Quotulatiousness

September 16, 2019

Election 2019 – “Going negative this early strongly suggests that the Lib’s internal polling is suggesting a fair bit of weakness”

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

Jay Currie’s take on the first week of the Canadian federal election campaign:

Dock Currie (not related) apparently posted something to the internet several years ago which was offensive. So he felt he had to resign as an NDP candidate. [Anyone who sees Dock on Twitter has to wonder if he has ever posted something which is not offensive, but there is is.] Several conservatives have, at various times been in the same crowd of several hundred or thousand people as Canada’s answer to Tokyo Rose, Faith Goldy. The shock, the horror.

I realize that a race between Trudeau, Scheer, Singh and May is not very inspiring. (It would have been so much more interesting had the Conservatives actually run a conservative like Max Bernier rather than whatever the hell Scheer is, but them’s the breaks.) But piling on to candidates for ancient statements or mau-mauing them for distant association with a cartoon fascist simply sets the bar even lower.

Having accomplished nothing of substance in their years in government – they even screwed up the pot file which took real ingenuity – the Libs are reduced to going negative from the outset. Their war room knows that Canadians are unimpressed with “climate change needs higher taxes” as a campaign theme. They also know that Trudeau’s legal and ethics problems offset what charisma he has as a campaigner.

So now it is time for “Project Fear”. Scheer = Harper = Trump. Scheer is going to take away abortion rights, Scheer is not an ally of the gay community because he does not jet all over the country to march in pride parades. The Conservatives hate immigrants, and so on.

Going negative this early strongly suggests that the Lib’s internal polling is suggesting a fair bit of weakness. Conventionally, a party will save the negative stuff for the last couple of weeks of the campaign when it is the most damaging and the hardest to refute. I suspect the Libs have realized that with their own leader either under RCMP investigation or credibly accused of impeding that investigation, they need to distract and terrify the under 30’s, newer immigrants and the ladies if they are going to win.

September 15, 2019

Why the national polls are, at best, only a rough guide to voters’ intentions

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

Canadian elections have their own quirks — historical, geographical, linguistic — that cannot be accurately captured in national opinion polls:

Conservative support is heavily concentrated in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Tens of thousands of its votes are therefore likely to be wasted racking up massive majorities in a relatively small number of seats.

The Liberal vote, by contrast, is more efficiently distributed, notably in Quebec, with its tight three- and four-way races, where a winning candidate might slip through with 30 per cent of the vote or less. So even though the Liberals are projected to win fewer votes than the Conservatives, they are also projected to win a solid plurality of the seats — perhaps even a majority.

Then again, the polls are misleading in another way. A poll can project, with some uncertainty, the level of support for the various parties among the voting-age population. It is a more difficult matter to predict what proportion of each party’s supporters will actually turn out to vote. The Liberals benefited in 2015 from a surge in turnout, especially among younger voters, on the strength of Justin Trudeau’s sunny idealism. No such enthusiasm, or idealism, is detectable this time around.

It all makes for a close, unpredictable race. The Liberal challenge is the usual one: to round up the vote on the left without giving too much ground on the centre, appealing to those tempted to vote NDP or Green not to split the progressive vote lest the Tories get in.

The Conservatives, for their part, will also be fighting a two-front war, with the emergence of the People’s Party to their right imposing some constraint on their ability to reach across the centre. To date the PPC has not posed much of a threat — its support has stalled at around 3.0 per cent — but it is not impossible that it could break out of that range now that voters are paying more attention.

Of course, Maxime Bernier being actively excluded from the debates, and the pollsters often not including a choice for the PPC will also limit the PPC’s visibility to ordinary Canadian voters. Oddly, this may benefit the Milk Dud and his “Conservatives”, as the media tries to ignore Bernier’s party but gives disproportional coverage to the Green and NDP campaigns, which potentially weakens support for Trudeau and the Liberals.

Update, 16 September: I guess the media finally noticed that excluding Maxime Bernier from the debates was a sub-optimal idea for their preferred winner (Justin Dressup).

