Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2021

Alberta’s pantomime election to nominate a Senate candidate that Trudeau can ignore with great relish

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

In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh discusses the apparently ongoing non-binding election for Alberta’s next Senate seat:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S. Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

The prestige of Trudeau’s Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments must be maintained at all hazards, which is why the Prime Minister’s Office undertook, a little surprisingly, to provide our Ryan Tumilty with an official response to Alberta’s Senate election. The board, says the voice of the PMO, “evaluates candidates based on public, merit-based criteria”; it was not deemed necessary to finish the sentence with “… unlike the demented, bloodthirsty populace of Alberta, who will presumably just vote for the candidate who can devour the most tar sand at a COVID party.”

For our part, NP Platformed has always been a tad frustrated that smaller political groupings don’t welcome Alberta Senate elections as a chance for a low-stakes, low-cost electoral push toward the limelight. Now that federal and provincial Conservative parties are united, for the moment, 2021’s Senate election has not been accompanied even by the quiet campaigning or the minuscule media attention that the first four elections involved. It is probably to be expected that the three Conservative Party of Canada candidates on the Senate ballot will accumulate enough semi-automatic votes to be nominated.

The Liberals and New Democrats, on an official level, stayed further away from the Senate election process than ever. Duncan Kinney, a totally-independent-from-the-NDP left-wing journalist and fellow of the Broadbent Institute, is appearing on the ballot as part of a sort of none-of-the-above campaign. His entire platform is “this Senate election is illegitimate and stupid, but wouldn’t it be amusing if I won anyhow?” (We’ll take the bait: yes, it would!)

And the People’s party has taken the opportunity to pick three official nominees. If you ask us, the Mad Max party absolutely ought to have hung onto some of what it spent on the federal election and devoted the funds to making a big splash in this one. The TV networks and newspapers would ululate with helpful rage if some PPC creature topped the Senate ballot. Heck, Maxime Bernier has always been able to personally attract big crowds in Alberta. If he had planned ahead and squatted here for six months to meet the residency requirement, he could have run in the Senate election himself.

His proxies probably won’t get anywhere, but we’ll see. There really is an opportunity for a bit of chaos here, since anyone who can break into the top three on this ballot would become an Alberta “senator-in-waiting”. Some of the independent candidates, including former Slave Lake mayor Karina Pillay and former Alberta finance minister Doug Horner, have name recognition that could count for a lot in a low-turnout vote.

October 2, 2021

Federal NDP going through the six phases of political campaigns – enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, the search for the guilty, the punishment of the innocent, and the promotion of the uninvolved

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

The NDP had high, high hopes for the September election, largely pinned on the undoubted popularity of their leader among young voters. As Joshua Hind shows, it didn’t work out at all the way they had hoped:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the NDP leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Only the most die-hard supporters of the New Democratic Party thought the recently-concluded 2021 federal election was winnable in the way 2015 felt very winnable in the early days. Still, the NDP’s showing at the polls — a single-digit increase in popular vote and a single new seat — is undeniably disappointing for a party that spent big to win back seats.

With that disappointment gnawing at them, the NDP and its faithful are bound to want to assign some blame, a process which always starts with the leader. But that’s a uniquely tough proposition for the NDP, who not only has Canada’s Best-Liked Leader™ in Jagmeet Singh, but has also positioned Singh to be the entire personality and profile of the party. In trying to create another singular figure like Jack Layton, the NDP has painted itself into a tight corner.

In project management there’s an old joke about the “Six Phases”. Like the stages of grief, the six phases of project management are the various emotional states into which all large projects — construction, software development, political campaigns — can be divided. They are: enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, the search for the guilty, the punishment of the innocent, and the promotion of the uninvolved.

It’s easy to see the first three in an election, where enthusiasm, disillusionment and panic often happen all at once. Now in the post-election period, parties must wade into the more fraught final phases.

The search for the guilty started the moment the networks called the election for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, and Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is already under scrutiny. The Greens, for their part, got a head start on punishing the innocent by pinning their party’s staggering immolation exclusively on their (now former) leader, Annamie Paul.

For the NDP, things are more delicate.

Jagmeet Singh, who’s personable, well-spoken and very photogenic, was front and centre in every aspect of the NDP’s campaign. Their bus exclusively featured his name and picture, the first page on their website is simply labelled, “Jagmeet”, and every campaign stop was focused on the leader and his appeal. But the “leader first” tactic that arguably got the most attention was the social media campaign, specifically Singh’s appeal to young voters through TikTok.

Singh is the undisputed Canadian political TikTok champion, with nearly 850,000 followers and videos that regularly rack up millions of likes. His content is charming and apparently quite credible with TikTok users, at times fun, mischievous and pleasantly silly. It’s also clearly the platform Singh likes best. His Instagram account is mostly reposts from Twitter, and his Twitter account, while popular, doesn’t get nearly the response he earns on TikTok. Because it’s so important to Singh, and presumably the NDP, it can also form the basis for appraisals of both, and that creates new challenges.

