. This question is a threat. It makes her extremely nervous. “I think that, at this point, there has been enough documentation, there have been enough — there’s enough social and archaeological consensus to say that, to say that, we can just believe indigenous people, and move on with trying to do our best by them as a society.”

So two people are arguing about truth. What is true? How can we know what is true? One person keeps asking what is the evidence. The other person keeps deflecting to identity, authority, and social status. The government says so, there is social consensus, “believe indigenous people”. No human remains have been found, but there are human remains, because government officials and indigenous people say so, and other people with the status to matter say that they agree. Truth is consensus. Defaulting to evidence is cruel. Why would you do such a horrible thing?

  • What’s the evidence?
  • Are you refusing to submit to the narrative consensus?
  • Yes, what’s the evidence?
  • (shocked gasping and trembling voice)

This is the mechanism of woke narrative control: It has been said that this is true. The people who say it possess authority — they are officials — or they possess privileged identities. It is now disinformation to say that government plus indigenous people might not be correct, and an act of dangerous extremism to mention questions of evidence.

June 28, 2025

Breathtaking hypocrisy in the BC Ferries deal to buy ships from China

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As you’d imagine, with the coastal geography of British Columbia, there’s a lot of demand for ferry service between the mainland and Vancouver Island (and other less-accessible-by-land locations). BC Ferries runs a fleet of ships to handle this traffic and needed some new ferries to replace older vessels. They decided, in the middle of a trade war, to source the ships from China rather than a Canadian shipyard. And the federal government financially backed the purchase:

So just to recap — because this one’s almost too absurd to believe: BC Ferries cuts a billion-dollar deal with a Chinese state-owned shipyard to build four new ferries. Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland — always quick to perform outrage when the cameras are on — writes a stern letter saying how “dismayed” she is. She scolds British Columbia for daring to do business with a hostile foreign regime that’s literally attacking our critical infrastructure in real time.

And then — wait for it — it turns out her own federal government quietly financed the whole thing.

Yes, really.

According to an explosive report from The Globe and Mail, the Canada Infrastructure Bank — a federal Crown corporation — provided $1 billion in low-interest financing for the very same China shipbuilding deal Freeland claimed to oppose. The contract was signed in March 2025. The outrage? That only came later, when the public found out about it in June.

Freeland’s letter to BC’s Transportation Minister was loaded with warnings. She talked about China’s “unjustified tariffs” and “cybersecurity threats”. She demanded assurances that “no federal funding” would support the purchase. But what she didn’t mention — what she conveniently left out — was that Ottawa had already cut the cheque. The financing was already in place. The loan had been approved. Freeland just didn’t say a word.

And when reporters asked for clarification, what did her office say? Nothing. They passed the buck to another minister. The new Infrastructure Minister, Gregor Robertson, now claims the government had “no influence” in the procurement decision. No influence? You loan a billion dollars to a company and have no opinion on where it goes?

Let’s be clear: This wasn’t some harmless miscommunication. If it wasn’t a cover-up, then it was sheer incompetence — the same brand of incompetence that’s driven our shipyards into obsolescence, our economy into dependence, and our country into managed decline. An entire federal cabinet stood by, watched this unfold, signed the cheque — and then pretended they had nothing to do with it.

And British Columbia’s government? Just as bad. Premier David Eby, the man who pretends to champion “BC First”, claims he was “not happy” with the China deal but says it’s “too late” to change course. Too late? This isn’t an asteroid heading for Earth. It’s a contract. And contracts can be rewritten, canceled, renegotiated — if anyone in charge had the political will to stand up and say, “No, we don’t hand billion-dollar infrastructure projects to hostile regimes”.

But instead, we get excuse after excuse. They say BC Ferries is independent. They say there was no capacity in Canada. They say we had no choice. All the while, Canadian shipyards sit idle, unionized workers are frozen out, and the Canadian taxpayer is stuck subsidizing Chinese shipbuilding — and Chinese espionage.

June 17, 2025

BC is buying ferries from China … to spite Trump!

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

After all the “buy Canadian” blather of the last federal election campaign, it was only a matter of time before the feds or one of the provinces did something astoundingly out-of-step with the mantra. Smart money was always on Quebec being the first (because that often makes sense for internal provincial political reasons), but no, this time it’s British Columbia going a long way out of their way to not buy Canadian for a huge government purchase:

BC Ferries’ MV Spirit Of Vancouver Island between Galiano Island (Bluffs Park) and Mayne Island, en route from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay, BC on April 6, 2022.
Photo by Gordon Leggett via Wikimedia Commons.

British Columbia’s transportation minister claimed Friday that buying new ferries from European shipyards would have cost roughly $1.2 billion more than buying them from a Chinese government-owned shipyard in Weihai, Shandong province, which is a city roughly the size of Montreal that I had never heard of until this week. China knows how to build cities. They burst into existence from nothing, like popcorn. China also knows how to build ships, and highways, and high-speed rail, and just about anything else you would care to name, better and more efficiently than the Canadian public service can realistically comprehend.

The four ships B.C. Ferries is fixing to replace, of 1960s and 1970s vintage, were built at Seaspan in North Vancouver (which is an active shipyard), at the Victoria Machinery Depot (which is no longer an active shipyard), and at the Burrard Dry Dock (which is also defunct). Canada’s shipyards, for better or worse — certainly for expensive! — are very busy building things for the navy.

