Quotulatiousness

October 27, 2025

Trump versus Carney (and Ford, his court jester)

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

Another week, another set of bleak headlines about the trade relationship (or lack thereof) between Canada and the United States. For some, this is the story of how Trump Derangement Syndrome has consumed all levels of Canadian leadership, while for others it’s proof that you can’t deal with Trump as a rational adult and instead need to consider him an overgrown toddler with a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Or perhaps it’s a little from column A and a bit from column B:

At the risk of overstating my own influence, it’s like the President of the United States read my piece saying he was acting like a toddler and decided, “oh yeah? I’ll show what ‘acting like a toddler’ means!” and did this, presumably once Bluey was over:

    U.S. President Donald Trump says he is raising tariffs on Canadian goods by 10 per cent, after accusing Canada of airing what he called a “fraudulent” advertisement that misrepresented former president Ronald Reagan’s stance on tariffs.

    In a post published on Truth Social at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Trump wrote, “I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”

    Trump’s post cited his frustration over an advertisement produced by the Ontario government that used clips of Reagan warning about the dangers of protectionism and praising free trade.

    “Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs,” he wrote.

    Earlier this week, Trump had cut off trade negotiations with Ottawa, explaining it was due to the “hostile” nature of the ad campaign.

    “Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD,” Trump further said in the Truth social post.

The good news is, at least Trump is coming right out and admitting that his “national security” tariffs are really about nothing more than his fragile ego, just in time for the Supreme Court to hear arguments about this very issue.

The bad news is, I think it’s exceptionally naive to think SCOTUS is going to save us from this madness.

Not because I think they’ll rule that what he’s doing is legal. That might be a bridge too far for even Justices Thomas and Alito.

But because this proposition rests on the assumption that Trump considers himself bound by Supreme Court rulings and that anyone else is going to exercise their power to ensure these rulings are followed.

Or, if you think Canadian leaders are deep in a TDS binge:

How The New Republic saw Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign.

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a widespread and serious issue. When one is afflicted by it, their capacity to sense-make becomes compromised. Emotions are a difficult thing for humans to control, and TDS-sufferers seem for the most part unaware of how much their negative, emotional feelings concerning Trump have hijacked their reason.

TDS types reveal themselves in so many ways. One specifically, which often goes unnoticed, is a general uncharitableness when it comes to interpreting the words and actions of Trump, or a general unwillingness to look beyond words – either Trump’s words or anyone else’s which have been inserted into Trump discourse. A prime example of this is the anti-tariff ad campaign involving a 1987 speech by former president Ronald Reagan which the Ford government paid $75 million to have broadcast to American audiences – key Republican areas – for the purpose of undermining President Trump’s economic policy.

Firstly, the uncharitable analysis does not allow that Trump has any right, or any good argument, or reason to be upset about Canada’s trade practices, such as supply management. The uncharitable analysis sees Canada as an innocent victim and Trump as a bully who is trying to destroy us and/or take us over.

[…]

Returning to reason and reality. Trump has justification for being upset with Canada over both our trade practices and in the under-handed and unfriendly tactics of Doug Ford and other Canadian leaders. The ad was an insult to Trump. His reaction or over-reaction to the ad, does not change the fact that what Ford did was antagonistic and not in the best interests of productive trade negotiations. The charitable analysis understands this, and does not lose sight of it, no matter how outlandish the things Trump does may be.

On the other side of the uncharitable Trump analysis concerning Ford’s Reagan ad blunder, is circulating the idea that Reagan was anti-tariff. Why is this idea believed? Because of Reagan’s rhetoric. You can find hundreds of clips of Reagan speaking about the dangers of high tariffs, or advocating for free trade. But the uncharitable analysis refuses to go beyond words. They ignore words that don’t support their argument, and act as if the words that do support their argument were the only ones spoken. Further, they act like words are the be all and end all, by not bothering to investigate the actions of those who speak the words, they pretend that word-speakers always do and intend exactly what they say. Reagan’s oratory contained lots of anti-tariff rhetoric, but his actions included lots of pro-tariff policy in an effort to deal with unfair trading partners.

None of this is difficult once you mea culpa from TDS. If you remain under the spell of TDS, you will not be rational or reasonable, and I for one, will not take you seriously. You will look increasingly foolish as time goes on and Trump’s policies turn out not to be the disasters you hysterical twits dreamed they would be. And the group of people like me, who shake their heads and roll their eyes at you, will grow and grow, under the weight of inevitable mass mea culpa. But you will remain shrouded from truth as you descend further into darkness and gloom and hate. It doesn’t have to be this way … just mea culpa FFS!

October 25, 2025

International FAFO – Ontario pokes Trump, Trump withdraws from trade talks

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

Canadian politicans seem unable to comprehend that Donald Trump is not a typical American leader — for both good and bad — and Ontario Premier Doug Ford seems to be the last one to figure it out. The Ontario government paid for ads featuring Ronald Reagan making anti-tariff comments to run in the US media and Trump reacted, strongly:

The Ontario government’s anti-U.S. tariff ad will run multiple times during the U.S. broadcast of baseball’s World Series game Friday, less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump “terminated” trade talks with Canada over the commercial.

In an email, Ontario Premier Doug Ford spokesperson Hannah Jensen confirmed information first reported by National Post that the ads will run throughout the World Series.

That means the ads, taken out by Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government, will be playing to a primetime U.S. audience less than a day after Trump cited them as the reason he was ending trade talks with Canada.

The Toronto Blue Jays are vying for the World Series championship for the first time in over three decades.

The move suggests Ford is not ready to back down on his public campaign against U.S. tariffs on key Ontarian industries including auto manufacturing despite Trump’s ire.

Late Thursday evening, Trump took aim at Ontario’s ads which quote a 1987 speech by Ronald Reagan to fight against U.S. tariffs.

“The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. The ad was for $75,000,” Trump wrote on social media.

“They only did this to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts. TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT.”

On Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada stands ready to resume trade talks with the Trump administration. But he stopped short of opining on if Ontario should cease running the ads.