September 24, 2021

Jen Gerson has some helpful advice for the Conservative party

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

Writing in Maclean’s, Jen Gerson suggests to the “conservatives” that they shouldn’t dump their new-ish leader on the basis of the party’s results in the September 20 election:

It’s come to my understanding that there is some considerable consternation about the future of Erin O’Toole, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, on the grounds that he underperformed in this week’s election.

I cannot help but wonder whether those now implacably resolved to booting the man for being inadequately conservative might, perhaps, consider getting a goddamn grip.

Yes, I understand that O’Toole ran his leadership campaign further to the right than his personality would otherwise suggest, in order to win over the Conservative base. And, yes, I understand that the unstated agreement behind this bait-and-switch was that O’Toole needed to show progress in key regions, particularly the 905. Also, yes, I understand that these gains failed to materialize, and that many conservatives feel both betrayed, and more importantly, no closer to government.

This state of affairs may ensure O’Toole’s leadership is unsalvageable.

Certainly, O’Toole and his brain trust seem to have rationally concluded that they could leave western conservatives hanging out to dry so they could chase votes in the GTA — because up until now, those westerners had nowhere else to go. However, the rise of the PPC suggests that they may now have somewhere to go …

Conservatives have a bad habit. They go into an election with reasonable expectations, enjoy some early momentum, and then let the excitement get to their heads. They reset those early expectations to something far less probable, and when the campaign produces exactly the results they predicted at the outset they declare the whole affair a disappointing failure.

I will note here that this complements the Liberal temperament, which interprets entirely lacklustre results as nothing short of a sign from the trumpet-wielding messengers of God blessing their mandate. Only the Liberals would see two successive minority governments with declining popular vote totals as clear-cut evidence that they, the worthy elect, have been chosen without reservation to lead the nation to paradise.

The Conservatives could use a little more of that energy.

These observations are provably true of both parties. The only amendment I could suggest is that the Liberals really do believe they have been granted the right to run Canada by divine providence (which few of them actually dare refer to in conversation) and view any interruption in their God-given right to rule as unnatural and a perversion of the arc of history.

Conservatives ought to have seen this election as the first in a two-election strategy. Fundamentally, the urbanites who hold the key to government don’t trust you, Conservatives. They’re worried about the conspiratorial lunatics in your caucus and your base, and they’re worried about who actually holds the reins of power in your party. Their distrust is fair, and will take time to repair.

If you dump your affable, moderate, centrist leader at the first opportunity because he didn’t crack the 905 on his first try, and you replace him with someone who will chase Maxime Bernier’s vanishing social movement like a labradoodle running after the wheels of a mail truck, you will wind up confirming every extant fear and stereotype this crowd already holds about you and your party.

It’s a trap. Be smarter than that.

The PPC nearly tripling the size of their vote over two years doesn’t quite match the characterization of a “vanishing social movement”, but I’m not who she’s trying to persuade here. It’s often said that modern “conservatives” don’t actually have a plan except to do what Liberals/Democrats want to do — just a little bit slower. O’Toole (and Ontario Tories generally) fits that description quite well.

September 22, 2021

The “She-lection” or the “what was that?” election or the “what was the point?” election

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

In Tuesday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh looks at the sham election we just experienced … differently … here:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

What to say about a federal election in which nothing happened? Surely last night’s refusal by the Canadian public to budge an inch is more astonishing than almost any other imaginable result could be. Our last two elections were separated by exactly 700 days. During that brief time, Canada experienced a science-fiction disease pandemic with mass death and violent protests, a fairly urgent diplomatic crisis with China, a dramatic change in the U.S. presidency, a foreign-policy disaster in Afghanistan, epic Liberal scandals and constitutional strife. Canadians seem to have lived through all of this and decided that it made no difference, or no net difference, in how they wanted to vote.

Maybe this could be considered a psychological defence reaction to the surprising prospect of an election. Given the incredible result — no consecutive Canadian elections have ever been remotely this close in seat outcome — we can hardly even say “surprising and unwelcome”. Everyone knew who was responsible for calling an election. In Liberal ridings, the response seems to have been gratitude for the opportunity to vote Liberal again so soon.

In conversation with a non-representative sample of Canadian voters outside the Toronto border, it’s rare to find people who admit to voting Liberal, yet clearly enough people did yet again — nearly 20,000 of them in my riding alone. I live in Erin O’Toole’s riding, so the winner wasn’t in a lot of doubt despite him not having any spare time to campaign here. I was pleased to find over 3,600 other Durham voters willing to vote PPC this time around, giving Patricia Conlin about 5.6% of the vote. I’ve generally been a Libertarian voter all these years … at least when there’s been a Libertarian candidate to vote for … but this time around as in 2019 the Libertarians didn’t have anyone running here, so voting PPC was my best option.

The more we watch NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh campaign, the more we think, “Toronto does have an awful lot of people who ought not to be especially eager to run headlong into stuff like wealth taxes and confiscatory rates on capital gains.” The New Democrats seem increasingly determined to cement their all-urban base among youths and convinced leftists with bolshie rhetoric. Are the resentful, hopeless millions they hope to add to these stagnant forces really out there? Was this an election result that reveals a populace disaffected with neoliberal capitalism — of a kind genuinely beset by rent-seeking, cronyism and corruption — and keen on revolutionary change?