B.C. Ferries has plenty of experience with foreign-built vessels. Its current fleet includes ships built in Romania, Poland, Germany and Greece. Other than the Baynes Sound cable ferry on Vancouver Island — which is not especially popular — the Crown corporation’s newest Canadian-built boat went into service in 1997. So “foreign” obviously isn’t the problem.

But China is China, and that’s legitimately another thing. China is not a Canadian ally. They try to screw with our democracy, and most other democracies by the sounds of it. And right now we are in a profoundly protectionist moment: Across the political spectrum, mostly because of President Donald Trump, “buy Canadian” is the only philosophy really on offer.

But does that make sense? We should pay over the odds for ferries … because of Trump? There wasn’t half of all this foofaraw when Marine Atlantic on the East Coast bought its newest ferry from Weihai. Since last year it has safely been shepherding Canadians between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, without a whisper of controversy in the Rest of Canada.

I don’t quite get the Trump angle, which is perhaps why I’m more interested in Dean Broughton‘s take:

… I’m not just disappointed — I’m furious — about the NDP government’s decision to award the construction of four new BC Ferries vessels to a Chinese state-owned shipyard. This isn’t just outsourcing. It’s betrayal dressed up as budget management.

Back in 2021, the NDP government unveiled a “Made-in-B.C.” shipbuilding strategy with great fanfare. They formed a Shipbuilding Advisory Committee, posed for cameras, and promised to rebuild a long-neglected industry. It was supposed to be a turning point, a real investment in local jobs and industrial capacity.

Now, many of those same politicians have turned their backs on everything they claimed to support. Not only did they ship the contracts overseas, but, according to Eric McNeely, president of the BC Ferry and Marine Workers’ Union, they didn’t even give B.C. shipyards a fair shot. The procurement process was so rushed and restrictive that no local yard could realistically compete. They didn’t lose the bid — they were boxed out.

That’s not fiscal prudence. That’s political cowardice.

The hypocrisy is staggering. This is the same government that talks endlessly about investing in clean industry and supporting working families, and they just handed a massive public contract to a country with a well-documented record of environmental abuses and human rights violations.

They talk about reconciliation and sustainable development—and then funnel hundreds of millions to an authoritarian regime.

Worse still, they did this knowing full well that B.C.’s industrial base is already in decline.

We have so little left beyond resource extraction. Shipbuilding could have been part of our economic renewal. Instead, it’s another casualty of government optics and empty promises.

I remember my father’s outrage in 1990 when the federal government cancelled the Polar 8 icebreaker — a Canadian-built vessel meant to defend our Arctic sovereignty. That decision was dismissed as a “cost-saving measure” and today our claim to the North has never been weaker.

The BC Ferries decision reeks of the same short-sighted logic.

May 27, 2025

Four years on, and the media still haven’t been honest about the Residential Schools claims

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies looks back to the bombshell claims that horrified the nation, yet went unquestioned by pretty much all of the mainstream media:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

This week marks the fourth anniversary of the day Canada’s media broke faith with the public that funds it.

May 27, 2021, was when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” discovered at the former Kamloops Residential School site. Most, if not all, media reported this statement, which was based on anomalies shown on ground penetrating radar, without challenging its veracity.

Not long after, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced that ground penetrating radar had located 751 unmarked graves in a community cemetery adjacent to the former location of a residential school.

Talk of “mass graves” ricocheted across the country and the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Saskatchewan in a flash on bended knee with teddy bears. It didn’t matter that the markers in the cemetery had been removed decades ago by a rogue priest; Anderson Cooper and a 60 Minutes crew were already flying in to Regina. The impression left by the coverage was that children had been murdered en masse. Statues were toppled or put in storage and close to 200 churches were burned — many to the ground — or vandalized in the months and years that followed. Pope Francis visited Canada in 2022 to atone once again for the Roman Catholic church’s role in operating many of the schools.

All because no one had the courage to ask: “This is a very serious allegation – how can you be certain?” and then, in the immortal words of the City News Bureau of Chicago, check it out.

The coverage at the time showed little evidence journalists looked for proof beyond the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc allegation or gave sufficient play to Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme’s efforts to establish context.

Since then, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc have revised their confirmation of bodies so that they now maintain the radar showed anomalies that possibly could be graves. No bodies have been found or, for that matter, searched for. The band has received millions of dollars to assist it with its investigation and the school is now a national historic site.

The original stories remain online and, in many cases, uncorrected, leaving the public’s understanding of the matter unchanged. Here’s one example from CTV/Canadian Press. The headline — “Remains of 215 children found buried at former B.C. residential school” — is still there. CBC has made an effort to update its stories, but its original headlines remain and recent incidents suggest staff still believe the initial version.

As Marco Navarro-Genie of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently wrote, media may even have been enlisted as allies to ensure the allegations went unchallenged:

    “According to The Knowing by Tanya Talaga, “select journalists” were given embargoed details to ensure “sensitive and impactful” coverage. CBC journalist Angela Sterritt admitted she was in contact with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc the day before the announcement and was one of only a few journalists granted access to the June 4, 2021, video conference, where live-streaming was prohibited. This raises serious questions about whether the CBC acted as a passive reporter or an active participant in promoting an unverified claim.”