September 13, 2019

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh gets his tax plans vetted by the Parliamentary Budget Office

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

A recent innovation for political campaigns is that they can ask the Parliamentary Budget Office to provide an estimate for the impact of any taxation proposals, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was the first out of the gate to have his “super-wealth tax” evaluated. The PBO estimates that the levy would net out some $6 billion in the first full year of implementation. Sounds like a lot of money! Colby Cosh explains why it’s not quite what it might seem:

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

Alas, the bean-counters always swoop in to spoil things. Singh’s wealth-tax scheme is instructive not only because he availed himself of PBO costing, but because it usefully reveals the limits of what the PBO or any other economic modeller can do. Look, in other words, at the fine print.

The PBO’s job was to estimate what you can extract from “an annual net wealth tax on Canadian resident economic families equal to one per cent of net wealth above $20 million.” In the PBO model this is a simple multiplication, but the roughly $6 billion take is arrived at only by reducing the revenue by 35 per cent to correct for “behavioural response” — that is, lawful (and unlawful) tricks employed to avoid the new tax by the rich targets. The net revenue is what’s left after you deduct another two per cent to cover administrative costs.

And, as the PBO immediately insists, “the estimate has high uncertainty” on both counts. This means they’re educated guesses. Jennifer Robson, a social policy prof at Carleton University’s Arthur Kroeger College, pointed out on Twitter that right now we don’t tax economic families per se and we don’t report assets and debts routinely to Revenue Canada. Ideas for pure wealth taxation (which is rare in practice) are predicated on the creation of, essentially, a new tax system — one which would have to detect and perpetually update how much, for example, the furniture in your house costs. The 35 per cent loss from behavioural response is at the high end of historic estimates from real-world examples. Even within our current tax system, Robson observes, we only get two extra dollars for every one we spend on expanding collections and compliance against the existing tax base.

As a practical matter, a wealth tax would mostly be, or would act most efficiently as, a tax on bank balances and investment accounts. Of course, there is always real estate. The super-rich seem to have a lot of that, and it is relatively easy to tax, and the resentment of Torontonians and Vancouverites who don’t own some is, for better or worse, a major reason the NDP is trying to weaponize envy.

But this reminds us that property taxes and taxes on property transfers perform a similar function, although they are not used primarily for income redistribution as such here — and in Canada ours are relatively high. The OECD does a little league table of tax structures, and compared with other industrialized countries Canada’s take from property taxes is about double the average. In a 36-country list we are near the bottom (33rd) in our dependence on taxing goods and services, and about average (12th) in dependence on corporate taxation, but fifth highest in dependence on personal taxation — and third in dependence on property taxes.

September 8, 2019

Cynicism is the correct way to view the two largest federal parties in Canada

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

Andrew Coyne on the contrast between the Liberal Party, led by Prime Minister Dressup, and the Conservative* Party, “led” by the empty suit I like to call “The Milk Dud”:

As we await the start of the election campaign that began several months ago, some cynics would have you believe the whole thing is little more than a hollow ritual, an empty contest in mass manipulation between rival gangs of careerists and power-seekers who, for all their partisan breast-beating, do not differ in any meaningful way.

Don’t be fooled. Seldom have the choices between so stark, or the stakes so high.

The two main parties, after all, could not be more different. The one, it is well known, is little more than a personality cult centred on the leader, while the other is a personality cult, minus the personality. The first is notably bereft of any governing philosophy or principles but will say and do whatever it takes to win, while the second will say and do whatever it takes to lose.

Of course, both parties have from time to time had their share of scandals, a Wright-Duffy here, an SNC-Lavalin there, but with a critical difference. For whereas the Liberals abuse power because they can — because being so often in government and so accustomed to its pleasures, no one expects them to do any differently — the Conservatives do so because they must: because being so rarely in government, they are at every disadvantage, between an uncooperative bureaucracy and a hostile media, and need recourse to every expedient just to even the scales. Or because the Liberals did it first. Or just because.

* Note that no actual conservatives are members of this party, the name is just a convenient label, not an accurate descriptor.

September 7, 2019

QotD: The affections of the voters

Filed under: Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop-bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.

Orson Scott Card, quoted at Samizdata. (Reposted from the old blog, 2004-08-31).

September 5, 2019

Phony Trudeaumania has bitten the dust

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

Nico Johnson discusses the dangers of family dynasties in democratic countries:

When future political historians look back at the 21st century, Justin Trudeau’s election as a Liberal leader may be regarded as a bland footnote. Despite all the hope Trudeau brought Canadians in his once seemingly eternal, post-election honeymoon, his leadership inevitably toppled into a swamp of sticky scandals and hurried apologies.

