There’s much viewing-with-alarm and pearl-clutching going on over some of J.D. Vance’s more outré notions floated before he became Trump’s running mate:
U.S. Senator J.D. Vance speaking with attendees at The People’s Convention at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan, 16 June, 2024. Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the amusing features of this week’s U.S. election turbulence has been sudden media scrutiny of Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance, a former author and pundit newly named as Donald Trump’s running mate. Readers will know I’m a sadistic student of electoral reform crusades, and in 2021 Vance advocated for one of the myriad of utopian ideas that has never quite reached prime time: parents should be given extra votes that they can exercise on behalf of their minor children.
[…]
Critics of Vance are screaming about the sacred principle of “one person, one vote” — but of course the centrists and liberals who have toyed with the same idea support it precisely because children are persons who deserve political representation. (They would be represented second-hand by their parents until the age of majority, but us adults are all represented that way in democratic decision-making now, right?) Earlier this week Reason magazine published a short excerpt from a pro-Demeny paper by two American law professors with strong conservative, originalist credentials: there isn’t all that much daylight between their arguments and Corak’s.
Are the arguments actually any good? Some of them seem circumstantial or even aesthetic. We’re in a transitory era of gerontocracy because of a baby boom that happened eighty years ago, and nobody under 70, whatever their ideology, likes this universal predicament much. But on the grounds of revealed preference, the lack of actual real-world Demeny experiments is a big problem.
If we want the proxy votes to go to custodial parents who are involved with a real child and conscious of its particular interests, you’re suddenly talking about integrating election systems with family law. I.e., an unfathomable technical nightmare. But assigning control of the extra child votes automatically to biological parents, including deadbeats and those who have surrendered children to adoptees or foster families, seems like a non-starter. (And would also be an unfathomable technical nightmare.)
You can say that the democratic principle is more important than the mere design details of a child-voting system, and this is the kind of thing election reformers say all the time — but would you book a seat on an airplane that was built on aerodynamic principles with no attention to detail?
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In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines what Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland might be thinking as she pushes her capital gains tax increase:
Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in October, 2022.
On Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland defended her government’s raising of the capital gains tax by delivering a weirdly catastrophic lecture speaking of a Canada beset by poverty, division and angry mobs.
“Do you want to be in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury but must do so in gated communities behind ever higher fences using private health care and airplanes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less privileged compatriots burns so hot?” she said.
[…]
Monday
Rivers of blood. Mothers consuming their offspring. Houses of worship employed only as makeshift storehouses for the dead.
Abundance will cease. Colour will vanish. The people you now know as loved ones will first become strangers, and then they will become enemies.
These are but some of the fates that realistically lie in store for a Canada that refuses to raise its capital tax inclusion rate from 50 per cent to 67 per cent on gains realized after June 25, 2024. While I am sympathetic to those who have worked hard and wish to retain what they have earned, I would urge them to consider the value of money in a Canada where the only remaining currency is one’s readiness to kill.
Tuesday
As deputy prime minister of Canada, I am fully aware that carbon taxes are an electoral liability for this government. But this is a problem not of policy, but of messaging.
If we’re not able to tax carbon-emitting fuels to a rate of $170 per tonne by 2030, the most optimistic scenario I can offer is the complete breakdown of the natural world as we know it.
Agriculture will become a memory. Cities will become unapproachable due to the overwhelming smell of decay. Language will devolve and then disappear. Any surviving art or culture will only inspire fear, because people will not know what it is.
The air may be breathable, but we will wish it was not.
In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s terrible response to a topical question from a reporter:
Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in October, 2022.
In fairness, noting that Freeland, she of the infamous Disney+ flop, is bad at politics is not an original observation. I confess that. But, still. Yikes! What the hell was that?!
I’m referring to Monday’s unfortunate gaffe. Freeland was in Montreal doing post-budget stuff with the small business minister, and after touring a business, took questions from reporters. Sarah Leavitt from the CBC asked a question related to a particularly vile eruption of overt antisemitism at a protest in Ottawa last weekend. A man leading the crowd in chants said “Our resistance attacks are proof that we are almost free … Oct. 7 is proof that we are almost free. Long live Oct. 7, long live the resistance, long live the intifada, long live every form of resistance.”
By the time Leavitt quizzed Freeland, the comments in Ottawa had already been widely disseminated and, critically, condemned. Among the condemners: Freeland’s boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He’d commented via Twitter a day before Freeland faced Leavitt’s question. This ought to have been an extremely easy exchange for Freeland.
As it turns out, though, not so much, actually.
In the interests of transparency, let’s simply see in full both what Leavitt asked, and how Freeland replied.
