Quotulatiousness

July 20, 2018

“Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I’ve ever covered who has demoted himself”

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

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells analyzes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent federal cabinet shuffle:

So much has changed, culminating — for now — with the burial of Ontario provincial Liberalism at the hands of Doug Ford. Alberta and Quebec could next fall to Jason Kenney and François Legault. Certainly that’s the way to bet it. Even normally sunshiny New Brunswick, Newfoundland and PEI are refusing to file carbon reduction plans in line with what Catherine McKenna expects.

So the cabinet Trudeau shuffled on Wednesday isn’t a pre-election cabinet, in the sense of one that’s sweet and shiny to attract distracted voters, so much as it’s a survive-until-the-election cabinet. If this cabinet were a movie, it’d be Walter Hill’s 1979 classic The Warriors. A bunch of street fighters, just trying to make it from the Bronx to Brooklyn in one piece. Doug Ford calling to them from an abandoned car, clinking empty bottles together. Or to use another, perhaps less obscure, movie analogy, it’s farewell to Hope and Hard Work, hello to Horse’s Head/ In Your Bed.

The stars of this partially-refurbished cabinet are two bad cops, in one case quite literally: Bill Blair and Dominic LeBlanc. Blair’s job on the border-crossing file isn’t only to get up Doug Ford’s nose, though that’s a handy bonus. It’s to do more or less what he did as the Liberals’ back-bench pilot of cannabis legalization: to steward a controversial file as humourlessly as humanly possible, to convey with every flinty word and steely grimace that the government is not even remotely interested in messing around.

It’s interesting that Ahmed Hussen, a personable and diligent minister who was also obviously appointed so he could incarnate Liberal branding of openness and diversity, keeps every part of the immigration file except those elements that scare some voters: the people walking across the border. Those parts have been assigned to Sgt. Rock over here.

LeBlanc, an irrepressible rogue whose dad was Pierre Trudeau’s fisheries minister and who has known Justin Trudeau all his life, is not by nature a political bone-crusher, although that’s certainly within his vocabulary. He doesn’t even like when people like me emphasize that part of his personality. He will prefer to get along. But he has the job Trudeau had because Trudeau noticed that, even though his intergovernmental minister was Justin Trudeau, the intergovernmental mood out there was getting noticeably chippy. So Trudeau stripped Trudeau of that portfolio and handed it to someone who could concentrate on it. It’s traditional to view a smaller ministerial portfolio as evidence of a demotion. Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I’ve ever covered who has demoted himself.

July 5, 2018

Barbara Kay on revising Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum

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

Her latest column in the National Post has some advice for Premier Doug Ford and his merry band of (dare I say) reformers:

Doug Ford at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Ontario.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Doug Ford’s victory was in some measure due to his promise — I believe a heartfelt one — to repeal the sex ed curriculum in Ontario schools. I assume there’s a replacement program in the works. A sex-ed vacuum is not politically tenable, or even what most conservative parents want.

What principles will undergird a Doug Ford inspired curriculum? I’d suggest four guidelines for his consideration.

First, take sex ed out of the hands of ideologues and activists. Constitute a task force made up of a variety of stakeholders, involving both liberal and conservative parents (including parents of LGBT students), disinterested scientific authorities and, yes, religious representatives, to hammer out recommendations for a sex ed paradigm, in which science is separated from theory, and in which proponents of morality and modesty-based sex ed have a voice and a vote.

Second, revisit the underlying premise in sex ed today that all children must learn everything under the sun that touches on sexuality from the state.

[…]

Third, there is the question of readiness. Children can be taught the facts of biology quite early, but there is no need to engage young children in detailed discussion of sexual preferences before they fully understand the nature of sexual desire. It is obviously appropriate to warn against internet porn and social media perils at a fairly early age, and the reality of same-sex couples (including parents of students) openly acknowledged, but full engagement in the nature of sexual desire in all its diversity and detail is best left for adolescence.

Finally, nowhere is the need for distinction between science and theory more urgently required than in the area of transgenderism.