Justin Trudeau may still be re-elected. However, the Conservatives can rest easy in the knowledge that Trudeaumania, at least for this current Trudeau, is well and truly dead.

What is noteworthy, however, is the atmosphere of surprise and confusion that has clouded commentators’ judgements surrounding the downfall of Trudeau. In the corridors of Ottawa’s broadcasters, it may have appeared absurd that natural political decline should apply to their darling Prime Minister; the leader of the “woke world.”

Trudeau’s appearance of invincibility, which still makes these commentators swoon (note the SNC-Lavalin coverage) was first created in those blue-skied months following his leadership election in 2013.

Perhaps Justin, with his charisma and handsomeness, seemed like a breath of fresh air to Canadian progressives. Gone were those days of Ignatieff, the drooling philosopher, who rather spectacularly (considering his semi-illiterate predecessor) lost 43 seats forcing the Liberals into third-party status.

With Trudeau’s leadership, the Liberal party would have a candidate who seemed so perfect for Canadian political life that even a eugenicist would struggle to replicate it. With his status as an Anglophone-Quebecois, which managed to pacify the sensibilities of English Canada, whilst having his Quebecois heritage to maintain seat-rich Quebec—Trudeau must have seemed like a divine gift.

Yet even in those early days, Trudeau lacked noticeably in the fundamental requirements that statesmanship should necessitate. He had no political experience after being almost casually elected to the House of Commons. Nor did he possess any working experience, and had been entirely unknown to the Canadian public until the eulogy at his father’s funeral. To put it quite simply, Justin Trudeau would have never become Prime Minister of Canada if his father, Pierre, had not been one too.

August 28, 2019

The political football of “mass” immigration in the Canadian federal election campaign

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

Recently a registered third-party (under Canadian election rules) paid to have billboards put up in major cities that appeared to be from Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada:

A billboard in Toronto, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province – https://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-berniers-legitimate-position-on-immigration-taken-down-by-spineless-billboard-company/wcm/ecab071c-b57d-4d93-b78c-274de524434c

Colby Cosh discusses the issues raised:

I offer sarcastic congratulations to everyone who gave Maxime Bernier the stupid controversy he wanted over the “Say NO to mass immigration” billboard, bearing his image, that briefly appeared in a few Canadian cities and was taken down in a hurry Monday morning. The billboards were purchased from Pattison Outdoor Advertising by a third-party supporter of Bernier’s People’s Party. The company’s initial response to the resulting outcry was to observe that the message of the billboard complied with advertising standards; it did not contain any hateful, disparaging, or discriminatory language.

“We take a neutral position on ads that comply with the ASC (Advertising Standards Canada) Code as we believe Canadians do not want us to be the judge or arbiter of what the public can or cannot see,” was Pattison’s original statement in the face of controversy. (Most everybody, including the company, seems to have missed the point that election advertising is explicitly “excluded from the application” of the Code on the grounds that political expression deserves the highest degree of deference; the Code does say, for what it’s worth, that “Canadians are entitled to expect” that such advertising respects the underlying principles.)

[…]

The question I have for objectors and denouncers of the billboard is how they think it could have been rewritten, expressing the same underlying idea, so as to be acceptable. If the unpleasant-sounding word “mass” were replaced with “large-scale,” would there have been less of a ruction? Maybe any objection to prospective levels of immigration to Canada is to be regarded as inherently racist and hateful, even when no racist or hateful language is used.

If that is the case, it is perfectly predictable that the People’s Party will exploit this and cry “mob censorship,” and public polls on immigration suggest they will have some success, in case recent history everywhere didn’t offer enough of a hint. Moreover, we are left with an awkward question how any limit upon or criteria for immigration, any government immigration policy per se, can be justified at all. What, indeed, can be the objection to “mass immigration”? Who will have the courage to put up a “Say YES to mass immigration” billboard?