Unfortunately, the very failure of the election to yield a different result probably means that every party can treat last night as a rehearsal rather than a test. NP Platformed‘s initial instinct, which we reserve the right to throw out, is that we’ll be back at it with the same cast of characters in another 700 days or so. Everyone failed: what else is there but to follow Beckett’s dictum? “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Other than Maxime Bernier, is there a federal party leader who can point to the results of this election and claim much more than a bare moral victory?

Speaking of highly sus votes … here’s an example from California’s recall election

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

At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin recounts what he heard from a Californian friend after their recent election on recalling the sitting governor:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

He was sent a postal ballot – a ballot and an envelope to return it in. He had not asked for it and did not want it but got it anyway. His wife was also sent one and what I say below applies to her as well.

Both envelope and ballot had serial numbers printed on them – and they were sequential: the return envelope’s serial number differed by one from its ballot’s serial number. (His wife’s likewise, so it seemed to be a pattern.) This gave him some concerns.

  • As the state had posted the serial-numbered ballot specifically to him, it sure looked like, after the election, the authorities would be able to tell how he’d voted. In a state where expressing a heterodox thought can be career-ending, this was a little worrying. Of course, he could have chosen to trust the Governor’s assurance that the state would never dream of recording the serial-to-address data, let alone exploiting it afterwards (if the Governor had given that specific assurance, but he did not recall whether Newsom had clearly promised that as such).
  • As the envelope and ballot serials had this simple sequential relationship, it sure looked like anyone who saw the returned envelope (which had to have his name and address on it), would be able to deduce the serial of his ballot. In a state where the operation of the law can make defying antifa more dangerous to you than to them, this was a little worrying. Of course, he could have chosen to trust the Governor’s assurance that no such person would later be able to get access to the ballots or their scanned data to relate his name and address to his vote (if the Governor had given that specific assurance, but he did not recall whether Newsom had clearly promised that as such).
  • As there was no secrecy sleeve, it sure looked like whoever ripped the envelope open to get the ballot during the count would have a hard time not seeing his name, address and vote all at once anyway. In a state where supporting the wrong party can lead to unequal application of the law, this was a little worrying. Of course, he could have chosen to trust the Governor’s assurance that the electoral staff would be unable to record or memorise such information (if the Governor had given that specific assurance, but he did not recall whether Newsom had clearly promised that as such).

After thinking about this, he went to the local polling station on election day to try and get a ballot from them and put it in the ballot box the old-fashioned way. Wisely, he took the postal ballot with him, knowing they should – and in this case probably would – want to see it destroyed. Unwisely, he filled it in beforehand in case they refused to let him vote the old fashioned way (so that, in that case, he could at least put the postal ballot straight into the box, thus cutting some intermediaries out of the insecure loop, without making a second visit). He gave me a vivid word-picture of the crossed-arms, blocking-the-way lady in change of the polling place when he made his request. They did not absolutely refuse, but it was made clear to him that the first thing to happen would be his postal vote being torn open and carefully examined before its destruction. Cursing himself for the “forethought” of filling it in “in case”, he decided that that would destroy the point of the exercise, which was to cast a secret ballot – though he did wonder by then whether, despite his studiously-meek demeanour, the lady felt any more doubt of whom he was voting for than he felt of whom she was voting for. So in the end he used it as the state intended he should.

September 19, 2021

Erin O’Toole suddenly scrambling to try to win back votes from Maxime Bernier’s PPC

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

John Paul Tasker reports for the CBC on Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s last minute appeal to wavering supporters (that is, people who would prefer actual conservative or even libertarian policies to what O’Toole’s “Conservatives” have on offer):

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said today that conservative-minded voters sick of the Liberal government should park their votes with the Tories rather than turn to the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) in this election.

Speaking to reporters at a campaign stop in London, Ont., O’Toole said his party is the only one in a position to replace the Liberal government and a right-wing vote split could lead to four more years of Justin Trudeau.

“There are actually millions of Canadians who are very frustrated with Mr. Trudeau. If they allow that frustration to do anything other than vote Conservative, they’re voting for Mr. Trudeau,” O’Toole said.

“There are five parties and there are two choices. More of the same with Mr. Trudeau or real change and ethical government with Canada’s Conservatives.”

O’Toole said Trudeau wants Conservative voters to “vote for smaller parties” rather than unify behind O’Toole’s candidacy.

CBC’s poll tracker has the PPC at 6.2% support, which is nearly four times what it was in the last election. Other trackers have the PPC at least a few points more than that, and it might be noteworthy that PPC-leaning voters are probably not be as interested in sharing their preferences with pollsters as supporters of more left-wing parties like the Liberals and Conservatives.

After the last election campaign, a CBC News analysis showed that — even with its rather dismal level of support — the PPC likely cost the Conservatives seven seats in the House of Commons by splitting the vote (six seats went to the Liberals, one to the NDP).

With polls suggesting PPC support is now well above its 2019 level, the party’s impact could be even greater in 2021.