If there’s a wrong way to deal with Donald Trump, you can be sure that some Canadian politician — often, but not always, Doug Ford — will find it:

Outside of the light conservatism found in the AM Talk radio circuit throughout the GTA, Ontarians didn’t really seem all that fired up when it was discovered that Premier Doug Ford spent $75 million on anti-tariff ads, the most contentious involving an audio clip of former Republican president Ronald Reagan, to be played in American cities targeting Republican audiences. They, for the most part, are also unlikely to appreciate the insult, and the damage it caused, by going directly to Trump’s base with a message that undermines the premise of his economic plan. In Canada, leaders like Ford and Carney, are permitted and even encouraged to talk tough on Trump, because it is well understood that Trump Derangement Syndrome is the leading cause of anxiety amongst Canadian leftists, and sadly, even many so-called conservatives. However, it has always been hollow, toothless, and pointless.

Carney’s elbow’s up nonsense is easily the most embarrassing thing produced by Canada in the last four decades (maybe longer). And Doug Ford is such a clueless dummy, conservative in name only, with NDP levels of TDS, and an incredibly irresponsible propensity to go off half-cocked, with such a careless abundance of volatility. No serious province can survive a leader like this. Ford is what Leftists think Trump is: a dangerous blundering idiot who can’t get anything right. But this thing with the Reagan ad is maybe the worst example in a long list of Ford blundering. Maybe Trump’s anger will blow over, maybe we will somehow come out of this episode embarrassed, yet again, but for the most part, unscathed. We will have to wait and see.

As much as I wish Canada was a force to be reckoned with, as it once was, the best I can muster is that some day in the distant future other countries might stop laughing at us. The sad reality is that generations of abysmal Laurentian elite leadership has destroyed the strength and respectability of Canada. We are a weak insignificant joke of a nation made that way by a grossly feminized ultra-weak leftist leadership class. Ford and Carney with their ineffective provocations directed at Trump in order to appease and win points with the TDS numbskull segment of the Canadian population, does little more than show the nation, and the world, the opportunism and lack of self-awareness indicative of all weak and clueless men of the social justice paradigm in the great feminized north.

To make matters worse, as if the largest and most rapidly expanding national debt in the history of Canada, the general complacency concerning government spending, or the massive affordability crises were not enough, it appears that Ford’s ad team manipulated the content of the Ronald Reagan speech they used in order to make it appear as if Reagan were anti-tariff. The ad stitches together non-consecutive segments of a five minute speech he gave in 1987. Again, the ad in question was part of a $75 million marketing campaign, paid for by Ontario tax-payers, which targeted American audiences.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute stated that “The ad misrepresents the presidential radio address, and the Government of Ontario did not seek nor receive permission to use and edit the remarks”.

Nice work, Doug. You can stop any time now …

Update: Fixed broken URL.

August 7, 2025

“The Beer Store seems to be going down faster than, well, a nice, cold beer”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line Scott Stinson discusses the precipitous fall in the fortunes of Ontario’s former beer retail behemoth now that beer is available in — shock! horror! — grocery stores and even (gasp!) convenience stores:

“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

A major Ontario retailer announced last month that it would permanently close 20 locations in August. This follows the closure of 10 of its stores just over a week before that, and precedes the planned shuttering of 10 more locations in September.

What business could possibly be swooning this much? A general retailer pummelled by Amazon? An exporter battered by Trump’s tariffs?

Nope: Beer. Seriously. The Beer Store seems to be going down faster than, well, a nice, cold beer.

Welcome to the uniquely weird world of alcohol sales in the province of Ontario, where somehow selling beer has become a struggling business.

Some background is probably required, for those who, understandably, must think by this point that I am full of shit.

For ages the vast majority of Ontario’s beer sales ran through The Beer Store, a chain of 450-ish outlets that was co-owned by Canada’s largest brewers. You could also get beer at the provincially owned LCBO, but the largest size available there was a six-pack. That was it. This system was exceedingly unfriendly to consumers, but owing to our puritan roots and the fact that the brewers had excellent lobbyists at Queen’s Park, it remained that way through decades — and governments of all three major parties.

About a decade ago, the Toronto Star got its hands on one of the agreements between The Beer Store and the province, which revealed what a sweetheart deal it was getting. Among other things, the deal greatly restricted the degree to which the LCBO could compete in beer retail, which caused much frothing over the fact that The Beer Store, long since owned by multinational conglomerates, was getting preferential treatment over the province’s own booze outlet.

The Liberal government of the day responded by loosening The Beer Store’s stranglehold on beer retail, but just a little: allowing it to be sold at a limited number of grocery stores, a hilariously small step but one that in Ontario was nevertheless a great leap forward.

Doug Ford’s Conservative government had long wanted to expand alcohol sales much further, but always stumbled over the fact that The Beer Store had a deal that prohibited such expansion until 2026. But then Ford wanted to hold an election last spring and he convinced The Beer Store to let him break that deal a year early for $225 million, which always seemed like an awfully steep price to move up that expansion by what amounted to a number of months.

It’s only in recently, though, that it has become clear how spectacularly dumb that giant payment was in the first place.

July 28, 2025

Ontario Premier Doug Ford – threat or menace?

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

In many ways, Ontario’s Doug Ford is a 21st century version of former Ontario Premier Bill Davis … a virtuoso performer of the “talk Conservative, govern Liberal” style that urban Ontario voters really seem to love. It works well for the Laurentian Elite to have a Liberal government in Ottawa and a “Conservative” government in Toronto, as they can argue in public about all sorts of marginal issues, but when it comes down to legislation and regulation, they’re almost indistinguishable from one another aside from party colours.

Last week, Ford announced a plan to hand out provincial work permits to a huge number of “asylum seekers” as the feds seem to be making motions to reduce their support of such irregular immigrants:

One step forward, two steps back? As a card-carrying, self-appointed board member of Team “Please stop making everything worse on purpose,” there are some hard-earned wins and faint movements back towards normal, and then there’s the ongoing screw-jobs that threaten any/all progress.