The question was clear enough: “Over the weekend, protesters in Ottawa were heard chanting, among other things, ‘Long live October 7’ and ‘October 7 is proof that we are almost free’. Is this hate speech?”
[…]
Let’s walk through her answer, putting her reply into the discrete points she’s been trained to hit.
Phase One: Ass covering. “I wasn’t in Ottawa over the weekend. And I’m not aware of those specific reports. And so it would be just wrong of me to comment on something that I am not specifically aware of.”
Phase Two: Banal statement that favours no group in particular but mentions the key stakeholders. “What I will say is, today is a time in Canada, when antisemitism and Islamophobia are on the rise. When we have a lot … there are a lot of Canadians who are not feeling safe. In my own riding of University-Rosedale, the JCC, a really important centre for Jewish Canadians but also for all Canadians, has faced a lot of pressure. And I’ve been there to meet with people there. There’s also a mosque in my riding that faced pressure and attacks and I’ve met with the leaders there.”
Phase Three: Attempt to sound like you’re engaging with the actual question, even though you are not. “Hate speech is absolutely not acceptable. Glorifying … I mean, I can’t even say the word because it’s … you shouldn’t. It’s too terrible. And what happened on October 7 was a heinous terrorist attack. People were killed. People were raped. Women, men, children … totally unprovoked attack on civilians. That is not acceptable.”
Phase Four: Pivot back to approved talking points. “Canada recognizes Hamas as a terrorist entity and our government is very, very clear on that. We have also been really clear that there needs to be a ceasefire, that a humanitarian catastrophe is happening right now in Gaza, and Canada and Canadians are there to support the people, the suffering people, there, too.”
This is how the PM answers questions, too. It’s a pattern that, once seen, will never been unseen. The problem for Freeland is that the PM is better at it. He’s smoother and quicker on his feet. His evasive non-answers sound more natural, but have begun to get old in recent years, as foreign journalists are generally better at pointing out than Canadian ones. Freeland has never been comfortable doing talking-point politics, and has always sounded extremely unconvincing when she tries.
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In The Line, Andrew Potter theorizes that the Canadian government finally “got it right” on Ukraine, but only after having exhausted all the other possibilities:
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine. Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery.
When Russia started massing troops on the border in Ukraine this time last year, Canada was one of the first Western countries to close its embassy in Kyiv, moving everyone to Lviv on February 12. Hours after Russia launched its illegal, insane, nihilistic, genocidal full invasion of Ukraine on February 24, all non-Ukrainian employees of our embassy scooted across the border into Poland.
For months after the invasion, that highly risk-averse attitude infected every aspect of Canada’s approach to helping Ukraine. Whether it was diplomacy (hesitant), military aid (slow and limited), financial support (inadequate) or straight-up moral fortitude (lacking), the Trudeau government made it clear that it would do the least amount necessary, while taking the most credit possible, in supporting Ukraine.
[…]
The weird thing about Canada’s foot-draggy-as-she-goes approach to helping Ukraine is how little sense it made politically, for both domestic and international audiences. Canada has one of the largest Ukrainian diaspora populations in the world. We were the first Western country to recognize Ukrainian independence in 1991. The deputy prime minister of Canada is half Ukrainian and has been a loud supporter of the country for years. Privately and publicly, our allies were pleading for us to do more.
Who knows what it was that finally shook some sense into the Trudeau government. Maybe it was Freeland, maybe it was a call from Uncle Joe Biden, maybe it was just a sense in the PMO that, having exhausted all other options, the only thing left to do was the right thing. Whatever it was, over the last three or four months, Canada is finally punching its weight on the global stage on the Ukraine file. In particular, we seem to have finally figured out that the best way to help is to provide the sorts of support that draws on our strengths.
So for example, while the handful of M777 howitzers we sent were certainly useful (and the ammunition we’re continuing to supply will be well spent) we’re never going to compete with the Americans or Brits when it comes to heavy arms supplies. That’s why, back in October, it was probably more helpful for us to send 400,000 pieces of winter gear and to provide a few million dollars worth of satellite communications to the Ukrainians through Telesat. And it was great to see Canada re-engage with its training commitments to the Ukrainian armed forces through the deployment of 40 combat engineers to train Ukrainian sappers in Poland, to complement our ongoing training of recruits in the U.K.
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CDR Salamander explains why, despite her having good qualities that match some of what the job requires, we shouldn’t be betting any money on Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland taking over the role of Secretary General of NATO:
Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland’s speech at the Brookings Institution in October, 2022.
So, via NYT, as a war wages in Eastern Europe and NATO is looking for a new Secretary General, what is the focus?