While polls suggest some PPC support is coming from first-time or infrequent voters, there’s no question the PPC is drawing at least some support from former Conservative voters.

[…]

“The Conservative Party is not conservative anymore,” Bernier said today in response to a question about O’Toole’s warnings about a vote split.

“O’Toole has flip-flopped and adopted the Liberal program on the few remaining issues where there were still difference between the two parties, such as the carbon tax, gun bans and COVID passports,” Bernier said in an emailed statement. “Mr. O’Toole will have to live with the consequences of his failing strategy.”

Some of Bernier’s recent momentum is driven by his opposition to pandemic measures. The PPC leader has slammed the proposed federal vaccine mandate as a “draconian” and “immoral” measure.

September 16, 2021

Who is the typical PPC supporter?

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney grapples with inadequate polling data to determine what the “average” supporter of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada believes and who they are compared to typical Canadians:

Poll after poll has shown that the People’s Party of Canada, led by former Conservative Maxime Bernier, is surging in popular support. The party, which captured only 1.6 per cent of the vote in 2019, electing zero candidates, is now polling at closer to five or six per cent, or higher. These gains have not come at any obvious loss to any major party (the hapless Green party may be an exception, but there were only so many Green voters in the first place). While there is no doubt that some voters are bolting to the PPC from traditional parties, it seems certain — and polling suggests — that they are also drawing support from the nine million Canadians who were eligible to vote in 2019 but did not.

This is, to put it very mildly, worth watching. In a recent column here, drawing on polling information provided by John Wright, the executive vice president of Maru Public Opinion, we tried to establish what we could about a PPC supporter. They are not particularly remarkable; as noted last week, a typical PPC voter is a typical Canadian. They are fairly evenly distributed across all demographic segments and found in generally similar numbers in the various provinces. The earlier numbers were based on a fairly small sample size — the PPC’s low support on a national level has limited their numbers in any typical national-level poll. Last week, I said that more polling was necessary, to firm up the profile of who a PPC voter is and where they live. Wright has been doing that polling — the sample sizes are still modest, but a representative profile is beginning to emerge … not just of who a PPC voter is, but what they believe.

There is a degree of background context that must be established before we can move onto the numbers. When he presented me with his latest results on Tuesday, Wright noted that polling PPC voters is a particular challenge for his industry. The very concept of “the typical PPC voter” is rapidly shifting. The PPC base of even five weeks ago was a small fringe of grumpy people loosely assembled around a handful of vaguely libertarian policies, some anti-immigration blather and a disillusionment with the political status quo. (A typical PPC billboard encapsulates this unfocused dissatisfaction: “The Other Options Suck.”) Many polling companies track the attitudes of partisans of various affiliations by creating a panel of those partisans and then polling them over and over. Polling companies trying to track the PPC’s sudden rise, if they rely on such an identified panel of PPC voters that will be repeatedly surveyed, are capturing the PPC as it existed before the mid-August influx of new supporters. This is undoubtedly skewing our understanding of what the PPC voter, as they exist right now, believes. Wright has done four waves of polling in the last 10 days to update, as best as possible, our understanding of what the PPC voter believes today. He will continue to poll several times a week for the foreseeable future.

As to that August surge, as discussed in my column here last week, the best way to explain it is to look for something that recently changed — and something has: there are millions of Canadians who are adamantly anti-vax and anti-vaccine mandate/passport. The PPC surge began at the precise moment that vaccine mandates became a major issue in the federal campaign, and provinces began discussing their plans for certificates to verify vaccination status for domestic purposes. Pollsters needed a few weeks to notice the surge and verify it was real.

[…]

Roughly a third of Canadians (35 per cent) agree that the government is stripping away personal liberties; with Conservative and Green voters answering in the affirmative more often than NDP and Liberals. By comparison, 89 per cent of PPC voters believe the government is stripping away their liberty. Almost 90 per cent of PPC voters further agree that their governments are creating “tyranny” over the population. To put that in context, only about 40 per cent of Conservatives feel that way, with the other major parties way behind.

Oh, and here’s a cheerful one to chew over: Wright asked Canadians if they’d agree that “we are on the verge of a revolution in our society to take our freedom back from governments who are limiting it.” That question received 32 per cent support nationally — but an incredible 84 per cent from PPC supporters.

This sounds like the kind of thing we maybe ought to be paying attention to, eh?

I find it fascinating that the PPC appears to be motivating lots of people who haven’t been interested in voting by providing an option for them that isn’t just a red or blue coloured version of pretty much exactly the same policies and goals. I don’t expect the PPC to “break through” in this election, but if they can continue drawing the interest of those Canadians who feel disenfranchised by the Liberals and Conservatives, they can be a significant force for change in our political future.