As we have bemoaned time, and time, and time again around these parts, Ontario has a premier problem. But now, all of Canada has a Doug Ford problem.

I’ve been part of an effort to drag urgent immigration reform into the spotlight, and even into a feature position in the waning days of that ‘first ministers’ meeting in Muskoka, but a certain conservative-in-name-only threatens to make historic problems of immigration and unemployment worse, rather than better.

Conservatives in Canada are about to find themselves in a tricky position with Ford, who has the unique potential to remain one of the last vestiges of the failed Trudeau years — even more so than Carney. And the latter may need defending.

Ford and his deeply conflicted and unethical inner circle may wish to grant provincial work permits to a supply of fake students turned fake asylum claimants, but ordinary folk, concerned parents, our proud immigrant communities who made the grade and never cut corners, and our abandoned workers have other ideas.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @HOCStaffer tries to provide some context:

Asylum seekers, refugees, illegals, whatever you want to call them.

They are filling up hotels, getting money, & doing basically nothing, all the while waiting upwards of 2 years for their application to be approved/denied.

I mean, it’s better than where they came from, which is why they are here.

There’s a massive financial burden to the govt & a huge pool of labour doing nothing which could be serving you your coffee instead of a Temp Foreign Worker.

So Ford’s argument — which I have had made to me in person by hotel, tourism, & restaurant lobbyists — is that why don’t we use these people to do the shit jobs?

***** Especially if we are reducing TFWs.

There is a pretty good logic to it.

“May as well have them do something while they are here waiting.” Right?

But I still disagree with the idea.

Most of these people aren’t refugees. They are economic migrants from terrible places. They came here illegally, often under false pretences, & most should be deported.

The longer they stay the more likely they are to have kids here, to potentially marry a Canadian, and to establish links to the country.

Giving them a job furthers that connection.

The last thing we need is the local Tims owner arguing to keep Abdul in the country because he is the only one who will sling shit coffee on the night shift for shit wages.

Giving illegals jobs just rewards the business owners who take advantage of TFWs with a new pool of labour to exploit.

I get that these are businesses and real people have money and time invested in them.

But if you cannot operate without indentured servants then perhaps we don’t really need your business?

A bunch of Tims will close. McD’s too. Maybe some hotels & other businesses too. It’s sad. No one wants to see that.

But we also can’t keep importing people — and thereby affecting much of the rest of society — in order to keep these businesses open.

So yeah, there’s a sound argument to what Ford is saying.

But what he should be saying is that we need a stronger border, faster processing, less appeals and quicker deportations.

That would save his govt real money.

May 1, 2025

Canada’s Conservative Party – every silver lining has a cloud

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

In the National Post, Colby Cosh considers the state of the party for the federal Conservatives after an election campaign that looked radically different than the one they had prepared to fight for more than a year:

Pierre Poilievre’s riding had an insane number of protest candidates registered for the election. Oddly, the same wasn’t true in any other riding in the country. This was an organized protest for electoral reform, supposedly.

The Conservative opposition is now bound to have a difficult year, with their leader inexplicably, inexcusably ejected from the Commons. Dedicated haters of Pierre Poilievre won’t find anything at all inexplicable about the Carleton disaster, but there will need to be a proper autopsy. Especially since Poilievre’s party gathered more vote share nationally than any right-wing party — or combination thereof! — has achieved since the days of Mulroney.

Even in Ontario, Poilievre’s Conservatives got over a million more votes than the hyper-critical Ford PCs did in a provincial election 60 days earlier, and they are headed toward a higher vote share within the province. So is Poilievre a generational leader potentially on the brink of a dynasty, or an unloved boob who got caught flat-footed by a change in public mood? I promise you that the quarrelling over that question is well underway.

I assume the CPC will keep its unlucky leader, which leaves only the question, “So then what?” The Liberals don’t have to call a by-election until six months after someone decides to resign to make way for Poilievre. And maybe I ought to say “if someone decides”. It’s not essential for a party leader to have a Commons seat, but it would certainly be ideal, especially with the Commons hung.

The Conservatives are bound to find themselves adopting more of a team approach to the Opposition job by default, and maybe this ought to have been considered while it was still optional. Even by Canadian standards, the CPC campaign was very leader-focused, and was obviously predicated on the idea that the people really wanted Poilievre and would like him more as they saw more of him. (And, again, this may actually have happened!) Now there’s a chance the CPC’s House leadership performs well over the next year or so — and then has to fade into the wallpaper behind the guy who already lost.

March 31, 2025

The infighting among the Conservatives is becoming a story in this election

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

Listening to Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney on The Line podcast a few days ago, I was surprised to hear that the Ontario Progressive Conservatives seem to be trying to actively torpedo the federal Conservative election campaign. While internecine combat among conservative factions is pretty normal, it isn’t quite as normal for it to be happening in the middle of a federal election campaign. It’s almost as if Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s team would rather throw the election to the Liberals than to let Pierre Poilievre’s team score a win. Some friction, sure, but this level of conflict is almost unheard of.

At Acceptable Views, Alexander Brown mulls the chatter he’s been hearing from the campaign trail:

“Something’s really going on here,” says word from on the ground in once-Liberal-safe Toronto.

“The polls say one thing, but we’ve never given out so many signs. We’ve had to print thousands more than usual.”

“We’re actually doing just fine,” says another source high up on the federal campaign trail.

“Don’t believe the chatter from disgruntled so-called conservatives … Nobody here is hanging up their skates. We’ve had a very good week — long days notwithstanding! — and are beginning to inflict solid brand damage on Carney.”

“The best is yet to come. We are running the campaign we should be running. One that’s true to conservative values and principles.”

On that “chatter”, this non-profit campaigner and writer has no qualms about going weapons-hot.

For those unaware, Ford-“conservative” insiders in Ontario have been taking to the media circuit, issuing complaint after complaint, as both anonymous and named sources, in an effort to pull the Conservatives off of major pocketbook issues such as immigration, housing, affordability, and crime, and on to, all but exclusively, Trump, Trump, Trump.