Shamed domestically and internationally, the nation’s flags went to half mast for months before being raised only in deference to Remembrance Day. A new holiday was declared for federal employees and the Prime Minister took advantage of the first one to go surfing.

There is no question that children died at residential schools. I have stood by and honoured the once unmarked graves — including those belonging to children of the school’s principal — at the reclaimed site of the Indian Industrial School outside Regina. Nor is there doubt that many students suffered from cultural dislocation, shaming and abuse. But that is no excuse for media not reporting the original Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc claim and the Cowessess news professionally and instead wildly and widely misinforming the public, raising the spectre of mass murders and traumatizing many. It’s one thing to make a mistake, quite another to leave it uncorrected because you prefer the impression it made.

April 8, 2025

Mark Carney explained how he viewed the world in his book Values

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s worth considering what Mark Carney wrote about his beliefs before becoming prime minister and how he’s campaigning right now:

For those who haven’t had the misfortune of parsing through Mark Carney’s Values, it reads like a sermon from a high priest of globalism — polished, preachy, and packed with ideas that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares about Canada’s economy, especially Western energy producers.

Writing as the former Bank of Canada governor and a darling of the Liberal elite, Carney pitches a vision of “sustainable finance”, net-zero absolutism, and heavy-handed regulation. To the National Citizens Coalition, it’s clear: this isn’t a roadmap to prosperity, it’s a wrecking ball aimed at the heart of Canada’s resource sector and the West’s economic lifeline.

Start with Carney’s obsession with “revaluing value”. In Values, he argues markets should prioritize climate goals over profit, pushing financial institutions to choke funding for oil and gas.

For Alberta and Saskatchewan, where energy employs tens of thousands and pumps billions into the economy, this is a death knell dressed up as virtue.

Western producers aren’t just businesses; they’re the backbone of communities, powering schools, hospitals, and homes. Carney’s disdain for fossil fuels ignores their role in keeping Canada competitive while our allies and adversaries keep drilling. His plan? Starve the sector, stranding assets and jobs, all to appease international green lobbyists in European nations with nationalized economies on the road to being as disastrous as Canada’s.

Then there’s his love affair with regulation. Values champions policies just like Bill C-69 — the “No More Pipelines Bill” — which Carney has refused to repeal. He sees it as a tool to enforce his net-zero utopia, but for the West, it’s a padlock on progress. Pipelines that could carry Canadian oil to global markets sit stalled, leaving producers at the mercy of low prices, foreign competitors, and now, tariff threats.

Carney’s mental framework both then and now doesn’t just stop projects, it signals to investors that Canada’s energy sector is a no-go zone. The result? Capital flees, jobs vanish, and the West pays the price for the lofty ideals of a London and Manhattan banker, who spends only part of his time in Canada — specifically, Ontario and Quebec.

Dan Knight on Carney’s swing through some British Columbia ridings this week:

A mock campaign sign for the Liberals spotted on social media.

Mark Carney rolled into Victoria this week with the swagger of a man who’s never missed a wine-and-cheese reception in his life and delivered what the Liberal brain trust likely considers a “bold vision” for Canada. But peel back the banker buzzwords and Churchill cosplay, and what you really got was a cringeworthy display of delusion, detachment, and recycled globalist dogma.

He opened his mouth and immediately signaled his marching orders: “clean energy”. Not once. Not twice. It was practically every other sentence. Because when you’re out of ideas, just say “green transition” on repeat and hope nobody checks the receipts.

He’s not just pushing the same failed Liberal climate ideology — he’s doubling down on it.

Carney promised to turn Canada into a “clean energy superpower” — without explaining how, exactly, we get there when his party has spent years shutting down oil and gas, blocking pipelines, and handing our resource wealth to the Americans.

This wasn’t new policy. It was the same Liberal fantasy that has already gutted Alberta, choked investment, and driven electricity prices through the roof — just ask Europe how that’s going. And when it comes to reopening auto plants or restoring manufacturing jobs? Nothing. Not a plan, not a word, not a clue.

And don’t worry — when Trump’s tariffs hit our industries, Carney says we’ll respond with “retaliatory tariffs”. Sounds tough, until you remember who actually pays those. Working Canadians. Line workers. Parts manufacturers. People trying to keep the lights on while Ottawa plays global economic chicken.

Carney’s big idea for recovery? Just keep handing money to the Liberal-connected elite.

He promised to “give back” — and by that, he means pouring another $180 million into the CBC, the same taxpayer-funded mouthpiece that’s been running interference for the Liberals for nearly a decade. This comes after ArriveCAN, the $60 million QR code boondoggle funneled through Liberal contractors, and countless other slush funds masquerading as “public service”.

While the working class is bracing for a made-in-Ottawa recession, Carney’s pledging more green slogans, more centralized control, and more taxpayer money to keep the illusion alive.

December 6, 2024

Liberal cabinet minister accepts “free” Taylor Swift tickets

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve often joked that it isn’t surprising that politicians can be bought … what is surprising is just how little it can take. This situation isn’t quite as clear-cut as that, but it looks bad to everyone except Liberal Party insiders:

Former Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan in happier times (yeah, it’s the only picture I have of the minister).

On Tuesday we learned that federal Liberal cabinet minister Harjit Sajjan will be attending a Taylor Swift concert at BC Place in Vancouver, in a private suite, courtesy of PavCo, the Crown corporation that operates the stadium. The federal government partially funds PavCo, including $116 million earlier this year for improvements to the stadium in advance of the 2026 World Cup.