The behind-the-scenes jockeying for who should succeed Jens Stoltenberg has begun in earnest, with a focus on women.
Here’s the CV:
While the officials cautioned that these are early days, and very often the names that surface first do not survive the bargaining among NATO’s 30 members, they said one prime candidate has surfaced in Washington: Chrystia Freeland, 54, the Canadian-Ukrainian deputy prime minister and finance minister of Canada.
Ms. Freeland, 54, a former journalist (who is married to a reporter for The New York Times), has also been Canada’s foreign minister. Her advantages are considerable: she speaks English, French, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian; she has run complicated ministries; she is good at news conferences and other public appearances; and she would be the first woman and first Canadian ever to run NATO.
The fact that word is on the street that the primary filter here is if someone is XX vs XY would be laughable if not so destructive. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a woman being Secretary General, but that should have nothing to do with the decision. The fact is leading with that as the first criteria, any woman selected as Secretary General this round, would — rightly — always have a shadow over them for this simple fact that they did not get the position on merit — but simply an attempt to signal virtue to … well … fellow members of the woke left in the West, I guess. NATO’s potential enemies will only be encouraged by such an act.
This does nothing for NATO or women — and it degrades both by the process.
That being said, as her name is being floated, let’s look at Freeland. Many US citizens may recognize her from her very undiplomatic interactions with the Trump Administration. It wasn’t just Trump, but something worse that seeps out. Even during the Biden Administration, her not-so-subtle sniffs of standard issue leftist Canadian anti-Americanism crops up on a regular basis. It only gets worse when she deals with Americans to the right of Bernie Sanders.
In NATO, you need someone who is a subtle politician — again with experience working in a vigorous multi-party coalition with highly different views, priorities, and goals. That is why Europeans make such good Secretary Generals. While Canada also has a parliamentary system, it and its parties are VERY different than the European model. Freeland only gets partial credit here.
There is also the issue of temperament. Read the links above. Freeland likes to pick fights, often in public. Worse, she seems to enjoy — again as most standard-issue Canadian leftists do — in making snide comments about the government and people of the alliance’s largest monetary and troop contributing nation — the United States of America.
The Secretary General of NATO has to be someone by temperament and habit seen as a non-partisan person toward the USA so that they can work with American administrations from all political parties. Freeland has significant issues with the American Republican Party in general and American conservatives in particular. That alone should be enough for serious alliance nations from Poland to Great Britain to be against her as a possible candidate. In summary; Freeland does not possess the skills or temperament for the position.
Now is not the time for such frivolity.
The last reason — and the most important reason for me — that Freeland should not be the Secretary General will be recognizable to regular readers here. It has nothing to do with her as a person, but her nation, Canada.
I love Canada and Canadians — but this is not personal, this is business. Serious alliance business. Simply by the numbers, Canada has not earned the position.
We are well past being polite to alliance members who refuse to pull their fair share of the burden. Canada simply has not put herself in the position to reward any of her political elite with the position of Secretary General, man or woman.
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In The Line, Matt Gurney reluctantly agrees that at least some of what Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland covered in her recent speech to the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC was logical, sensible and well-crafted. What he finds mind-croggling is the chasm between what Freeland talks about and what the government she’s deputy leader of is actually doing:
Screencap from the CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland’s speech this week.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland went to Washington this week, to give a speech at the Brookings Institution. It is a very interesting speech. Truly — it’s interesting. You should read it.
Is it a good speech, though?
In some ways, yes. You could even go so far as to say it’s a very good speech. Freeland lays out a stark but convincing critique of more than 30 years of Western foreign policy and economic assumptions, and offers some worthwhile Canadian initiatives that seek to address what we got wrong. We were wrong to believe that history had ended, Freeland said, and must now accept that we’re going to have to fight for the world we want to live in, and to win hearts and minds. We can’t just sit around and wait for the arc of history to bend things our way — we must work consciously and deliberately with our allies to make the Western alliance stronger, richer and safer, better able to withstand the hostility of our enemies and win over the undecideds of the world.
That’s the good stuff. There is, however, some bad news.
[…]
Freeland’s speech is full of little examples like this, where the value of her ideas collides bodily with the reality of her government’s competency problems. She is saying the right things. She is also saying the things that her government could already have been doing, but either hasn’t wanted to or isn’t capable of actually pulling off.