It matters to them not, apparently, that the Liberals have lucked into booby-trapping both sides of the Trump issue, and that it forces the Conservatives onto uneven terrain.

Drag this out and make it worse, as Carney has largely chosen to do? His elbows are up!

Get shoved around by the administration to the south? See, this is why he’s the one to deal with it. He’s Trump’s enemy!

(Apparently, it also matters not that Carney has received repeated pats on the head and quasi-endorsements from #45, and now, #47.)

The real story here? Allegedly embittered that they were left out of the war-room for reasons of not being all that conservative and being untrustworthy (a point they are now proving over and over again), and wanting to neglect a youth vote they were incapable of turning out, a select few in an Ontario crew think they know best, and would rather engage in public displays of industrial sabotage than keep it private and above the belt.

It’s a ridiculous little consultant slap-fight, at a time when 5000 people are standing out in the rain, to tell a man they don’t know that their Canadian Dream is now a nightmare, that they’re now drowning in debt and don’t feel hope for the future.

“These guys have no idea what they’re talking about. When this is all over, I hope they regret ever weighing in like this.”

For Doug Ford’s campaign manager Kory Teneycke, who has been working the Liberal podcast and media circuit the hardest, it might be worth noting that not every campaign has the advantage — nor indulgence — of being able to run on Liberal-lite and solely Trump.

The Ontario PCs were granted the easy road of being able to cut the corner to the polls in February, in an election no one asked for, while running Carney-adjacent messaging, and they still couldn’t pick up a seat against the worst Ontario Liberal leader of a generation.

The Line‘s Gerson and Gurney both seem quite taken with the attacks on Poilievre by Ford’s right-hand spokes-hatchetman, but others are reporting lots of enthusiasm on the campaign trail and contrasting it with Carney’s handlers deliberately keeping the PM away from the press as much as they can.

The numbers of people who show up to political events isn’t a dependable metric, but if the disproportion gets to the point that you’re able to hand-count the number of supporters at a given venue, it might be a useful bit of anecdata:

November 29, 2024

Trump is a deals guy … and Canadian politicians need to negotiate with him on that basis

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

In what has turned out to be his final column for TVO, Matt Gurney says that Canadian views on Trump need to evolve if we hope to preserve the overall amicable relationship between the two countries. Trump made his career on making deals … but not many of our political leaders seem to have clued in that this means we need to approach all our post-Biden American affairs with that in mind:

Justin Trudeau meets with President Donald Trump at the White House, 13 February, 2017.
Photo from the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

Ever since the re-election of Donald Trump earlier this month, the most interesting question in Canadian politics has been “Who gets it?” That’s the main thing I’ve been looking for, and I think some of our leaders get it — or are starting to, at least.

Doug Ford doesn’t get it. Or didn’t, anyway, up until Tuesday afternoon.

On Monday night, president-elect Trump announced via a post on his Truth Social app that, as one of his first acts upon retaking the Oval Office in January, he would levy a 25 per cent tariff against all goods coming in from Canada and Mexico until those two countries fix the problems Trump says exist along the border. That’s a careful bit of phrasing on my part, so let me explain: I don’t disagree that there are issues for the United States along both borders. I don’t necessarily accept that the issues are the same on both borders or that Trump has accurately characterized the overall situation. But, in any case, Canada now has less than two months to figure out what it can do, assuming it can do anything, to satisfy the president-elect’s demands.

It’s very possible that we can do enough. Trump is a negotiator and a dealmaker, and we have to see his social-media post through that lens. He is establishing a strong opening position, and we’ll negotiate him down from there. That’s the good news, such as it is. The bad news, though, is that there’s no reason to assume Trump is going to do this only once. After we meet his demands on the border, he could demand that Canada take on more of the burden of the military defence of North America and the Western alliance. After we’ve drafted a bunch of people and launched a fleet of new warships and sent a heavily armed stabilization force to Haiti, he could come after us for our dairy subsidies. Once we give way on that, it’ll be getting tough on white-collar crime or telecom access or airline access. And so on and so on and so on. It’ll be one damned thing after another.

The broad contours of this were clear to me by about 1:30 in the morning on the day after (or night of, if you prefer) the U.S. election. As I keep saying, the party is over. Some of Trump’s demands will be basically utterly bogus, and others may be arguably unreasonable, but some of them are absolutely going to be fair, and Canada has, to my enormous frustration, left itself very, very vulnerable to his brand of pressure. We have utterly failed as a country to adapt to a changing world order by getting this country onto a more serious footing on any number of fronts, especially trade and defence. We were warned by friendlier U.S. administrations, including by presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. We didn’t listen. That was idiotic, and I can only hope not suicidal on our parts. Trump is going to get his way.

September 8, 2024

The last dispatch from Toronto before the catastrophe began

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

Toronto, in fact all of Ontario, may no longer be there when you get up tomorrow morning. As Chris Selley explained in his brave, final communiqué from the doomed province:

Doug Ford, the form of the destructor Ontario chose.

Dear non-Toronto friends,

This city is in crisis. This may be my last communiqué before the telex goes down for good, and I feel honour-bound to tell the world of my city’s plight. If the worst should occur, which it almost certainly will, please tell our story.

The unthinkable has occurred: Doug Ford’s madmen and women at Queen’s Park have licensed hundreds upon hundreds of new locations — called “convenience stores”, in local parlance — to sell beer, wine, cider and pre-mixed cocktails.

They did this instead of fixing health care, if you can believe that. And, outrage upon outrage, the government even made a map of such locations — as if delivering fallen Ontarians one by one to Mr. Booze himself.

Why, within just a few hundred metres of where I write, through my tears, I can discern on the map more than five such new locations. There’s Mei Convenience, Mimi Variety, Lucy Grocery and Meat, Queen & Jarvis Convenience … the list goes on, and on, my God. Church attendance is reportedly soaring as Torontonians steel themselves for the forthcoming.