September 14, 2021

The Line‘s She-lection Bullshit Bulletin No. 4 … don’t bother questioning the timing

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

The latest installment of The Line‘s campaign bullshit tracker looks at the attempts by Liberal partisans to gin up some faux outrage over the timing of former Trudeau cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s tell-all book:

First of all, we would like to specifically invite our Conservative and Liberal friends to take a few deep calming breaths and settle the fuck down about Jody Wilson-Raybould’s forthcoming book, Indian in the Cabinet, which will be out on Tuesday — but was splashed early in the Globe and Mail. The book will recount, among other things, JWR’s memories of the SNC-Lavalin scandal. The excerpt the Globe ran certainly doesn’t paint Justin Trudeau in a particularly flattering light.

But it doesn’t matter.

Seriously, our Conservative friends need to rein it in. The SNC-Lavalin affair was an example of the Liberals at their very worst; so utterly self-assured and self-righteous that any ethical or normative breach can be justified to themselves so completely that they’re genuinely shocked and offended that not everyone else buys the official story. However, alas, there’s no remaining life in this scandal. The very best-case scenario for the Conservatives is that the topic bubbling up again reminds some voters that they don’t love Trudeau, and why. But any big damage this was gonna do to Brand JT, it did literally years ago, and before the last election campaign. There are no remaining undecided voters who’ll swing based on a new book that dishes on a pre-COVID scandal.

But now to our Liberal friends, good Lord, people, chill out. We’ve seen quite a few of you, including some who ought to know better, muttering darkly about the “timing” of JWR’s book, landing as it is right before the election.

The book was announced in March, people. We all knew it was coming — so did the Liberals when they called the election. Was the book’s publication timed for maximum impact? Well, no shit Sherlocks. What, was JWR obligated to delay out of deference to the guy who kicked her out of caucus for defying him? Here’s some sage wisdom for the Libs out there: if you make enemies in politics, those enemies will eventually try to fuck you. It’s real deep stuff, we know. You’re welcome.

Meanwhile, JWR is selling books. This is what book selling is: her publisher accelerated the book’s publication date by a few weeks to land when it would have maximum public interest, and the greatest potential for earned media. JWR gets to stick it it to JT and maximize her sales before hitting the speaking circuit, where the real bucks get made.

Also, so what?

Stop gargling your own bathwater, people. We’ll read the book when it’s out, but it won’t swing the election.

September 13, 2021

“Only the most fanatical Justin Trudeau partisans will begrudge Jody Wilson-Raybould for her moment of revenge”

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

Howard Anglin responds to an early excerpt from former Trudeau cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould:

Jody Wilson-Raybould, 30 January, 2014.
Photo by Erich Saide via Wikimedia Commons.

Reading the first excerpt of her book, I did find myself occasionally cocking an eyebrow at the portrayal of a wide-eyed innocent who somehow awoke to find herself in a den of partisan thieves.

It was, after all, the Liberal Party she had joined — the most ruthless and successful vote-winning machine in Western politics this side of Mexico’s PRI — not the parish altar guild.

But setting aside questions of systemic hypocrisy and looking only at the SNC-Lavalin imbroglio, it is as clear today as it was in 2019 that Wilson-Raybould was right and Trudeau was wrong.

She was right as attorney general to rebuff political pressure to offer SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement — a slap on the wrist that would have seen the engineering and construction company avoid criminal conviction and remain eligible for more federal contracts — and Trudeau and his office were wrong to pressure her to consider it.

Now, she is fully justified in reminding us of that fact. And if the book’s self-righteousness message is belied by the calculated timing of its release, well, she has earned the right to say “I told you so” at the time of her choosing.

As far as the election goes, the most important revelations are about Trudeau’s character.

To constitutional law nerds like me, however, the highlight is Wilson-Raybould’s disagreement with the prime minister over the role of the Attorney Genereal, including her description of a freshly briefed Trudeau expatiating scholastically on the nuances of the Shawcross doctrine before she drily punctures his condescension with the comment: “You have been talking to a lawyer.”

Coming from someone who was until a few weeks earlier “his” lawyer, at least in his capacity as head of government, the comment is doubly ironic.

Wilson-Raybould had, by her account, explained the doctrine and its implications at length to Trudeau, as well as to his principal secretary, Gerry Butts, and the Clerk, neither of whom is a lawyer but both of whom were nevertheless dispatched to try to explain their version of it to her and her lawyer chief of staff.

September 11, 2021

Thursday’s debate was “a grand Kabuki theatre, increasingly divorced from any grounded reality about our fiscal situation, or our ability to deliver on complex programs or problems”

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson offers her observations of the debate on Thursday night among most of the federal party leaders — missing, of course, the participation of the PPC’s Maxime Bernier who was pointedly not invited:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

No one can be said to have “won” such an exercise. You “win” these “debates” not by proposing the best policies, or offering competing philosophies, or even by presenting the best rhetoric. Rather, a “winner” is determined by who comes off the best to a general public that largely doesn’t follow the minute differences of respective platforms.

By that measure, no one really won Thursday’s debate, but Trudeau especially did not win it. I imagine that one of the problems of being raised as a spectacle of wealth, privilege and popularity is that it doesn’t quite prepare you for the moment when the worm turns, when people learn to dislike you for all the right reasons; when you are no longer given the proper deference and respect you feel is owed to you.