August 23, 2019

Reasons to expect an even weirder (and scarier) US election in 2020 than in 2016

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

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains why the First World War was inevitable (because of the fecklessness of all the world leaders at the time) and then points out that the same sort of inevitability seems to be playing out in the run-up to the 2020 US elections:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

In short, World War 1 was a massive, indescribably bloody dick-measuring contest between a few inbred yokels. To anyone who has met the Sons of Privilege,* or who is passingly familiar with the Peter Principle, this comes as no surprise. Hell, Lenin saw it, and a guy with his egg head further up his own ass you’ll never find.** All you have to do is look at the people, not the paper.

That’s where the modern political landscape gets so terrifying. Looking at the paper from the establishment Democrats’ point of view, their course of action seems obvious. And credit where it’s due, even Slow Joe Biden and Fauxcahontas are smart enough (or, more likely, have hired people who are smart enough) to see the obvious once it gets rubbed in their faces a few dozen times — Slow Joe is playing the above-it-all unifier, while Dances with Socialism has gone on a Hillary-esque “listening tour” for The Media’s benefit. Should they choose, The Media can now memory hole all the “fake Indian” stuff, and yell “racist!” at anyone who tries to dredge it back up …

… but I don’t think they’ll choose to. The human factor always wins, and the humans (using the term in its strictest biological sense) in The Media are fed up close to bursting. The mask is completely off “The Squad,” and The Media couldn’t be happier. I’m sure that, in their heart of hearts, Nancy Pelosi et al don’t have a problem with BDS, or the Green New Deal, or any of the rest of it. But flying to Israel on the taxpayer’s dime to support Palestinian terrorism just doesn’t play in Peoria, and the Establishment Dems know it. The Media, however, do not — just look at the coverage.

I’m also quite confident that Nancy et al are even, in their heart of hearts, ok with “Antifa” shooting at cops and firebombing ICE offices. Nancy, after all, came up in the heyday of Jim Jones’s San Francisco, so she’s no stranger to political violence. But The Media absolutely cream themselves over “revolutionaries.” They’ve kept this stuff under wraps so far — Nancy et al have convinced them it’ll hurt Donald Trump more than it will hurt them if they keep it bottled up — but every single person in The Media had xhzhyr first wet dream about Che Guevara. I doubt they can keep it in their pants too much longer, especially if — as seems all but certain — “Antifa” commits some gaudy, gross atrocity in the 2020 campaign season.

Nor can we discount the human factor regarding Normals. Every day brings a new insult — Twitter colluding with China to suppress democratic protests in Hong Kong while all-but-openly banning anyone to the right of Mao; gender-and-race-swapping comic book characters; anything and everything to throw sand in Normals’ faces. If Trump’s victory in 2016 was The Great Fuck You, I can’t even imagine what it’ll look like in 2020, after four more years of this stuff ramped up way past 11.

It’s not looking good, but since the idiots in charge have never even thought about looking up from the paper, the whole thing is going to catch them completely unprepared. Forget “that’s how you got Trump;” this is how you get the Somme.

* they’re like the Sons of Anarchy, but effete and usually gay.
** though he basically just stole the idea from Hobson, who, though a goofy love-the-worlder, was actually a pretty smart guy.

August 12, 2019

Australia’s government broadband fiasco might be a useful lesson for Senator Warren

Filed under: Australia, Business, Economics, Government, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the race for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, Senator Elizabeth Warren recently proposed a government-provided broadband rollout across the United States to compete with or supplant the existing private ISPs. Arthur Chrenkoff suggests that looking at Australia’s experience with a very similar plan might encourage her to abandon her proposal after a brief airing on the campaign trail:

Senator Elizabeth Warren speaking at the Iowa Democrats Hall of Fame Celebration in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on 9 June, 2019.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.

Maybe Senator Warren should have a pow-wow first with IT experts from Australia, who could enlighten her about our country’s 12-years-and-counting saga of the National Broadband Network, a Labor government initiative that the -then leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, described as “a white elephant on a massive scale” but later adopted and continued while in government.

It started in 2007 as a policy for a government-rolled out broadband network, in most areas duplicating internet services already provided by private sector providers (mainly through the existing copper wire telephony network), which would be available as an option to all Australian households. In most cases it would be achieved through wired technology (fibre to the premises, later downgraded to a cheaper fibre to the node) with a satellite connection available to the most remote areas where cabling was impractical.