Much of what children are learning about transgenderism today, at a very tender age, is not science-based, but activist-dictated theory that can result in psychological harm.

June 9, 2018

Various comments on the Ontario election

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

Once the voting was underway, I briefly checked my Facebook feed and, as expected, saw a lot of declared support for the NDP (even among those who normally lean Liberal), a few of the more outspoken Conservatives fighting their corner, but others I think of as Conservative-leaning were generally being very quiet. I didn’t bother with my Twitter feed, as relatively few of the people I follow are from Ontario, and the same for my Gab feed (Twitter biases as far left as Gab tends to the far right).

When I went in to vote (I had a Libertarian candidate in my riding), I asked the poll clerk if there had been any ballot refusals and she said “there’d been a few”. The preliminary results shown on the Elections Ontario site for my riding:

The Globe and Mail sent a tweet showing the overall shape of the PC victory:

David Warren commented on the election results:

My Chief Texas Correspondent leaps naturally upon the result of yesterday’s Ontario provincial election, in which our governing Liberals were annihilated. He sees this as a conventional “shift to the Right,” in Merican party terms, and celebrates it as such.

To which I reply: that the moronic city voters went not Right but over to the NDPee, which promised more spending than even the Liberals could imagine, and various grand new welfare schemes. (They are a zoological garden of various activist nutjobs.) Our outgoing premier’s personal charmlessness factored into the result. The winning Doug Ford is a total clown, and the media will have him for breakfast and snacks, yet for one brief glorious moment the Leftoids are in disarray. Ford is no Trump, though he might be able to match your esteemed President in straightforward vulgarity. He cannot have the fondest clew what he will do with the mess he has inherited, now that he is in power. He will have to betray that half of his constituency to which he promised the opposite of what he pledged to the other half, with unstudied vagueness. His caucus will be crawling with Suburban Saracens and other multicultural eccentrics — not the old solid Tory phalanx of white, Presbo-Methodist, rural hicks. Alas, though the ride may be wild, it won’t be fun to watch.

At BlogTO, Lauren O’Neil gathers a lot of Toronto-centric Twitter comments (not surprisingly, most are not complementary toward the Premier-elect (who, I’m informed we should more accurately be calling the Premier-designate instead)).

Kathy Shaidle posted on Facebook:

Am I relieved? You bet. But: Remember how close the polls were. The NDP got a lot of votes, and while our system means that the PCs won, the “popular” vote still shows how many leftoids there are in the province. And who else noticed that Doug’s “enthusiastic” official opening lines — “What a response. This is incredible.” — was scripted, and delivered with the stilted conviction of an Ed Wood stock player? On that note, I’ve seen less wooden Chippendale highboys…

May 18, 2018

Deploy scare quotes as required when considering the “cultural” “impact” of the suburbs

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

Rick McGinnis has a thoughtful piece on the creation and evolution of the modern western suburb, in the context of the ongoing Ontario election:

Maybe it’s some remnant of our tribal past, but it’s hard for us to leave behind some impulse to fear and vilify whoever lives one village over, beyond the river or in the next valley. We might think we’re sophisticated, cosmopolitan people, but this nascent tribalism is never far from the surface, and I saw it re-emerge with a roar during recent municipal elections here in Toronto.

Back when the late Rob Ford won his surprise mayoral victory in 2010 – certainly a surprise for his opponents, who couldn’t imagine how decisively he’d win – the electoral post-mortems painted his triumph as the revenge of the suburbs that once comprised a group of independent townships over the downtown, Toronto’s older urban core.

It was a battle between the suburbs and the city, won this time by the suburbs, who rallied behind various standards – summed up in the media as a love of cars, ethnic and cultural homogeneity and lower property taxes. As with any history written by the losers – the media, for the most part, who identified as urbanite, not suburbanite – it relied on conveniently ignoring facts that didn’t fit, and the deployment of sweeping generalizations, many of them out of date – if they were ever true at all – by decades.

[…]

Up here in Ontario, the imminent provincial election means that the suburbs versus city scenario will be revived, to either apportion blame should Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford become premier, or get unpacked if he loses and the boogeyman of a monolithic voting bloc needs to be triumphantly debunked.