Trudeau came off as defensive, and flustered, taking hit after hit from other party leaders on topics ranging from his record, reconciliation and, especially, his self-interested decision to call a party in the first place. That he lacks a credible answer to why we’re holding this election at all three weeks into this campaign is a deep failure, one large and deep enough to consume his prospects of forming a majority government — and his hold on the party leadership along with it.

Annamie Paul offered the best performance of the night by far, and demonstrated that the Green party as a whole is unworthy of her. Whatever private internal dramas that may be unfolding, in public that party condemns itself to obscurity by refusing to get behind a woman who is, by every measure, impressive.

Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet made himself into an idealized avatar of a whiny and aggrieved Quebec nationalism that puts Alberta to shame. It takes a real special lack of self-awareness to imagine that Quebecers have had it rougher in this country than Indigenous people. Or that Blanchet, by virtue of his French ancestry, has suffered from greater oppression than, say, Annamie Paul. One day, the rest of Canada is going to stop humouring these insulated, thin-skinned delusions — but not before Quebec’s seat count declines relative to the rest of the population’s. In the meantime, Blanchet’s ability to beam pure DGAF energy into the English debates at least made him seem like a human, albeit a delusional and unpleasant one.

By this measure, Erin O’Toole “won” the debate by not losing it. I can’t remember a single thing he actually said, and in such a setting this can only work to his favour.

I mean, what is there to say? On actual substantive policy issues, I couldn’t escape the sense of watching a grand Kabuki theatre, increasingly divorced from any grounded reality about our fiscal situation, or our ability to deliver on complex programs or problems.

September 10, 2021

By Gandhi’s reckoning, the PPC is entering stage three (“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, …”)

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney says that the dying media will have to start taking Maxime Bernier and the PPC much more seriously if the recent “blips” in the polls turn out to be accurate:

To riff off the old song, there’s something happening here, though what it is ain’t exactly clear. Like it or not, we’re going to have to start paying attention to the People’s Party of Canada and its leader, Maxime Bernier. If polls are to be believed, they’re having a great election.

The PPC hasn’t warranted much attention before. It has largely served as a vanity vehicle for Bernier, who probably can’t believe he’s been able to keep himself out of an ordinary job this long. The party is a mixture of populist outreach and pie-in-the-sky pseudo-libertarianism. It has proposed a smattering of policies, but none of them are much more than a talking point or meme. They are often summed up as a “far-right” party — or at least further right than the Conservative Party of Canada — but it feels overly generous to place them firmly anywhere in particular on the political spectrum. Their organizing principle has seemed to be anger with the status quo, and a feeling of alienation from the majority consensus on most political views.

The PPC took just under 300,000 votes in the 2019 election, or 1.6 per cent of ballots cast. It was a rounding error on a fringe, and seemed set to stay that way. This, combined with a history of dogwhistle racism, is why journalists and political analysts paid it little attention (and that includes yours truly).

Something seems to be happening, though. The party has climbed in the polls, with some showing they’ve climbed by a lot. There are important caveats: Some of this can be written off as within-the-margins-of-error blips in the numbers. Perhaps there is some methodological quirk that is causing polling companies to overestimate the PPC’s standing. Maybe frustrated people are parking their vote there for a time but will come back to one of the traditional parties when actually making their x on a ballot.

So yeah. There’s all kinds of ways to rationalize this into a nothingburger, if you’re so inclined, but the fact remains there is a trend, consistent across different polls, from different companies, and over an extended period of time. It really does seem as though the party is set to double, triple or maybe even quadruple its support, relative to the last election. The latest Ekos poll has them at nine per cent. That’s an outlier on the high side, but if they came even close to that, the PPC would eclipse the Green Party of Canada’s best-ever showing. By a lot.

My friend John Wright is a pollster with decades of experience, and the executive vice president at Maru Public Opinion. He called me this weekend to tell me that something was up with the PPC’s numbers — I’d already realized the same, at least on an intuitive level, but he had the numbers to back it up. His numbers are broadly similar to what’s showing up in other polls. I asked him what he could tell me about the typical PPC voter, and he said there isn’t a ton of information about them, but pulled what data he could find.

The typical PPC supporter, based on polls as recent as last month, is … pretty normal, actually, at least demographically. They are fairly evenly distributed across every segment of Canadian society. No province has a wildly high or low number of PPC supporters (Alberta was a bit higher than the others, but only a very small bit, and with an overall small sample size). They are found fairly consistently across all age groups and economic and educational classes. The only really notable divergence in Wright’s numbers was on gender lines — men are twice as likely to support the PPC as women.

September 8, 2021

The Line‘s She-lection Bullshit Bulletin No. 3 … scary black fully semi-automatic assault machinegun edition

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

The folks at The Line continue their good work in pointing out some of the bullshittiest bullshit the politicians spew on the campaign trail. This week has been all about politicians promising to crack down even harder on the hunters and sport shooters who keep driving their pickup trucks (plastered with Trump bumper stickers, of course) into downtown Toronto to shoot their scary black fully semi-automatic AK-15 or AR-47 assault machineguns with chainsaw bayonets at innocent gang-bangers at 3 in the morning:

It is hard to know where to even begin picking through the bullshit that Canadians have had dumped atop their heads this week on the gun-control file. Both the Liberals and Conservatives hurled their share, but the worst offenders were by far the incumbents who claimed to ban “military-style assault weapons”.