I remember thinking then that the project was an absurd waste of taxpayers’ money for a service of the type that telecommunication companies would be able and willing to provide in any case. At most, there was an argument that the government could step in and provide the infrastructure in some country areas where there was no commercial case for the private providers to proceed. Call me a clairvoyant but it was pretty clear to me that “broadband for all” would take a lot longer to roll out that planned, would cost significantly more than initially budgeted, and would very likely be technologically obsolete by the time it was finished.

August 5, 2019

More on the still-damaged diplomatic relationship between India and Canada

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

Ted Campbell quotes from a recent article in the Hindustan Times about the not-yet-healed damage in the diplomatic world between Justin Trudeau’s government and the Indian government of Narendra Modi:

Justin Trudeau and family during India visit
Image via NDTV, originally tweeted by @vijayrupanibjp

In the influential Hindustan Times, Toronto based journalist Anirudh Bhattacharya writes … “in an astonishing attack that will not help heal fraught ties between India and Canada, the former top advisor to the North American nation’s Prime Minister has accused the Indian Government of sabotaging Justin Trudeau’s visit to India in February 2018 to favour his political opponents [and] This scathing statement is in the forthcoming book, Trudeau: The Education of a Prime Minister, written by senior Canadian journalist John Ivison. The author [Ivison] confirmed to the Hindustan Times that Butts’ comment came during an interview.” The article adds that “Indian diplomats didn’t comment on the matter because it is so politically charged and the Canadian Government has yet to respond to questions from HT on its stand on the incendiary remark from Butts.”

So, while some pundits forecast that the return of Gerald Butts would reignite the whole SNC-Lavalin/Jane Philpott and Jody Wilson-Raybould scandal, it appears that the damage will be deeper and we will get a chance to revisit the disaster that Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland visited upon Canadian foreign policy in 2018. India is a rising great power; it helps to contain China in new “Western Approaches:” the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. India is a growing trading power; it is a HUGE potential market for Canadian goods and services. India is one of the top three providers of new Canadians ~ and that’s where our problems with India originated. Someone in the Trudeau PMO thought (since thinking was the problem that probably lets Justin Trudeau off the hook) that it would be a good idea for Prime Minister Trudeau to attend a Khalsa Day parade in Toronto back in April 2017. I explained, back at the time of the India trip fiasco, why that was a mistake and how Jason Kenney had already set the example of doing it right. Now Khalsa Day, also known as Vaisakhi, is an important festival for Sikhs, it marks their New Year. But the festivities, especially in Toronto where 300,000 Sikhs live, are, sometimes, taken over or interrupted by Sikh separatists who advocate violent revolution in India. Jason Kenney saw that in 2012 and he stormed off a stage and berated his hosts, in public for trying to use him to undermine Canadian foreign policy, which valued, as it should, good relations with India. But, in 2017 all the Trudeau PMO (headed by Gerald Butts and Katie Telford) could see were all those Sikh voters. Neither the PMO team nor new Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland was able to prevent Trudeau from being used as a photo-op prop by avowed Sikh separatists … there is no indication that anyone tried although, even though, given the bureaucracy’s corporate memory of events in 2012, I would be amazed in alarms were not sounded.

August 3, 2019

The unexpected rise of Tulsi Gabbard in the Democratic race

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

Brendan O’Neill says that Tulsi Gabbard is the Democratic candidate who is worth supporting:

Tulsi Gabbard speaks at the “People’s Rally” in Washington DC on 17 November, 2016.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.

The liberal establishment is so scared of Tulsi Gabbard that they’ve convinced themselves she’s an unwitting stooge of Russia, being pushed by Putin’s evil online robots to destroy America from within.

Yes, in the febrile, conspiracist, Russian-bot-obsessed brains of the increasingly unhinged liberal elite, Ms Gabbard, the Democratic congresswoman for Hawaii and easily the most impressive 2020 presidential candidate, is the fave of those dastardly bots whose ultimate aim is to screw over the USA. Following this week’s Democratic candidates’ debate in Detroit, in which Gabbard made mincemeat of the California Democrat Kamala Harris on the issue of judicial authoritarianism, an actual New York Times writer said: “Beware the Russian bots and their promotion of Tulsi Gabbard and sowing racial discord, especially around Kamala Harris.”