There remains the small matter that Ford Nation events – held inevitably in the suburbs since the heyday of Doug’s brother Rob – are visibly far more diverse than, say, the average Liberal fundraiser, and Ford opponents have been chewing on that tough gristle for nearly a decade.

Obviously, the suburbs can’t be both a politically, economically and culturally monolithic place, and a diverse, complex collection of communities mysteriously moved to unite during election cycles to oppose the prerogatives of certain political parties and the urbanites who love them. There’s a very complex story about the suburbs dying to be told, but we’re still invested in stereotypes that are decades out-of-date for the purposes of situational political utility. It’s an object lesson that politics, more than anything else, is the enemy of truth.

Diversity has joined “marriage,” “rights,” “privilege” and “family” on that list of words that we’ve come to use without sharing a common meaning, especially when we talk about places like the suburbs, what have come to mean something very different in our imaginations than they exist in reality. For the people living there – whose lived experience has nothing to do with convenient fictions – the suburbs are really just a place where a mortgage might be affordable, where you can have a front and a back yard, and where you don’t share walls with your neighbours.

May 11, 2018

Imagine Ontario’s election

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

Andrew Coyne on the fantasy campaign that is just kicking off in Ontario:

The first NDP ad of the 2018 Ontario election campaign invites viewers to “imagine a place” where hydro is cheap, drugs are free, and dental care is on the house — all at no cost to anyone except the “very rich” who will be “asked” to “pay a little more,” which I gather is NDPese for “taxed within an inch of their lives.”

That word — “imagine” — might be the theme of the coming election. The three major parties appear to be living in a world of the imagination, with platforms full of imaginary promises paid for with imaginary dollars. The province is sinking ever deeper in debt, notwithstanding the Liberal government’s desperate efforts to conceal it, its debt-to-GDP ratio headed for 45 per cent even after a decade or more of uninterrupted economic growth. A recession of any length or severity would blow that number skyward.

Beyond that the picture only grows darker, with the first of the baby boomers just into their 70s and the costs of health care projected to rise, relentlessly, as they grow into their dotage. And yet all three parties are merrily racking up new spending promises — daycare, pharmacare, dentacare, the works — with money they wouldn’t have even if the official budget numbers were genuine, and not, as the province’s auditor general has lately warned, a swindle and a fraud (I paraphrase). It’s an election in la-la land.

Oddly, this does not seem to be the conventional view. The advance word on the election, rather, is that Ontario is facing a choice of unprecedented starkness, a polarizing election with no one seeming to occupy the middle ground.

“It’s hard to remember a provincial campaign that’s featured two leaders so diametrically opposed to each other,” broadcaster Steve Paikin wrote recently, of the Liberals’ Kathleen Wynne and the Conservatives’ Doug Ford. “The political centre,” agrees the Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee, “has vanished like a puddle in the sun.”

It’s true that the Liberals and the NDP are in something of a bidding war for the left-of-centre vote. If the March budget signalled a retreat from the Liberals’ not-overly-stringent devotion to fiscal restraint, the NDP platform goes further in every direction: about $4 billion a year further, in fact.

May 3, 2018

I’m sure just calling him “Ontario’s Trump” will be a fantastic winning strategy in June…

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

Chris Selley on Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford’s on-again, off-again plans for the Greenbelt:

Thus far, for want of many specific Progressive Conservative policy proposals, the Liberal line on Doug Ford has essentially been to brace for catastrophe: trust that no matter what he says, he will fire everyone and cut everything and destroy all that you hold dear, because he’s Doug Ford and that’s what Doug Ford does. Oh also he’s Donald Trump. The Liberals know no other way of campaigning. They were comparing Patrick Brown to Trump way back in October.

On Monday, though, Ford unveiled a specific, bold, novel and controversial policy approach on the major issue of affordable housing in the Greater Toronto Area — something wonks and pundits and opposition politicians could really sink their teeth into. Sadly it was a tremendously dumb policy: to develop “a big chunk” of the Greenbelt, while somehow tacking other compensatory bits of land onto it to ensure it didn’t shrink in overall size.