Let’s start with this: Canadian law categorizes guns into three categories depending on their technical specifications: length, ammunition calibre, mode of operation, and the like. The categories are licensed and regulated differently. It can get pretty complicated. Despite their near-constant use, the terms “assault rifle”, “assault weapon” or the even-scarier sounding “military style assault weapon/rifle” have no specific or universally recognized meaning, including under Canadian law and firearms regulations. They aren’t part of or used by the categorization system.

This is essential to understand: because the terms have no specific and universally held meaning, these campaign-ready phrases can be appended to pretty much any type of rifle, whatever its actual legal category under our law. And that’s how we all found ourselves aspirating bullshit this week.

Most gun experts would generally classify an assault rifle/weapon as a rifle that fires medium-powered (or higher) ammunition and is capable of a “full auto” mode — that is, the weapon will continue firing as long as the trigger is held down. This results in a rapid volley of bullets at a cost of diminished accuracy (the recoil makes the firearm difficult to hold on target). These firearms typically have their ammunition kept in detachable magazines of 20 or 30 rounds each. When a magazine is emptied, it can be replaced by a practiced user in moments.

These sorts of weapons have been banned in Canada since the 1970s.

In 2020, the Liberals used an executive order — an Order in Council — to change the classification of several broad categories of until-then legal rifles, with the effect of preventing sales and further restricting most lawful uses for owners. None of these firearms were assault rifles/weapons by any reasonable standard. All are capable of semi-auto operation only, meaning one round is fired for each pull of the trigger. Under Canadian law, the magazines are limited to five rounds (there are some rare exceptions but five is the law).

Sigh. Still with us?

So the Liberals chose firearms linked to tragic events in Canada or abroad, like the AR-15, deemed these “assault weapons” and then banned them. But there was nothing meaningful or rational about this ban; it was was entirely a matter of political messaging. Numerous other rifles — firing the exact same ammunition from the exact same size of magazine at the exact same semi-automatic pace — remain legal and for sale to any licensed would-be purchaser. This isn’t an oversight. It’s just that the Liberals’ political goals were met by simply banning rifles linked to tragedies and ignoring the rest.

That’s the key thing to understand about what the Liberals did — it was always bullshit policy. But it sounds good to Canadian voters who don’t know fuck-all about guns. In that way, it’s meeting the Liberals’ needs.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole quickly abandoned his party’s pledge to revoke the Liberals’ 2020 order-in-council once someone noticed and called attention to it. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to O’Toole in the past … he’s what we used to call a “Red Tory” — really just a Liberal wearing a blue suit.

September 3, 2021

“Watching our feminist prime minister uncomfortably defend and explain away decidedly unfeminist behaviour has become an evergreen moment for our nation”

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

The NP Platformed newsletter is in the hands of Kathryn Marshall while Colby Cosh is on vacation, and she offers yet another golden moment of hypocrisy on the part of Justin Trudeau:

Standing in the fenced-in corner of a backyard during a press conference this Tuesday, Justin Trudeau was cornered in more ways than one.

Faced with questions from the media as to why he was allowing an incumbent Liberal candidate who had been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment to run for his party, an exasperated Trudeau was once again faced with his hypocrisy when it comes to his feminist credentials.

Only the day before, Trudeau was touting the Liberals “zero-tolerance” policy for sexual harassment. Of course, that was in the context of a Conservative candidate who had been accused of sexual misconduct. Notably, that candidate was very swiftly given the boot by leader Erin O’Toole, which was the correct response.

Now Trudeau finds himself in the exact same position that the Conservative leader was in. Following a CBC report, it has come to light that one of the Liberal candidates, two-term MP Raj Saini, has been the subject of numerous sexual harassment allegations from a number of staff going all the way back to 2015. I have no idea if these allegations are true, but they are deeply disturbing and should be taken seriously. As reported by the CBC, there are seven different sources who “described four different cases where Saini allegedly made unwanted sexual advances or inappropriate comments.” One of the allegations involves a former staff member who filed a human rights complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and tried to end her own life.

It should be a ludicrously easy call for Trudeau. The Liberal party has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment, right? Obviously, Saini needs to go and an individual who is facing allegations of this nature is in no position to be running for public office, period.

Except for one small hiccup. The allegations have come to public light after the candidate cut-off date for the election, which was Monday. So if Trudeau gets rid of Saini, it means they can’t replace him with someone else, and the result is no Liberal candidate on the ballot in a safe Liberal seat. Call me cynical, but if I had to guess, I would say this likely has something to do with the fact that overnight, the Liberal’s “zero-tolerance” policy appears to have evaporated into thin air.