It’s a textbook conflict of interest. Open and shut. Dead to rights. So much for Sajjan’s political career. Only … not. The only people who seem to disagree that it’s a conflict are federal Liberals and, sorry to say, the office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner — because Sajjan donated $1,500 to a food bank as a gesture to compensate for the coveted opportunity.

“If an item is paid for through a charitable donation, then it would not be considered a gift,” a spokesperson for the commissioner said in response to questions from National Post. “In the case of Minister Sajjan, for example, the original market value of a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert in Vancouver was roughly $600.”

Where do we even begin with this nonsense?

PavCo offered private-box seats to various dignitaries on the understanding they would donate some appropriate amount of money to good causes. Sajjan says he’s proud to have participated.

But you can’t “pay for” a free concert ticket — to use the commissioner spokesperson’s term — by giving money to a food bank. That’s like The Keg offering you a free dinner so long as you pay for it at Montana’s … except food-bank donations, unlike steak dinners, come with tax receipts.

December 3, 2024

“Granting more sovereign rights to others surprisingly means that these groups will pursue their own interests. Who could have seen this coming?”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his weekend round-up, Niccolo Soldo pokes a bit of fun at Justin Trudeau’s federal government for apparently being surprised that First Nations are looking to deal directly with China for their natural resources, rather than through the feds:

Canada continues to be unintentionally hilarious, all thanks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.

The Great White North was forever a boring place politically, but the arrival of Trudeau Jr. on the scene shook things up. One of the first things that he and his government committed themselves to was to work to improve the country’s relations with its Native tribes, both politically and especially economically. The Trudeau government invented a genocide narrative based around residential schools.1 Canada too wanted a dark aspect to its own history, so that it could share in the self-flagellation that has coloured the recent history of its neighbour to its immediate south.

Maybe the intention here was to show these Native communities that Canada really, really did care and that by doing this, everything bad that had happened would be forgiven and forgotten? I dunno … what I do know is that Native bands are now seeking to directly do business with China, whereby they would sell natural resources under their control to Beijing:

    Canada’s indigenous communities are seeking deals with China that could give Beijing access to the country’s natural resources, despite warnings from Canadian security services over doing business with Xi Jinping’s government.

    This week the Canada China Business Council indigenous trade mission is in Beijing to discuss potential energy and other business deals in a trip that could put Canada’s national “reconciliation” with its First Nation communities at odds with its national security priorities.

    Karen Ogen, the trade mission’s co-chair and chief executive of the First Nations Liquefied Natural Gas Alliance, said her goal on the trip, which starts on Wednesday, was to sell LNG for the benefit of the Wet’suwet’en communities in Canada’s western province of British Columbia.

    “We’ve been oppressed and repressed by our own government,” she said. “I know the history with China is not good but we have an understanding of what we need and what they need.”

Canada purposely degraded its own national sovereignty in parts of its own country in the name of “reconciliation”. Granting more sovereign rights to others surprisingly means that these groups will pursue their own interests. Who could have seen this coming?

Clever Chinese:

    China has spotted an opportunity in the sometimes fraught relations between Canada’s national and provincial governments and indigenous groups.

    In 2021, shortly after Canada imposed sanctions on Beijing over the treatment of its Uyghur population, Chinese officials began to object to the “systemic violations of Indigenous people’s rights by the US, Canada and Australia” at the UN’s Human Rights Council.

    “The PRC tries to undermine trust between Indigenous communities and Canada’s government by advancing a narrative that the PRC understands and empathises with the struggles of Indigenous communities stemming from colonialism and racism,” said a spokesperson for Canada’s security intelligence service.

    A 2023 CSIS report accused China’s government of employing “grey zone, deceptive and clandestine means” to influence Canadian policymaking, including Indigenous communities.

    “China knows how sensitive Indigenous reconciliation is to the Trudeau government,” said Phil Gurski, a former CSIS intelligence analyst.

A lot of these First Nations (Native bands) reside in the west of the country. Coincidentally, Canada’s third-largest city, Vancouver (located in Canada’s west), is roughly one-third Chinese in composition.

First Nations will continue to pursue these deals with the Chinese:

    But CSIS remains concerned over Beijing’s possible access to resource-rich areas or geopolitically important waterways and regions such as the Arctic through First Nations groups.

    “It not only undermines the government but is a way to potentially embarrass them on Canada’s past,” said Gurski.

    But Matt Vickers, from Sechelt Nations land in Canada’s western province of British Columbia, who first visited China in the 1990s and is part of the CCBC delegation heading to Beijing this week, rejected the concerns of the security services.

    “China now understands that for any major project to receive approval in Canada, you need First Nation consent, and not only consent but the First Nations require a majority equity play in those projects,” he said.

    The CCBC is a bipartisan organisation consisting of Canada’s biggest companies, including Power Corp, which is the main sponsor of the Indigenous event.

    This week’s trip marks the third time a group of Indigenous officials has travelled with the council to China in an effort to identify export markets, sources of capital and potential tourism projects.

    “These missions have been developed in the spirit of reconciliation and collaboration, to help delegates better understand how China’s economy and economic development influences its desire for imports and investment opportunities,” said Sarah Kutulakos, executive director of the CCBC.