This idea that Gabbard – the most principled critic of military interventionism to have emerged in the US mainstream in decades – is in the ascendant because Russian bots and other evil online forces are doing her bidding is becoming widespread among centrists. Newsweek columnist Seth Abramson says “there’s a concerted far-right effort (possibly involving foreign actors) to bolster Tulsi Gabbard”. He based this nuts claim on the fact that, during the Detroit debate, Ms Gabbard was the most-searched name online in every state in the US. Erm, isn’t it possible that viewers who weren’t entirely sure who Ms Gabbard is, but who were impressed by her articulate takedown of Harris and other candidates, took to the web to find out more? Surely that’s a more rational explanation than the idea that a Russian troll army and loads of fascists are on the web promoting Gabbard as chief wrecker of the United States.

It’s ceaseless. “Russia’s propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard”, declares NBC News. What all this nonsense reveals is that Russophobic conspiracy theories play a really important role for dazed Hillary-era centrists. They are now the main means through which these people try to make sense of a political world that no longer conforms to their tastes or their ideology. So just as they used the Russian-bots rubbish to explain why Trump beat Hillary, now they use it to explain why a candidate who, horror of horrors, is opposed to US military intervention overseas is proving popular with viewers and voters. Given that Gabbard’s worldview runs so counter to theirs – on war, on free speech, even on identity politics – the only way they can explain her presence in politics is as a result of foreign, fascistic meddling. That tells us far more about their own political arrogance than it does about Gabbard’s Russian fanbase.

In a sense, they’re right to be scared of Gabbard. She feels like a genuinely fresh force in Democratic politics. A former soldier who served in Iraq, and now the Democratic member of the House of Representatives for the 2nd congressional district of Hawaii, she represents a challenge both to the old militaristic US establishment and to the newer, more woke wing of the establishment.

We finally get an explanation for Justin Trudeau’s diplomatically catastrophic India tour

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

A few days ago, I noted on social media:

This is exactly the sort of suave, diplomatic polish that will smooth over all the damage in the Canada-India relationship. This is a quote from PM Trudeau’s right-hand man in John Ivison’s new book:

“We walked into a buzzsaw — (Narendra) Modi and his government were out to screw us and were throwing tacks under our tires to help Canadian conservatives, who did a good job of embarrassing us,”

http://thepostmillennial.com/out-to-screw-us-butts-blames-indian-pm-for-trudeaus-disastrous-trip/ #JustinTrudeau #India #fiasco #books #GeraldButts #NarendraModi #diplomacy

I figured this had to be some kind of new variant of the old “modifed limited hangout“, but it’s so potentially damaging to an already badly frayed relationship that there had to be more to it … possibly a lot more to it. No rational senior official would say something like that unless there was a much worse revelation that it was intended to camouflage. But whatever it was would have to be “recall the High Commissioner” bad to justify that kind of self-inflicted diplomatic wound.

Justin Trudeau and family during India visit
Image via NDTV, originally tweeted by @vijayrupanibjp

Brian Lilley is similarly puzzled, but he has a simpler explanation: it’s that familiar combination of the Trudeau unwillingness to take responsibility, an over-developed blame-casting habit, and Trudeau’s own frequently demonstrated love of wearing costumes:

It’s one thing for Butts to think those things, another to voice them in a way that he knows will be made public. It’s also the most tone-deaf assessment of the trip I’ve seen since Sophie Trudeau went on TV and blamed the staff for those outfits.

I mean think about that trip, the two things that got Trudeau in trouble were the invite of the terrorist to dinner and the outrageous outfits. Both of those amount to self-inflicted wounds.

At least Butts admits the photos of Trudeau and his family were a problem.

“Nobody would remember any of that had it not been for the photographs. We should have known this better than anybody — in many ways we’d used this to get elected. The picture will overwhelm words. We did the count — we did forty-eight meetings and he was dressed in a suit for forty-five of them. But give people that picture and it’s the only one they’ll remember,” Butts told Ivison.

[…]

The simple fact of the matter is that the trip to India was a disaster, the kind Trudeau and his team weren’t used to dealing with. So now a year and half later they are still looking to lay the blame anywhere but where it belongs.

With themselves.