September 1, 2021

Larry Elder’s campaign for governor hit with accusations of “white supremacism”

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

In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald looks at the recent hysterical attacks on gubernatorial hopeful Larry Elder based on the notion that he is somehow a kind of stalking horse for white supremacists:

Larry Elder at Camp Pendleton for the ceremony presenting the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to his father, Staff Sergeant Randolph Elder, U.S.M.C., 16 August, 2013.
US Government photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.

The media have focused particularly on Elder’s views about crime and policing. The self-described “Sage from South-Central” maintains that criminals, not the police, are the biggest threat in the black community. According to Elder, the false narrative about lethal police racism has only led to more black homicide deaths. “When you reduce the possibility of a bad guy getting caught, getting convicted and getting incarcerated, guess what? Crime goes up,” he said recently at a campaign event in Orange County.

Elder also rejects the charge that white civilians are gunning down blacks, as LeBron James maintained in a tweet during the George Floyd riots: “We are literally hunted everyday, every time we step outside the comfort of our homes.” Elder has a different take. If a “young black man is eight times more likely to be killed by another young black man than [by] a young white man,” Elder told the Orange County Republicans, then “systemic racism is not the problem.”

Such statements are anathema to the establishment Left, deeply invested as it is in the idea that blacks have little agency in the face of ubiquitous white racism. Few subjects are more taboo in elite discourse than the elevated rate of crime among blacks, as it suggests cultural pathologies that — at the very least — complicate the victim narrative. To the Left, black crime is little more than a racist fiction. Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero claims that the crime statistics Elder has cited “over the decades to support his views and policy proposals are misleading, if not outright false, casting Black people as unusually crime-prone.” Black people are not “more inclined toward violent crimes,” nor do blacks “disproportionately victimize whites,” Guerrero wrote, citing Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan and other criminal experts. (Fagan was the plaintiff’s expert in a trilogy of lawsuits against the New York Police Department in the 2010s.) Fellow Times columnist Erika Smith sneered that Elder “keeps trotting out statistics that purport to show that Black people are particularly prone to murdering one another.”

Unfortunately for Elder’s critics, the statistics showing vastly disproportionate rates of black crime and victimization come from some of the Left’s favorite sources. CDC data show that in 2015, for example, the homicide victimization rate for blacks aged 10–34 (37.5 per 100,000) was 13 times the rate for whites (2.9 per 100,000). That disparity is undoubtedly much greater now, given the record-breaking increase in homicides since the George Floyd riots — an increase disproportionately affecting blacks.

Those black victims of homicide are not being killed by cops or whites. They are being killed by other blacks. In Los Angeles, blacks this year have committed 46 percent of homicides whose offender is known, even though they are just 9 percent of the Los Angeles population. Whites make up 28 percent of the Los Angeles population but have committed 4 percent of homicides, mostly involving domestic violence. These data, reported by the Los Angeles Times, mean that a black Angeleno is 35 times more likely to commit a homicide than a white Angeleno. Homicide data are the gold standard for crime statistics. Alas for Jeffrey Fagan and the Los Angeles Times‘s other experts, the statistical conclusion that blacks are “more inclined toward violent crimes” is indisputable.

August 31, 2021

The Line‘s She-lection Bullshit Bulletin No. 2

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

Yes, it’s time to publish some of the silliest political bullshit our “leaders” and their parties are slinging around in the federal “she-lection”:

Let’s start with an interesting one.

We’d recommend watching the whole clip (and we’d also note that there’s a second video clip further down in the thread; technical limitations broke one long clip into two shorter ones). But there’s two piles of dung here, and it’s worth breaking them out separately.

The first is, of course, the patented non-answer to a direct question. Glen McGregor asked Trudeau about our people in Afghanistan who were in that very moment in immediate danger. Trudeau talked about something nice he did in 2015. We understand that this is a campaign, but imagine you or someone you love is stuck Afghanistan in now, and the leader of the country is asked about you/them, and that’s the answer? Really?

The second pile of scat is more nuanced. Check out the part of the clip starting at 1:25. Trudeau says that O’Toole and the Conservatives are “promising to end the very program that brought in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, the very program we’re using to bring in tens of thousands of Afghans fleeing to [safety] in Canada. That doesn’t make sense.”

Well, we mean … it doesn’t make sense because it’s not true.

The Tories are proposing changes to how Canada accepts refugees. Specifically, they want to shift to more heavily rely on privately sponsored refugees, citing research that shows these refugees more easily and more quickly settle into Canada. There would be both government-sponsored and private-sponsored refugees under what the CPC is calling a “joint model” model. This is broken out in the CPC’s campaign platform on page 129.

This seems … pretty reasonable? The Tories are not only promising to maintain current funding levels and numbers of accepted refugees, they just want to structure it differently. Not even very differently, at that: of the 62,000 Syrian refugees that Canada has resettled since Trudeau came to office, half were privately sponsored. The CPC platform also very specifically notes that this wouldn’t apply in “cases of emergency”, which the fall of Afghanistan clearly is. You can criticize that as policy, or even doubt they’ll follow through. Just saying they’ll cancel the program, though, is nonsense.

Of course, Trudeau isn’t the only bullshitter on the campaign trail, so RTWT for the rest of the antics that The Line felt were bullshitty enough to register this week.

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