It gets even funnier:

    Deteriorating relations between Ottawa and Beijing meant this year’s CCBC meeting would likely be “sombre”, said former Canadian ambassador to China Guy Saint-Jacques.

    First Nations leaders should have “very limited expectations” from the trip. “I don’t expect big business coming out of it,” he said.

    But Ogen, of the First Nations LNG Alliance, said she would put the controversy surrounding the trip to Beijing aside. “I … look at the global energy sector, China’s need for our gas, and how I can make the best deal for my people,” she said.

Trudeau scored an own-goal.

    1. From wiki (because I am lazy): “The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs and administered by various Christian churches. The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Euro-Canadian culture.”

November 11, 2024

The Angel of Victory: Canada’s Processing of The Great War (Vancouver, BC)

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Railways, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Valour Canada
Published Jan 9, 2024

This video, by Hania Templeton, discusses the historical context, significance, and current meaning of The Angel of Victory in Vancouver, BC. Hania’s work received first place in Valour Canada’s 2023 History & Heritage Scholarship (VCHHS) contest.

To learn more about this annually awarded #scholarship, including the rules and regulations for eligible entrants, please visit https://valourcanada.ca/education/vch…

September 4, 2024

There’s always been “BC weird”, but today’s BC politics is weirder than ever

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Although I can technically say I’ve been to British Columbia, a couple of hours driving around just west of the BC/Alberta border in 1988 doesn’t give me any real understanding of Lotusland’s, uh, unique political landscape. Fortunately, here’s Rob Shaw in The Line to give a somewhat better-informed view of BC politics today:

British Columbia politics has always been weird.

This is a province in which an obese Taiwanese billionaire once bought a premier’s personal amusement park using envelopes stuffed with cash in his underwear; where the clerk of the legislature was convicted of fraud; where the Speaker claimed the legislature’s ceremonial mace was bugged by spies; and an MLA stole from a children’s charity for the disabled.

In short, the province has a bit of a reputation. So it might be tempting to view the most recent headlines about the implosion of the former dominant B.C. Liberal party — and the meteoric rise of the B.C. Conservatives — as keeping with British Columbia’s unique brand of zaniness.

Except, it isn’t.

B.C.’s political realignment mirrors one that’s already occurred in several other provinces and is playing out federally, as well, as a tired, middle-road centrist party is squeezed out by a harder-right, hungrier, more-energetic conservative movement.

At the leading edge of it all is an unlikely figure — a 61-year-old former Liberal cabinet minister with a low profile, who was booted from the B.C. Liberal caucus in 2022 by leader Kevin Falcon for sharing a social media post questioning the role of CO2 in climate change. Rather than retire quietly, John Rustad took the ejection, pivoted and joined the moribund B.C. Conservative party, which had clocked only 1.9 per cent of the popular vote in 2020. He gave the party a seat in the legislature, and a profile to grow. Since then, it has skyrocketed.

“Of course nobody thought you could do this in a year, take a political party from two to three per cent to challenge to form government,” Rustad told me. “Lots of people ask me about it and I put it down simply to people are really desperate and looking for change.” Last week — two years and 10 days after he was fired — Rustad stood in a Vancouver hotel ballroom to accept Falcon’s political surrender. The leader of the B.C. Liberal dynasty, a party that ruled the province from 2001 to 2017 under premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, announced that he was disbanding B.C. United ahead of the next election. Supporters were encouraged to flock to the Conservatives.

“This is the right thing to do for the province,” Falcon said at the Aug. 28 press conference. “I said to John: I may only agree with about 75 per cent of what you might believe in, but I do know this, that on his very worst day John Rustad would be a far better premier than (B.C. NDP premier) David Eby on his very best day. And I’ve never lost sight of that bigger picture.” The Conservatives have been within striking distance of the governing NDP for months, according to polling done by almost every firm in the country.

July 8, 2024

QotD: The Potlatch

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

John: Among the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, there is a custom called “potlatch”. A potlatch is a feast commemorating a birth, a death, a wedding, or a communal ritual occasion. It has all the usual feast stuff — singing, dancing, drunken revelry, recitation of epic poems and renewal of ancient grudges — but there’s one additional feature to a potlatch that might be less familiar to our readers. As the party reaches its climax, the host of the potlatch reveals a collection of valuables: artisanal handicrafts, or precious items made from bone and ivory, culinary delicacies, alcohol, artworks, the rarer and more valuable the better. And then, all these treasures are heaped into a pile and burned in a giant bonfire.

The point, of course, is to show off how rich you are by showing off how much crystallized labor you are able to destroy. This pattern is not an uncommon one across human societies — a lot of human and animal sacrifice, while ostensibly religious in motivation, has this sort of showing off as an undertone. But what makes the potlatch especially interesting is its competitive nature. The Indians believe that as the goods are consumed by the blaze, every other wealthy man is “shamed” unless he comes back and burns objects of equal or greater value. It’s value destruction as a contest, like a dollar auction for status where the final price is set on fire rather than being paid to somebody, a negative-sum machine for destroying economic surplus.

Good thing our culture is way too civilized to do anything like that.