July 31, 2019

Federal NDP and Greens duel on climate platforms

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

Colby Cosh looks at the two most environmentally conscious federal parties’ climate change stances as we head into the next general election:

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

So why are our most radical, eco-aware parties so easily distracted on this front? Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats talk tough on climate change in their “Power to Change” plan. It is maximum urgency right out of the gate in the preamble. “People across Canada are worried about the future.” True enough! They usually are! “Flooding and forest fires are threatening our homes.” Well, speak for yourself, but OK. “Polluted air and water are hitting communities hard.” Wait, polluted water…? Wasn’t this supposed to be a climate change thing? “And rising temperatures are threatening our farming and forestry industries.” Oh, good, back on track! “It’s clear there’s no time to waste.”

There is a whole load of radical measures in the NDP program, but they cannot resist this tendency to drag in grace notes of economic nationalism and other subjects at best vaguely related. They promise to “make it easier to own a zero-emission vehicle” in Canada, which might help with the Big Problem, but in mid-sentence they remember that they’re in hock to organized labour and add “and make sure those cars are made in Canada.” This means that if the price of a Tesla comes down to $500 tomorrow, you’ll still have to buy the carbon-neutral modern equivalent of a Bricklin, assuming someone can be found to try building one. Shouldn’t we be willing to buy zero-emission vehicles from Zanzibar or Antarctica if that’s the most efficient way, or the only way, to upgrade the fleet?

The document also smuggles in a promise to eliminate single-use plastic products, which take carbon from the bowels of Mother Earth and… restore it thither in landfills, with the evil molecules usefully imprisoned in polymer chains. We’ll be replacing all that plastic, presumably, with metal cutlery (from mines) and cloth bags (from forests) that have to be washed in hot water if you happen to be particular. There is no hint that this is an incongruous or irrelevant part of a climate-change plan.

So, perhaps a bit of mixed messaging there, as the NDP have to trim their sails in odd ways to keep some of their constituencies in line. How about the Green Party then?

Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May with Green candidate Christ Tindal in 2008.
Photo by Shaun Merritt via Wikimedia Commons.

The Green list of climate-change policies is much more radical and earnest in appearance; Elizabeth May’s political liquidators intend to abolish internal-combustion vehicles by 2040 (such dates are no longer sci-fi, oldies) and retrofit every single building in the country for carbon neutrality by 2030.

But what, as the University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach asked in a CBC editorial on Monday, is this about “ending all imports of foreign oil”? This autarkic flake out flies in the face of the Greens’ entire approach; some of the oil we produce here is (please imagine me whispering this part) somewhat carbon-intensive relative to the stuff Eastern Canada takes from elsewhere in the world. Moreover, increasing use of domestic oil even in the short term implies a pretty major program of, uh, pipeline-building.

Not to mention the new refineries. The Green Climate Change War Cabinet (a real thing they want) would permit “investment in upgraders to turn Canadian solid bitumen into gas, diesel, propane and other products for the Canadian market, providing jobs in Alberta.” By 2050, they envision shifting “all Canadian bitumen from fuel to feedstock for the petrochemical industry.” This adds up to an awful lot of subsidized high-tech construction — executed at the same time as a total retrofit of the national housing stock! — that has nothing much to do with reducing emissions per se. Although it sounds as though the Greens are, if nothing else, definitely much bigger fans of plastic than the New Democrats.

July 28, 2019

With the SNC-Lavalin affair fading from memory, Justin Trudeau looks set for the fall election

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

They say that memories are short in politics, but this short? Thanks largely to the dog days of summer and a complicit media desperate for more government subsidies, Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are being allowed to shed the scandal-tainted skin of four whole months ago to emerge glistening and new with election promises galore. Democracy dies in government subsidies, apparently.

On the other hand, perhaps Canadian voters’ memories will last long enough to get past the casting of ballots in October:

Supposedly, the Liberals have put the SNC-Lavalin scandal behind them: the polls have rebounded, the media have moved on, while the company has worse problems to deal with than a mere hair-raising multi-million-dollar corruption charge.

Even the return of Gerry Butts, the prime minister’s former principal secretary, albeit in a part-time, temporary, what-are-friends-for capacity as adviser to the party’s election campaign, seems to have caused little stir, although he was one of two senior government officials to resign over their part in the affair.

Perhaps the Liberals have concluded the passage of time is enough to earn them a pass from the public. I mean this all took place, what, four months ago? Who even remembers that far back?