It was the worst of all things Ford: uninformed (there is no need for this); confusing (where exactly are they going to find all this replacement land?); a bit sketchy (the Liberals released a video of Ford saying the idea came from big developers); and ultimately not worth the napkin it was drawn on the back of. On Tuesday afternoon, citing public feedback, Ford abandoned the plan and promised to be the greenbelt’s fiercest protector.

“I govern through the people, not through government,” he explained in a statement. (He is running to lead Canada’s second-largest government.) Campaign spokesperson Melissa Lantsman was reduced to characterizing it as a great leadership moment.

March 12, 2018

And the next premier of Ontario is likely to be … Doug Ford?

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

Saturday’s Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership contest went down to the wire … and beyond, as voting glitches pushed the announcement of a winner beyond the time the party had rented the facility in Markham, so attendees had to go elsewhere to wait for the final result. In a disturbingly similar way to the last US presidential election, Christine Elliot won the popular vote, but the result hinged on the number of constituencies won, which went to Ford. Several of my (Liberal or NDP) friends on Facebook, who’d announced they’d joined the PCs explicitly to vote against Ford, were aghast at the result.

New Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York.
Photo via Wikimedia.

In the National Post, Chris Selley reports on the three-ring circus:

In the end, maybe caucus had it right. If more than anything else Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives wanted to win on June 7 then maybe they should have stuck with interim leader Vic Fedeli. If the ultra-folksy MPP for Nipissing wasn’t the most compelling imaginable premier-in-waiting, he would certainly have cut a less divisive figure than Doug Ford, who was announced as the party’s new leader late Saturday night in a small room at a Markham conference centre.

“To the party members I say thank you. To the people of Ontario I say relief is on its way,” Ford told reporters and campaign workers. “And to Kathleen Wynne, I say your days as premier are numbered.”

That got a massive cheer, of course, but this is an outcome that many in the party consider a worst-case scenario. An Angus Reid poll released this week asked “soft” Tory voters whether each candidate would make them more or less likely to support the party: Ford’s net score (more likely minus less likely) was minus 27 per cent; Christine Elliott, who finished a very narrow second Saturday — her third failed shot at the position — was at plus 20.

Sticking with Fedeli would also have spared the party the hideous embarrassment of Saturday’s botched convention. Vote-counting dragged on for hours thanks to a chunk of ballots that had been allocated to the wrong ridings. A packed crowd of partisans was left in the dark for three hours, then told to hang tight for another 30 minutes, and then sent away into the night with no result. In lieu of a cascade of balloons, there was booing and hollering. Various Ford supporters, citing ostensibly conclusive media reports earlier in the day that Ford had won, alleged party elites were trying to steal it.

These were not the ideal circumstances in which to build unity, which was the stated purpose of the event. “You’ve been through a very tough couple of months — perhaps the toughest times in the history of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario,” Alberta United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney told the crowd. “You’ve gone through weeks of anxiety and adversity. But I am certain that you will overcome this time of trial, and that this afternoon, with the election of your leader, you will emerge stronger, united and victorious in the election.”

“This afternoon,” he said. We were so young then.

The flow of votes from Allen to Ford was expected, but what I didn’t expect was the proportion of Mulroney votes that flowed to Ford instead of Elliot (I’d expected roughly 100% to Elliot, but a significant number went to Ford instead).

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the leadership campaign was how well Ford managed to stick to his talking points and not be baited into the kind of media spectacle his late brother seemed to specialize in. A tougher test awaits in the June provincial election, however. The Liberals and NDP have been gifted a full warehouse of attack ads, based on the Ford brothers’ chaotic and at times incoherent term in office in Toronto, but there may be a limit to the overall usefulness of this arsenal: rather like the US media attacking Trump during the last US election, we’ve probably heard it all before.

The circus may not be over yet, however, as reports on Sunday indicated that Christine Elliot is demanding an investigation into the election.

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