I don’t remember when it was that you told me I had to read this book about VIP “models and bottles” service at nightclubs, but I’m glad you did because it’s sort of like the Large Hadron Collider but for human social practices. By analyzing behavior under these extreme conditions, certain patterns that are normally obfuscated (often deliberately so) emerge with stark clarity. Much of your research focuses on “disreputable exchange” — the ways people buy and sell things while hiding the fact that they’re buying or selling something. Have you been able to get the NSF to pay for a night out in South Beach yet?

Gabriel: I should start off by disclosing that I’m friends with Ashley. However I don’t think that biases my opinion since the reason we are friends is that I admire her work.

Potlatch is one of the most interesting cultural practices in the world and the keystone upon which both economic anthropology and economic sociology are built. Indeed, you left out just how amazing it is in that not only did the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest destroy property in the form of salmon, blankets, and copper; but also wealth in the form of human beings, as they would use the occasion to both free and kill slaves. To us 21st century WEIRD Americans, murdering a slave and manumitting a slave seem like opposites, because manumission is humane and human sacrifice is brutal. But from the logic of status competition, they are alike in that both demonstrate that one is so wealthy that one can afford to give up the value of some of one’s slaves. Thus we see that not only the Tlingit but also the Romans would both murder and free slaves in funerary contexts.1 Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death has some very interesting material on this and is generally the greatest work of comparative scholarship on economic institutions since Max Weber — I hope to review it with you or Jane some day.

Now imagine it’s your job to describe one of the most interesting things to have ever happened, a ritual of passive-aggressively inviting rivals to parties that gavage your guests and culminate in wealth bonfires and human sacrifice, and the only thing you find worth emphasizing about it is how mean the Canadian government was to suppress the practice. This is how the Gene Autry Museum here in Los Angeles describes it, and you see similar emphasis at other museums that follow the curatorial heuristic of maximizing pious status redistribution and involvement of the descendants of the community being described, while avoiding at all costs anything that would serve as such a near occasion of awesome as to lead your internal monologue to roll tape for the Basil Poledouris score to Conan the Barbarian.

So now that we know what potlatch 1.0 is, why do I describe the models and bottles scene as a douchebag potlatch? There’s no human sacrifice, and the rivalry is a bit more friendly, but otherwise bottle service has a lot in common with a traditional potlatch. Most obviously, it is a ritual of competitive feasting where powerful men show off how much they can waste. The nightclubs are well aware of this and actively encourage “bottle wars”, where different tables compete to see how many bottles they can order. The service the club offers is not intoxication, but the spectacle of other clubgoers (and the home audience on Instagram) seeing how much the customer can spend. And so they don’t merely send a busboy or a waitress to quietly deliver the bottle, as would be the case at Applebee’s, but a bottle girl carrying bottles festooned in sparkler fireworks and, in one particularly decadent instance, the manager dressed as a gladiator and riding a chariot pulled by busboys. And once the bottles are drained, the bottles remain at the table. At a normal bar or restaurant, uncleared dishes would be a sign of lazy staff, but at a bottle service club the debris is an accumulating trophy that makes visible to all the consumer’s glorious expenditure.2

John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.

    1. Gladatorial ludi were originally funerary in nature. And we know from the Lex Fufia Caninia that by 2 BC funerary manumission was considered to be in such an escalatory spiral that it would ruin estates absent sumptuary laws limiting the practice.

    2. Another example of garbage as testament to the host’s opulent generosity is the “unswept floor” mosaic motif common to many Hellenistic and Roman triclinia.

June 3, 2024

The “mass graves” moral panic at three

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Father Raymond J. de Souza notes the almost un-noticed third anniversary of the dramatic announcement and ensuing moral panic over claims that hundreds of unmarked graves had been discovered at the site of a former Residential School in Kamloops, BC:

This past week marked the third anniversary of the dramatic announcement that 215 “unmarked graves” had been discovered near a former residential school in Kamloops. It was a global news story which had a significant impact in Canada. It was also a great media malpractice.

Many things were reported then that were not only not true, but had not even been claimed to be true by anyone. Recall the monstrously misleading headlines about mass murder and mass graves? For example, from the Toronto Star on 28 May 2021: “The Remains of 215 Children Have Been Found”.

Not true. No one ever claimed that remains had been found. Many people assumed that the “unmarked graves” held children, but the ground-penetrating radar employed cannot reveal if a body is in the soil, let alone whether it is a child or adult.

Tales of mass murder and mass graves produced a massive moral panic. Marches were held, symbolic children’s shoes were assembled, churches were burned and vandalized, hundreds of millions were committed to investigating further mass graves, the prime minister ordered flags at every embassy abroad and federal building at home to be lowered for nearly six months, a new federal holiday was instituted, the Catholic Church issued (another) apology and Pope Francis came to visit.

How can it now be that the anniversary of something so globally momentous passed so quietly this week?

It’s because the great media malpractice has been answered by journalists, a broader category in the digital world, who provided the effective response. It’s an inspiring David and Goliath tale of how courageous, good journalism beat out conforming, bad journalism.

We can take some pride here at the National Post, for on the first anniversary we published the remarkable reporting of Terry Glavin, who demonstrated exactly how media malpractice had produced a moral panic.

But aside from that, the work was carried out by writers — academics, reporters, amateur researchers and dogged citizens — outside of the legacy media. The story unfolded in C2C Journal, Dorchester Review, True North, Western Standard, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and Quillette.