Ford’s government did this entirely to solicit corporate donations to his party (some say that’s actually illegal, but whatever) from his buddies at convenience-store empires 7-Eleven and Couche-Tard … and presumably from Mimi and Lucy, whoever they are. Very rich women, clearly.

Instead of fixing health care!

Until recently, some semblance of sanity prevailed: The nearest government-run liquor store to where I sit now is a 15-minute walk away; the nearest Beer Store, the privately owned former quasi-monopoly where you’re still supposed to return your bottles and cans, is nearer to 20 minutes.

And now, suddenly, a bottle or can is shockingly near to hand. And this will lead to more alcohol-related harms. Of this there is no doubt, as one expert recently told the Toronto Methodist Star: “Harm will increase in Ontario. That is straightforward.”

It is true that many jurisdictions around the world report similar or lower levels of alcohol consumption and related harms than Ontario despite having much greater access to retail alcohol — Italy, Greece, the United States — but that is not germane to this discussion. Ontarians are not like other people. Ontario is not like other places. We are worse. Or maybe better. Or some combination of the two.

It’s true! Even saintly Bowmanville has been sullied with the demon liquor thanks to Premier Ford’s diabolical plan:

August 14, 2024

Premier Doug Ford’s weird plan to hold the justice system to account

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The problem with Premier Ford’s as-yet-unelaborated plan to collect formal statistics on the products of the criminal justice system is that it’s weird. And Canadians don’t like weird things because something something Donald Trump something something Hitler. Despite that, Colby Cosh thinks it’s a good idea:

Superior Court of Justice building on University Avenue in Toronto (formerly the York County Court House).

… the very idea of addressing a social problem by gathering quantitative information is so un-Canadian as to seem radical and startling. It certainly seemed that way to the lawyers and civil libertarians who freaked out at Ford’s mention of “accountability” for judges who fail to protect the public from criminal predators.

Judicial independence is an axiom of our constitution — but to the degree that judges become policymakers, which is perpetually increasing as they discover creative new applications of the Charter, their lack of oversight by elected legislators and by the voting public is also a serious and obvious problem, purely in principle. It is no wonder the legal guild takes fright at the notion of “accountability” if it is interpreted to mean that judges might be subject to enforceable performance measures or firing by a minister.

But, of course, the word “account” is visible in there, and measurement of a social crisis is necessary to establish that one exists, even if almost everybody believes it to exist. Our courts are the first to castigate a government that makes some legislative change affecting individual rights without an attempt at inquiry into its reasonability and urgency. Ford, in proposing to establish the dimensions of preventable re-offending, is doing exactly what a legislator hoping to reduce crime ought to do: gather numbers. Collect and publish information. And let us specify that we mean publish publish, in an open, dependable, accessible way, with maximum detail.

Frankly, Ford’s announcement seems as much as anything like a reaction to being backed into a corner by an unresponsive Liberal government, which controls bail policy and the content of the Criminal Code, and by judges, whose irrational bail and sentencing decisions flood what’s left of our news media. Provincial politicians are bound to be judged by voters on the perceived prevalence of crime, but about all they can actually do about it is to, well, buy more choppers for the coppers and start collecting local data about revolving-door justice.

Update: Fixed broken link.

July 7, 2024

Ontario’s LCBO strike may be both justified and counterproductive

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

Ontario’s main importer and distributor of wine, beer, and spirits is now facing its very first actual strike, as the negotiators couldn’t come to an agreement by the strike deadline on Friday morning. On the face of the dispute, the union certainly has some solid grounds for the strike, as pay hasn’t been keeping pace with (official) inflation and far too many of the LCBO’s workforce are on work schedules that keep them from earning full-time wages. On the other hand, over the last decade or so, both Liberal and Progressive Conservative provincial governments have been making piecemeal changes to the market so that the LCBO is far from the only place Ontario drinkers can purchase their preferred booze. Just off the top of my head, here are some of the alternative options now available to Ontario consumers:

“LCBO at Parkway Mall” by Xander Wu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

  • The Beer Store, Ontario’s other (foreign-owned) booze oligopoly for beer and cider is still operating normally at all their retail locations and agency stores. They also have online ordering for delivery available to ordinary consumers.
  • The LCBO is still offering online sales — not same-day, but free delivery.
  • Ontario’s vast array of craft brewers are still able to sell individual cans or bottles of beer from their bottle shops or storefront locations (pre-packaged 6-, 12-, 24-container or other types are still limited to the Beer Store oligopoly, of course).
  • Ontario’s wineries are similarly still operating normally for retail sales at the winery or (for a few older wineries who still have grandfathered privileges from earlier licensing regimes) stand-alone retail stores.
  • Ontario’s much smaller — but growing — number of distilleries are also operating normally and are able to sell their locally produced whiskey, gin, vodka, etc. from their tasting rooms/bottle shops.
  • Many, many grocery stores in the province now sell wine, beer, or both, and are all operating normally. They may be slower to replenish the shelves as the LCBO’s limited number of non-union staff will be handling re-supply.

In addition, if the strike continues for more than two weeks, the LCBO will open a select number of their stores for limited hours across the province (again, limited by the number of non-unionized staff available to operate the stores). With all of this (and I’m sure I’m missing some options in my list), consumers may begin to draw the conclusion that the LCBO isn’t as essential as it once was:

On Thursday evening, Colleen MacLeod, chair of the team bargaining on behalf of government liquor-store employees, declared the summer of 2024 utterly ruined.

“Tonight, (Premier Doug) Ford’s dry summer begins,” said MacLeod, of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), hours before the first ever strike in the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s (LCBO) history became official.

Desperate? Delusional? That’s up for debate. OPSEU’s press release announcing the strike suggests “delusional.” At one point it claims the LCBO is “Ontario’s best-kept secret.”

What could that possibly mean?

The release then quotes OPSEU president J.P. Hornick as follows: “We told Ford not to ruin everybody’s summer, but now he’s closed the Science Centre and forced a dry summer for Ontarians by refusing to offer a deal that would be good for LCBO workers and Ontario.”