So we’re going to spend some domestic political capital to help draw the democratic allies together, eh? That sounds great. But what if they want to sell us some cheese or fancy butter? Are we going to spend some domestic political capital on that, or nah? Freeland says we must “deepen and expand” NATO and our other alliances, which also sounds super, but we’re already seeing signs that our allies are increasingly cutting us out of the loop and forming new Canada-free forums because we simply aren’t interested in deepening or expanding anything, and don’t add anything but an extra meal tab when we show up for the family photo. Freeland says that adapting to our changing world order is “one of our most urgent tasks”. Okay! Again, that sounds fantastic, but are we going to do a defence policy review? A foreign policy review? Are we going to spearhead any new initiatives? Are we going to build out our military, expand our diplomatic corps, and invoke that famous convening power in a way that tangibly helps? Or is this one of those things where the urgency is in the saying aloud before a well-heeled crowd, but not so much in the doing?
Indeed, this goes well beyond what I’d call this government’s meta-failure: a strong preference for saying the right things in place of doing the right things, but still expecting full credit for said things, as if they’d actually pulled it off. That problem is bad enough, but on top of that is layered the very real concerns I and many others have about our state capacity. Even if we chose to spend political capital to get things done, and then tried really hard to succeed, could we? I know it’s a bit of a deep cut now, but I wonder if everything Freeland wants to do will be charitably deemed “underway with challenges” by the time the war in Europe enters its second year, or fifth, or tenth.
There’s a line in Freeland’s speech that really jumped out at me. Early on, she’s talking about the assumptions many of us in the West had about the “end of history” — the proclaimed permanent triumph of democracy and capitalism after the end of the Cold War. “It is easy to mock the hubris and the naiveté which animated that era”, she said.
She’s right! Here’s the thing, though: it’s equally easy to mock the hubris and naiveté of a Canadian deputy PM who flies to Washington to lay out a vision of allied solidarity and hard work that her own government has yet to demonstrate the slightest interest in putting into action. Her government’s own record undercuts her (truly) very fine words. Canada could be leading by example here. Instead, Freeland is giving a speech about the things we ought to be doing, and could already be doing, but aren’t. The D.C. audience may not know enough of her government’s record to mock the hubris and naiveté; we Canadians have no such luxury of ignorance.
I’ll say this for Freeland: I believe she is sincere. I believe she means what she says, I believe she has thought about these issues long and hard, and despite my previously acknowledged quibbles, it is a damn good speech. The problem, in this case, isn’t the message, or even the messenger. The problem is who the messenger works for.
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The Canadian government under Justin Trudeau took advantage of a peaceful protest in the streets of Ottawa to invoke the Emergencies Act, the modern-day successor to the War Measures Act (which itself had only ever been used three times). Nothing the police have done in Ottawa since the emergency was declared required the powers enabled under the legislation, but apparently the protest was just a pretext to let the government do what it really wanted to do anyway:
The regular weekly round-up from The Line was delayed until Saturday as the events in Ottawa were far too fast-moving to summarize at that point. Here’s part of the later newsletter:
As the protest in Ottawa winds down, your Line editors are beginning to ask themselves, perhaps too optimistically: what happens after the emergency is over?
The Liberal government has arrogated to itself enormous powers through the Emergencies Act: the most notable among them, the ability to freeze assets of protest participants without any kind of prior judicial approval or warrant. It’s not entirely clear to us what would constitute an offence that the government would consider serious enough to justify using this power.
If someone gave $500 to the protest movement three weeks ago, would that merit freezing a bank account? Is the number $5,000? Or $50,000? Would this act apply to independent media livestreaming the protests?
Complicating matters, on Wednesday, Justice Minister David Lametti gave an interview with CTV’s host Evan Soloman. Solomon asked whether ordinary people who donated to the trucker convoy should be worried about the provisions in the Emergencies Act. Lametti responded:
“If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried,” said Lametti.
Excuse us, but … wtf?
Threatening people who are donating cash to anything that can be construed as a “pro-Trump” movement suggests that attempts to freeze assets aren’t directed toward criminal behaviour, but are rather politically motivated.
We asked Lametti’s office for response to his “pro-Trump” comments and this was his response:
“We always ask our police forces as well as our prosecutors to act reasonably, where they’re going to work with the banks to ensure that they act reasonably. Obviously there are going to be judgment calls that will be made and serious contributors will be treated more seriously. But, as always, we’re going to leave it to law enforcement to work with the banks, as they already do in other areas that already exist. Such as in anti-terrorism financing and in other areas through FINTRAC.”
This is, frankly, not much of an answer. It amounts to “we will be reasonable. Trust us!”
Well, we don’t. We don’t trust NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to hold this government to account in Parliament. We don’t trust the left to clue into the fact that the tactics used against the convoy will be used against their causes in turn. We don’t trust conservatives to show more principle or restraint when in power.