Last December, a single volume collecting much of this work was published: Grave Error: How the media misled us (and the truth about residential schools), edited by Christian Champion, founder and publisher of the Dorchester Review, and the well known academic and political player, Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary.

Those outlets which had perpetrated the original malpractice took a pass. The legacy media ignored the book, and Canada’s major book retailers did not sell it.

May 30, 2024

As everyone knows, it takes at least three years to find a shovel in Canada …

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay notes the third anniversary of the “mass graves” moral panic here in the utterly dysfunctional Dominion:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

This week marked the third anniversary of Canada’s strange “unmarked graves” scandal — a morbid social panic that took hold of my country in late May 2021, following unverified claims that the corpses of 215 (presumably murdered) Indigenous children had been located at the site of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

As I’ve already described this saga in several Quillette articles, I will not belabour the specifics (which, by now, have also been covered in the international press, as well as Canada’s National Post and Dorchester Review). Instead, this update will focus on the manner by which Canadian public figures (journalists, in particular) have tried to evade accountability for their original gullibility, as it presents an interesting case study in social psychology on a national scale.

The background here, as anyone who’s followed the story closely will know, is a genuinely shameful aspect of Canadian history — the federally funded, church-run system of residential schools established in the nineteenth century as a means to assimilate the country’s Indigenous population. In many cases, children were forced to attend boarding schools located hundreds of miles from their home reserves. Mortality rates from infectious diseases (especially tuberculosis) were tragically high, and the whole issue was properly referred to an authoritative body known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which concluded that at least 3,200 children died after enrolling in residential schools. The real number might well be considerably higher.

All of this had been common knowledge in Canada for years by the time Rosanne Casimir, Chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in Kamloops claimed to have discovered the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

In fact, she’d discovered nothing of the kind. But the Canadian media ran with the claim as if it were the proven truth. A typical headline: “Tk’emlups confirms bodies of 215 children buried at former Kamloops Indian Residential School site“.

If you don’t live in Canada, it will be hard to appreciate the national hysteria that resulted. In the press, Canada was officially anointed a nation of baby killers. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lowered the flag on public buildings for five months. Dozens of churches were burned by arsonists in apparent acts of retribution. The word “genocide” was thrown around in casual parlance as if we were Nazi Germany or Rwanda in 1994. The Canadian Press called the discovery of these ostensible unmarked graves the 2021 “Story of the Year.”

Then the days passed, the national festival of self-laceration abated somewhat, and it began dawning on some of us that — um, wait a minute — no evidence of graves had actually been presented yet. That evidence was on its way, right?

January 29, 2024

The residential school system in the historical record and in current politics

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barbara Kay discusses the residential school system debate that’s likely to become one of the issues in the next federal election:

“Canadians deserve to know the truth“, Pierre Poilievre told reporters earlier this week, regarding 2021 claims made — but never investigated — of unmarked graves at the Kamloops, B.C. Indian residential school. Poilievre said he was open to “a full investigation into the potential remains at Residential Schools”, wherever that may lead.

This is a bold move, taken in the full knowledge that the Liberals will put a demonizing spin on his comments, even though the Conservative leader also said that “the residential schools were an appalling abuse of power by the state and by the Church at the time”. If Poilievre feels confident to, as he put it, “stand in favour of historical accuracy” on this file, then he believes a critical mass of Canadians will support the proposal.

Trudeau’s government, by contrast, is wedded to the unquestioning, emotive approach to IRS history. From the day that First Nations announced the “discovery” of 215 unmarked graves in Kamloops, arising solely from a finding of “soil disturbances” by ground penetrating radar the Liberals sprang into supportive action. They were emboldened by an overzealous media, starting with the New York Times, which falsely claimed a “mass grave” had been found. Flags were lowered, and Trudeau issued a plangent apology for the children “whose lives were taken” at Kamloops.

Only there was no evidence of lives illicitly “taken”. To date, in spite of the government’s allocation of $7.9 million for the task, no excavation has been done at Kamloops. Excavations in other suspected sites have not turned up human remains. But the media long avoided contrarian copy. (Post columnist Terry Glavin’s May 2022 feature article on the graves in these pages broke the mainstream silence.)

Not that there wasn’t any published pushback. There was plenty, from a cadre of highly accredited scholars, investigative journalists, judges, lawyers and independent researchers, who have amongst themselves amassed probably a million hours of research into all facets of government-Indigenous relations, including the IRS. Only they appeared in non-mainstream media, such as C2C Journal, the Dorchester Review, True North, the Western Standard, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, Quillette and in some cases their own substacks. For their pains, most of them were labelled “deniers” by media and politicians.

Excellent articles on the IRS by these indefatigable researchers have now been compiled into a single volume, Grave Error: How the media misled us (and the truth about residential schools), edited by historian Chris Champion, publisher of the Dorchester Review, and Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and chair of the Indian Residential Schools Research Group (I am an IRSRG board member).

January 15, 2024

Grave Error

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte calls our attention to an important book on a major Canadian topic … that has been ignored by the Canadian media establishment (as one would expect if it contravenes the official narrative):

Have you read Grave Error? Have you seen it on the shelves in your local bookstore? At the library, perhaps? Did you notice coverage of it in the Globe or hear someone talking about it on CBC?

I’d bet ninety-eight out of a hundred SHuSH readers would answer “no” to all those questions.