The Ontario Science Centre is a tired old children’s destination in North Toronto that has been neglected in every way by consecutive provincial governments. I’m quite sure few people in Ottawa, Windsor or Thunder Bay have ever even heard of it. Mashing it together with the LCBO, just because OPSEU represents employees at both, suggests the union really doesn’t understand the fight it’s getting into.

If the Ford government is willing to dig in its heels and fight — which isn’t something it’s particularly known for — this could be a great win for the Ontario consumer.

It’s not 1990. The LCBO shutting the doors to its retail stores is really only a minor pain in the rear end, thanks to years of piecemeal, needlessly complex and and too-slow but nevertheless significant liberalization that really kicked into gear under former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne. (Ford is often mocked for being obsessed with alcohol, but Wynne was nearly beyond parody. If her government woke up in a crisis Monday morning, it was safe to say she’d find herself announcing more beer and wine in supermarkets by Thursday afternoon.)

Anecdotally, as I was in on Thursday picking up a small selection of wine and beer, I overheard a conversation with one of the staffers and another customer where the staffer didn’t believe there’d actually be a strike and that the only result of the brinksmanship at the bargaining table would be that they would have to do more re-stocking next week after the (understandably) higher sales during the past week.

November 4, 2022

Ontario parents brace for yet more school disruption as CUPE threatens a Friday walkout

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

Matt Gurney, writing in Toronto Life, recounts a fairly typical Ontario parent’s concerns at the latest stand-off between the Ontario government and the non-teaching educational workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE):

It’s one thing to watch the news as a journalist and wonder how to cover it. Over the last week or so, though, I’ve just been another parent wondering if my young kids are going to be out of school for an extended period. Again.

It’s all very familiar by now, of course. Can I shuffle my deadlines? Should we get rotating playdates going with neighbours so we can have some quiet in the house when we have an important Zoom call? Do we still have the number of that tutor we used during Covid, and should we call her again if this drags on? Anyway, there’s always the grandparents, right?

This is stress we don’t need — a kick in an already tender spot. I remind myself that, all things considered, others have it way worse: people on shift work, single parents, parents of kids with special needs, those for whom a missed shift means a missed rent payment or a skipped meal. But, even among the affluent and privileged, the frustration, the sense of weariness at more of this, is strong.

[…]

Let me repeat that: my son, now in the third grade, has never had a normal year of school. Preschool and JK? Sure. But then Covid struck mid-senior-kindergarten, in a year already disrupted by job actions from teachers during contract negotiations with the province. (Once the pandemic began, deals were quickly reached.) Schools closed and didn’t reopen. The next year, his first grade, was a complete fiasco, with schools opening and closing as the virus surged and waned. The second grade was better but still had a lot of shifting rules and a relatively brief shutdown after Christmas. This year was the first shot for my son to know a normal school year.

And there are thousands of other kids like him out there, each with a parent (or two) who worries that their child has already lost too much.

Don’t discount the guilt parents feel. We spent years telling our kids, “No, you can’t do this.” Denying them birthday parties, family trips, sports and activities, even just playdates. If you aren’t a parent and don’t understand why people might get so passionate about whether their kids stay in a classroom, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s all about the lesson plan or just a desire to ship them off so that the house is quiet for a few hours. Those both matter, but the bigger concern for many is that we’re tired of saying no to our kids. We’re tired of telling them that they can’t do things. We’re tired of having things taken away from them.

We knew that measures to limit the spread of Covid were important. We went along, for the most part. We waited. We got our jabs. Many of us got our kids jabbed. In exchange, we want normalcy back. Not for us but for them.

The Ford government’s treatment of CUPE is undeniably heavy handed — probably on purpose, to send a signal to other unions. It’s also unnecessarily nasty. Ford could have struck a better deal with education workers, like imposing a short-term contract with a higher wage boost to help them ride out inflation, as I proposed weeks ago. That might have eased the concerns of parents out there who, though worried about their kids, don’t like Ford or what he’s doing.

I think Jen Gerson has it right here:

June 4, 2022

Ontario’s election – “This was a weird campaign during a weird moment in history. Adjust your hot-takes accordingly, friends.”

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

From the Ontario election wrap-up post from the editors of The Line:

Newly re-elected Ontario Premier Doug Ford, seen here at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Canada.
Photo via Wikimedia.

Doug Ford and the Ontario Progressive Conservatives obviously feel pretty good this Friday. They really did about as well as they could possibly have hoped to do. Still, we urge our readers and all the analysts and pundits out there not to overreact to Ford’s victory. He’s not a political genius, he’s not some sort of colossus standing astride our politics, and he is not the man who must be immediately beamed into the federal Conservative leadership so that he can slay Trudeau’s government and win 200 seats.

Doug? He’s just a guy who got lucky last night. (Politically, we mean. Get your minds out of the gutter.)

We’re not taking anything away from Ford, or his campaign leadership, or all the people who worked hard for the PCs over the last month. They did a lot of smart things, they did them well, and they are reaping the benefits. It was an effective campaign. It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but your Line editors suspect it rubbed people the wrong way precisely because it was an effective campaign. Keeping Ford out of sight, avoiding a lot of questions, keeping things low-key … these weren’t accidents. These were deliberate decisions. You have to start any analysis of the PC campaign by granting that. Yeah, it was well conceived and well executed. A hat tip to the people behind it.

But the point that we want to make, and it shouldn’t take away from anything said above, is that the Progressive Conservatives maxed out the luck-o-meter. If this election had been a year ago, coming off the government’s catastrophic handling of Ontario’s third wave, it probably would have been Doug Ford resigning last night. The government caught an enormous break because factors well beyond its control shifted the public’s focus off its greatest vulnerability, the management of the pandemic, and put it solidly on economic and cost-of-living issues that the PCs are much, much more comfortable talking about.