But as recent events have shown, the same ingredients that combined to produce the SNC-Lavalin scandal — hubris, a maniacal desire to run everything from the centre, and an unwillingness, in all this overweeningness and control-freakery, to be bound by basic legal and procedural norms — remain very much in place in the prime minister’s office.

For starters, there is the affair of the two ex-ambassadors. First, David Mulroney, Canada’s ambassador to China from 2009 to 2012, then his successor, Guy Saint-Jacques, reported a senior official in the Global Affairs department had called them to demand they clear any public comments on the government’s policy towards China with the government.

Both men are now private citizens. Both have been critical of the government’s handling of the China file. Unlike the most recent former ambassador, former Liberal cabinet minister John McCallum, neither has framed his comments on Sino-Canadian relations in terms of what would assist in the re-election of the Liberals. Apparently, that was the problem.

The official, assistant deputy minister Paul Thoppil, claimed to be speaking on behalf of the PMO and explicitly cited “the election environment” as a reason to shut up. Oh, also the current state of “high tension” between the two countries, presumably over China’s seizure of two Canadians as hostages, which supposedly made it essential for everyone in Canada, whether in the government’s employ or not, to “speak with one voice,” i.e., refrain from criticizing the government.

As a China policy, this has the advantage of closely resembling the Chinese way of doing things. It’s hard to say which is the more extraordinary: the notion that private citizens should be compelled to clear their criticisms of the government with the government, or the notion that they could be.

July 10, 2019

Liberals: “vote for us, you ignorant, uneducated conservative plebians!”

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

Andrew Coyne sneaks in a literary quote from Chesterton on the eternal snobbery of the not-so-hidden class war in Canadian politics:

Democracy, in G. K. Chesterton’s careful definition, means government by the uneducated, “while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”

The enduring value of this distinction was suggested by the ruckus stirred up over the weekend by Amir Attaran, professor of law at University of Ottawa. Responding to a recent Abacus Data poll finding the Tories leading the Liberals by a wide margin among Canadians with a high school diploma or less, with the Liberals ahead among those with bachelor degrees or higher, the professor tweeted: “The party of the uneducated. Every poll says this.”

In the ensuing furor, Attaran tried to protest that he was just stating a fact, but the disdain in the tweet was clear enough to most. For their part, while some Tories quibbled with the data (just one poll, within the margin of error, misplaced correlation etc), most seemed less offended by the sentiment — every poll does show the less formal education a voter has, the more likely they are to support the Conservatives — than by the suggestion there was something shameful about it.

It was, in short, another skirmish in the continuing class war: class, now defined not by occupation or birth, as in Chesterton’s time, but by education. Conservatives, true to form, professed outrage at this arrogant display of Liberal elitism, while Liberal partisans protested that they were not snobs, it’s just that Conservatives are such ignorant boobs (I paraphrase).

The professor compounded matters by objecting, not only that he is not a Liberal, but that he is not an elite, since his parents were immigrants. And everyone did their best to be as exquisitely sensitive (“let us respect the inherent dignity of labour”) as they could while still being viciously hurtful (“not uneducated, just unintelligent”).

At the Post Millennial, Joshua Lieblein describes his initial reaction followed by sober second thoughts:

When I read the following condescending tweets from University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, my first thought was, “Well, somehow he wasn’t educated enough to predict this reaction. What did he expect?”

[…]

And then I realized that I wasn’t giving him enough credit. Professor Attaran knew exactly what to expect.

Professor Attaran wants you to read his unsolicited and deliberately insulting tweets. He wants you to talk about the tight links between the polling firm that provided him with his QUOTATION and the Liberal Party of Canada. He wants you to hurl all kinds of abuse at him.

Then, he and others will go through the pile of invective generated by this Sunday evening musing, pick out the most racist and inflammatory takes, and use them to justify the idea that facts are under assault, that minorities cannot speak out on issues of the day in Canada, that Conservatives don’t believe in freedom of speech, and that “right-wing mobs” exist and are being directed by CPC thought leaders.

It’s not like this is a new phenomenon, or something that’s new to Canada. Did you think all of Trudeau’s ridiculous behaviour was spontaneous? Sure, some of it is. The man is a certifiable moron. But we really should have guessed that we were being played for fools by the time he was doing shirtless photobombs of weddings.

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