David Sacks, posting at Bari Weiss’s Common Sense blog, says that the federal government’s moves to seize bank accounts is a clear sign that we’re having a Chinese-style “social credit” system imposed on us:
Last summer, I warned readers of Common Sense that financial deplatforming would be the next wave of online censorship. Big Tech companies like PayPal were already working with left-wing groups like the ADL and SPLC to define lists of individuals and groups who should be denied service. As more and more similarly minded tech companies followed suit (as happened with social media censorship), these deplorables would be deplatformed, debanked, and eventually denied access to the modern economy altogether, as punishment for their unacceptable views.
That prediction has become reality.
What I could not have anticipated is that it would occur first in our mild-mannered neighbor to the north, with the Canadian government itself directing the reprisals. It remains to be seen whether Canada will be a bellwether for the U.S. But anyone who cares about the future of America as a place where citizens are free to protest their government needs to understand what has just occurred and work to stop it from taking root here.
[…]
Trudeau escalated things further on Tuesday night, when he issued a new directive called the Emergency Economic Measures Order. Invoking a War on Terror law called the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act, the order requires financial institutions — including banks, credit unions, co-ops, loan companies, trusts, and even cryptocurrency wallets — to stop “providing any financial or related services” to anyone associated with the protests (a “designated person”). This has resulted, according to the CBC, in “frozen accounts, stranded money and canceled credit cards”.
Banks, according to this new order, have a “duty to determine” if one of their customers is a “designated person”. A “designated person” can refer to anyone who “directly or indirectly” participates in the protest, including donors who “provide property to facilitate” the protests through crowdfunding sites. In other words, a designated person can just as easily be a grandmother who donated $25 to support the truckers as one of the organizers of the convoy.
Because the donor data to the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked — and the leaked data shows that Canadians donated most of the $8 million raised — many thousands of law-abiding Canadians now face the prospect of financial retaliation and ruin merely for supporting an anti-government protest.
In the Friday wrap-up edition of The Line, a consideration of how shallow, insincere posturing, and performing became the hallmarks of Canadian government leadership:
Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”
Look, we at The Line are as tired as you are about the more, shall we say, theatrical aspects of Justin Trudeau’s approach to being prime minister. Whether it was his Day One “because it’s 2015!” smirk, his obsession with showing off his socks to foreign dignitaries, his fashion sense while vacationing in India, and countless other Trudeauvian trips of the light fantastic, the man has always seemed more interested in performance than in the substance of governing.
But that’s not quite right. Because if there is one thing we’ve come to realize over the past five years and a bit, it is that for the Trudeau Liberals, the performance is the governing. For example, we used to wonder at the amount of time and energy that Cabinet ministers spent working on their Instagram accounts, since it went far beyond what would seem to be necessary for promoting and communicating policy. But once we understood that it was the job of policy to promote the Instagram account, and not the other way around, all of this proudly vacuous behaviour started to make a lot more sense.
But while we’ve gotten more or less used to it here in Canada (or maybe the right word is “numb”), we’ve always wondered how it looks through foreign eyes. Those abstract wonderings became a little more concrete over the past few weeks. Countries are opening up, people are starting to travel, politicians are going back to their old habits of holding regular meetings to make sure the world is still ticking along. And for Canada’s leaders, all the world’s a ‘gram.
So it was that at the G7 summit in Cornwall England this week, Prime-Minister-In-All-But-Name Chrystia Freeland was the only finance minster to wear a mask in a group photo taken outdoors. Ok, we thought, maybe she’s not fully vaxxed, maybe she has reason to be extra cautious. Except in a string of photos taken just before the official photo, Freeland was captured scrambling to put on her mask, not for safety, but for show.
Freeland was just getting the crowd warmed up for her nominal boss, Justin Trudeau. At his official G7 welcome on Friday, Trudeau was the only leader to put a mask on to give Boris Johnson the chummy elbow, only to remove it a few seconds later. We get it. It’s a version of the old “what lie did I tell?” problem, but for acting. Which audience am I playing to at this exact moment? It’s hard for even an old luvvie like Trudeau to keep track.
Once he’s back in Canada, Trudeau is going to hole up in a hotel for a few days, which the Globe‘s Cam Clark aptly referred to as “symbolic penance for a symbolic policy.” We agree with Clark that there’s some good fun in seeing someone get tied up in their own moral posturing. But while Clark is unhappy at the prospect of the prime minister cooling his heels for three days, we’re less fussed about Trudeau’s prospective stay in Hotel Q. Because while Clark thinks “there are real things” for the prime minister to be doing, we doubt that very much.
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