So yeah, the PCs had a good campaign, but you couldn’t buy that kind of luck. None of it happened in Ontario or even Canada. This was a global trend. After two years of pandemic, people are tired and they’re getting worried about other things. The timing for Ford could not have been better. So we absolutely give full credit to his campaign for a good job, but we also insist on acknowledging the huge role of luck and timing. We don’t know if it’s better to be lucky than good. But we certainly know it’s nice to be both at once.

We raise this as a note of caution before the punditry gets too carried away. This election is undoubtedly a huge victory for the Tories. But it is also a really, really weird election. The circumstances of it are very unique. The combination of low turnout, pandemic fatigue, Ford’s personal political brand in Ontario, bizarrely lacklustre campaigns by the opposition, and a confluence of global trends that all netted out in Ford’s favour don’t tell us anything about the state of the conservative coalition in Canada, who would make a good federal leader, or what’s going to happen at the next federal election. This was a weird campaign during a weird moment in history. Adjust your hot-takes accordingly, friends.

Campaigning from your basement worked very well for Joe Biden, and now it’s done the job for Doug Ford. It probably wouldn’t work for Justin Trudeau — if he’s not performing for the camera, it’s not clear whether he actually exists. Ford certainly benefitted from the small attention his opponents on the right — the New Blue and Ontario parties — although minor parties have pretty much always been a non-factor in Ontario politics. They were summoned into existance by the way Ford and the Progressive Conservatives governed during the pandemic … almost indistinguishable from the federal Liberals under Justin Trudeau. The PCs seemed to rely on their “progressive” urges at the expense of anything remotely “conservative”.

Moving on to the other two major parties … it’s not pretty:

Preliminary riding-by-riding results from the 2022 Ontario election.
Blue – Progressive Conservative, Orange – New Democratic Party, Red – Liberal Party, Green – Green Party

Okay, let’s do the NDP first. The NDP is probably feeling pretty good today. We get it. Even a week or two ago polls were suggesting they were about to lose their hold on official opposition to the Liberals. That would’ve been a disaster for the party. There’s no way around that. They’ve avoided that fate. The NDP has remained in second, although they lost a bunch of seats to the PCs (see above). In the days to come, the party is going to have to take a few cold showers, give their heads a vigorous shake, and realize that warm feeling they’re enjoying right now isn’t the afterglow of victory, it’s the fading adrenaline rush of a near-death experience. Avoiding annihilation shouldn’t be good enough. But that’s all they did.

Andrea Horwath, long-time leader of the party, has already announced that she is stepping down. And rightly so. The Line has some fondness for Andrea. God knows we’ve had the opportunity to get to know her during her tenure as provincial NDP leader, which basically overlaps entirely with our entire careers in journalism. She is a decent person with a better sense of humour than often comes across in public, and she has nothing to be ashamed about. She has taken the party as far as she can, and it’s time for someone else to take over and deal with what might be a changing environment — one that is not obviously changing in the NDP’s favour (again, see above).

[…]

Writing critically about the Liberal campaign today feels a little bit like flogging a dead horse, and then shooting it a bunch of times, and then setting it on fire, and then hunting down all of its little horsey relatives and shooting all of them too. And then peeing on them. But still. It was a really bad campaign by the Liberals. The leader was bad. We’re sorry, but he was. If Steven Del Duca ever encountered charisma we suspect his body would reject it like a donated kidney. The party’s campaign platform was a weird mishmash of stuff that sounded vaguely on point for 2022, but also often read like something copied and pasted directly out of Ontario Liberal campaign platforms going back as far as the 1990s.

Some of the problems the campaign experienced had easy explanations. The party’s 2018 performance was so terrible they lost official party status, and the access to budgets and staff in the legislature that goes along with that status. The party has been trying to rebuild with at least one hand tied behind its back ever since. The campaign team was quite lean, and as a series of ejected candidates show, it was not able to properly vet the full slate of candidates it ran. You can understand how the lack of personnel and money contributed to those problems. But what we can’t understand is why the campaign insisted on making so many weird decisions. Handguns and abortion as campaign issues? In a provincial campaign? Talking up free transit rides, which will only appeal in the deepest downtown cores, where all they could do was hurt the NDP? A mid-campaign pledge to make COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory for school children, which was then never really mentioned again?

The NDP ran a bad campaign, but the Liberals just seemed to be totally disjointed, as if there wasn’t any agreement among the party leadership on what the platform should be so random unrelated items got floated as trial balloons on almost a daily basis, with no follow-up on most of them. Perhaps the party couldn’t afford the cost of proper in-depth pre-election polling or perhaps this was the party leadership’s belated buyer’s remorse over the leader they’d elected.

April 5, 2020

Ontario premier Doug Ford surprises many observers – “Wasn’t this guy supposed to be Canada’s Donald Trump?”

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

Chris Selley on the surprisingly solid performance of Ontario premier Doug Ford during the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic response:

Ontario premier Doug Ford as new Progressive Conservative leader at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Canada.
Photo via Wikimedia.

The premier has attracted much praise for his performance during this crisis, and it is deserved. His last misstep was advising families to head off on March Break as planned, viruses be damned, but that might as well have been 100 years ago. We were all clutching at optimism. Former premier Kathleen Wynne, who clearly understands Ford, graciously said she heard a man “trying to calm the waters … out of the goodness of his heart.”

Since then Ford has struck the right tone: often visibly alarmed, but calm, scripted and plain of speech. He has been gracious to everyone on the right side of the fight, from doctors and nurses to supermarket clerks and frantic, unemployed people stuck at home, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to his fellow premiers of all political stripes, and even to journalists. And he has been galvanizingly withering to those on the wrong side, most notably a few price-gouging businesses who have been helpful enough to offer themselves up as common enemies.

More than a few people have remarked: “Wasn’t this guy supposed to be Canada’s Donald Trump?”

Indeed, once upon a time, those comparisons flew thick and fast. But they were always absurd — a toxic by-product of the Canadian media’s mortifying obsession with all things American. No First World politician is remotely like Donald Trump. I have filed many thousands of words over the past decade on what I view as Doug Ford’s inadequacies as a politician, and it would never have occurred to me to compare him to such a transparently awful president.