The full title of the book is Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools). Its authors are former University of Calgary political scientist and Harper aide Tom Flanagan and Chris Champion, editor of the Dorchester Review. The book takes strong exception to commentary by media, politicians, and Indigenous leaders on the subject of unmarked graves at a former Kamloops Indian Residential School. I first noticed it over the holidays, several weeks after publication, when it was the overall #1 bestseller on Amazon.

It’s not easy to become the top-selling book on Amazon. You’re competing against Colleen Hoover and Prince Harry and the entire world of books, published and self-published. Grave Error was the only Canadian book, fiction or nonfiction, in Amazon’s top fifty when I came across it. It’s rare to see more than two or three Canadian books in Amazon’s top fifty at any given time.

You won’t have noticed Grave Error in your local bookstore because Amazon is the only outlet that’s selling the book. You won’t have seen coverage of it because no mainstream Canadian media outlet has paid attention to it. Nor does any public library stock it. It has not appeared on any conventional bestseller list, although it has to be a Canadian bestseller — Amazon sells well over half of all books in Canada. Most Amazon sales don’t register on our bestseller lists because Amazon doesn’t cooperate with the organizations that produce the lists.

Grave Error is published by True North, a conservative news website and public policy organization. It is run by Candace Malcolm, who founded True North with her husband, Kaz Nejatian, a former Jason Kenney staffer, now COO of Spotify. It’s published a half dozen hits in recent years, several written by Malcolm herself.

December 17, 2023

How RFK, Jr. helped destroy British Columbia’s resource-based economy

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson found herself added to one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s fundraising mailing lists:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois on October 14, 2007.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons.

I am on RFKJr’s campaign mailing list, probably through Children’s Health Defence and they asked me for money, and I said sure, just as soon as he fixes the catastrophe he caused in the province where I live.

Got a message back!

It read, “Elizabeth, I am sure Robert would fix whatever harm he caused, can you explain?”

No problem, I said.

1. In British Columbia, we had the largest industrial forest in the world

2. It paid for education and universal “free” health care.

3. The environmental left decided to shut it down.

4. The reason for their protest was that the government, as was common practice, had sold cutting permits with long leaseholds. A new socialist government announced it was pulling the permits and taking those forests back.

5. In order not to lose all the invested money, which they had not only paid for upfront and in annual leasing charges, but paid taxes on, some for decades, lessees immediately clear cut their lands. Clear cuts are ugly. (but they are fire breaks)

6. That triggered the protest.

7. RFK Jr came in under RiverKeepers and supercharged the protest. His celebrity and glamour made the protest major international news. I was in London, I heard about it. More kids joined the protest. And then more and more. Until the government caved. Would it have happened without his presence? I do not think so. He gave very young people who had no access to power, nor any hope of it, ever, a very heady hit of significance and their lives took on huge huge meaning. For many it remains the high point of their lives. Because for the province, it was all downhill from there. All promise vanished and a grinding slow growth followed.

8. Over the ensuing ten years, cutting was diminished and heavy regulation covered the rest. By 2002, written regulations piled on top of each other stood seven feet high, taller than a man.

9. Forested communities died.

10. 100,000 families lost their livelihood.

11. Resource jobs have huge multipliers, not only forested towns died, so did regional metropolitan centers. Greens, replete with success, hit other resource industries – mining, ranching – which died. More families bankrupted.

12. They were told to go into tourism.

13. Which pays minimum wage and can only support a family if everyone, even the children, work. And, it’s seasonal.

14. Over time, the unmanaged forests became clogged with overgrowth, little trees like carrots pulled all the water from the forest floor, desiccated the soil and then pulled water from aquifers. The forests became tinder. And increasingly every summer, they explode in fire.

15. The government needed money.

16. Casinos provided it.

17. Asian cartels – you cannot imagine how violent they are – moved in and used the casinos to launder most of the drug money from North America. They bribed immigration, they bribed city government, they threatened anyone who tried to stand in their way.

18. They were so successful, human trafficking and child sex trafficking shot up. We have the second largest port on the west coast of North and South America. Through it streams container loads of drugs and trafficked children and women. At the port, you just stand aside, if you want to live. You think most of the fentanyl comes in through Mexico? Nope. It comes in through us.

19. The cartels do pay taxes. You think Black Rock is bad? These guys kill if they don’t get what they want. They are buying every business they can, to launder money through. The cartels also launder money through real estate in the city. That means housing is insanely expensive and property taxes are sky high. Canadians can’t afford to buy houses or live in the ones they own. A family making a median income has to pay 100% of income to buy a median priced house.

20. Crime is a) a driver of the economy and b) a principal source of government revenue.

21. Green has destroyed the province.

And that, I am afraid, is what celebrities do. It is why they are so hated, and one of the reason Hollywood is dying. They destroy the lives of ordinary men and women, and then move on to greater heights. Their lives are so privileged, they have absolutely no idea how people make money. And RFKJr, mind-numbingly privileged from birth, is the same. When asked about climate change, he says it’s happening but taxes won’t work. “Regenerative agriculture” he says, vaguely. It is true, regenerative agriculture could capture a lot of carbon, the amount debatable but it has promise. But cutting regulation? He has no, zero, absolutely no idea of how regulation punishes the non-elites. His is a black hole of ignorance and that is common; a majority have zero idea. Zero.

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