Ford, too, has levelled many vastly over-the-top accusations against his opponents. But he has basically set them all aside now. While federal Conservatives continue battling federal Liberals on the carbon tax file, Ford has refused to discuss it and happily applauds the feds’ anti-coronavirus efforts. Where once Ford railed at his media critics, now he praises their efforts covering the crisis and informing Ontarians. His relatively plain talk is noticeably more reassuring than the messaging some other Canadian heads of government, who fancy themselves far more polished, are dishing out — Trudeau in particular.

August 11, 2019

“Saying ‘Donald Trump is not my president’ is like saying that your stepfather isn’t your real dad and slamming your bedroom door”

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

Colby Cosh looks at the oddly immature and childish meme of “Not my President”/”Not my Prime Minister” declarations that seem to be ubiquitous these days:

If you sent me back to grad school I would love to do some proper research into the history of the “Not My President”/”Not My Prime Minister”-type statements that are everywhere now. They do seem especially popular with liberals, although they are not exclusive to them. A strong memetic influence was obviously the multi-city “Not My Presidents Day” protests that followed Donald Trump’s inauguration. But the indignant, huffy insistence that Trump is “not my president” obviously had to gain traction in the first place.

The theme has been taken up internationally: if you Google “not my prime minister” most of the top hits are Boris Johnson-related (no doubt the “Theresa May: not my prime minister” T-shirts and buttons will sell in the online shops at a significant discount now), and the theme has become a formal slogan of street protest in the U.K. Adding “Trudeau” to the search string reveals a few comment threads. The Canadian politician who gets the most “Not my X” action is certainly Doug Ford. In Alberta, Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney have been getting roughly equal helpings of “Not my premier!”, presumably not from the same people. Who knows, maybe there’s someone out there who feels that his real premier is still Harry E. Strom.

In analyzing this emerging cliché, I suppose one could interpret it as a small act of libertarian or even anarchist rebellion. Is anybody really deserving of being “my” prime minister? Should we not all, in the glorious Utopia, be the prime ministers of ourselves? But the psychological force and intention of the statement that Joe Blow is not “my prime minister” or “my president” is not really anarchistic. The implication of the assertion is always that someone else might really deserve the title, or that there existed past statesmen nobody was ashamed to follow and identify completely with. Saying “Donald Trump is not my president” is like saying that your stepfather isn’t your real dad and slamming your bedroom door.

Meanwhile, of course, your stepfather is probably covering the mortgage and cleaning the eavestrough. “Not my X!” is a defection from democracy more than it is a challenge to the idea of the state. Donald Trump is definitely the lawful, constitutional president of the United States of America, and anyway possesses the powers thereof; those who say it ain’t so are making an incantation, trying to will a state of affairs into existence. If enough people say it, maybe it sorta automatically comes true. There is a lot of this kind of attempted magic going around these days.

August 2, 2019

Doug Ford’s sudden onset “Winegate” scandal

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

Ontario premier Doug Ford is now taking flak for promoting an Ontario winery after his party accepted what some Toronto media reports characterized as a “generous” donation from the winery’s owner. How generous? Are we talking millions? Tens of millions? A thousand dollars. Toronto media considers $1,000 to be enough money to sway the provincial government and at least one local media outlet encouraged its readers to boycott the winery. But that turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg from a media investigation point of view: Ford’s ultra-cheesy “Ontario News Now” party propaganda channel had given Ford’s endorsement to at least four other mega-corporations whose political contributions may have gone as eye-wateringly high as $2,000! Torontonians may never have heard of these corporate puppet-masters who clearly now control Premier Ford’s every waking moment, but as Canadians have never seen corruption on this scale before — nearly ten thousand dollars in political contributions!! — they’re demanding all the usual things that media-ginned-up protests tend to demand.

At the National Post, Chris Selley wonders why the Ontario Progressive Conservatives are acting just as badly as the Liberals they replaced:

When it comes to Canadian politicians and money, it might be difficult to explain to a foreign visitor exactly what’s kosher and what’s not. Ontario Premier Doug Ford got some bad press this week for having promoted the Pelee Island Winery in one of his impossibly cheesy “Ontario News Now” propaganda videos, just weeks after the winery’s owner, Walter Schmoranz, donated $1,000 to Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. In isolation, it didn’t look great. If it’s a coincidence, as the premier claims, then it’s the sort of coincidence a government wishing to claim moral rectitude should endeavour to avoid.

Viewed in the broad landscape of Canadian politics, however, it all seems rather overblown. Politicians regularly stump for certain products and businesses, after all, implicitly at the expense of others. More to the point they routinely give businesses free money without asking us, and not out of the goodness of their hearts.

According to David Akin’s indispensable @ottawaspends Twitter feed, the federal government doled out $723,000 to wineries and winery associations this year and last. The Nova Scotia Winery Association hoovered up $522,000 of the total, plus another $175,000 back in 2012. Perhaps it would be cynical to observe that the riding of West Nova, home to the Annapolis Valley wineries, is notorious for changing hands between the Liberals and Conservatives. Whoops — too late.

Here in Ontario, meanwhile, between 2013 and 2018, the province and feds collectively gave away at least $1.1 million to wineries and $1.5 million to breweries, plus $140-odd million more to an endless queue of cap-in-hand distillers, mushroom farmers, meat processers, goat dairies, sugarmakers and bakeries. Pelee Island Winery isn’t on that list, incidentally, which might put the premier’s non-financial contribution — quid pro quo or not — in perspective.

All that taxpayer dough got handed out under a program called Growing Forward 2, which was an “initiative that encouraged innovation, competitiveness and market development, adaptability and industry sustainability in Canada’s agri-food and agri products sector.” That’s a fancy way of saying “corporate welfare,” which can be unpopular in Canada when it comes to bailing Bombardier out of its latest fiasco or buying the Weston clan new freezers, but which is entirely uncontroversial when it comes to smaller, less obviously villainous businesses — especially if they happen to be farms.

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