Quotulatiousness

March 21, 2019

“It’s back to normal, basically. The emperor is naked. Votes are for sale. Caveat emptor“

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

Chris Selley somehow seems, I dunno, a bit … cynical about Prime Minister Trudeau and Finance Minister Morneau’s 2019 federal (election) budget:

Ahoy there, relatively young and middle-class Canadian! Did you vote Liberal in 2015? And are you, shall we say, somewhat less enthused about that prospect four years later, for various reasons we needn’t go into here?

Now, what if Justin Trudeau were to offer you a down payment on a shiny new condominium?

Well, that’s just the kind of guy he is. Starting this year, so long as your household income is below $120,000, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation will pitch in 5 per cent of the price of your first home — 10 per cent if it’s a new home, the construction of which the government hopes to incentivize.

That’s Item One in the 460-page federal budget tabled Tuesday in Ottawa.

On a new $400,000 condo, you could put down your own $20,000; CMHC would chip in another $40,000; and your monthly mortgage payment, on a 25-year term at 3.25 per cent, would drop by a not inconsiderable 12 per cent. You would reimburse CMHC, interest-free, if and when you sell. Cost to the taxpayer: $121 million over six years.

If you’re worried giving home-seekers free money might just push the price of a $400,000 condominium nearer to $440,000, Finance Minister Bill Morneau would first of all like you to stop. (“You’re wrong,” he admonished a reporter who dared suggest it during a press conference in the budget lockup Tuesday.) But if all else fails and you’re forced to rent, the feds also found $10 billion extra over nine years to throw at the Rental Construction Financing Initiative, a CMHC program that offers low-interest loans to qualified builders. The goal is 42,500 new rental units in a decade.

Can’t even think of home ownership until you pay off your student loans? Again, the government is here to help: From now on you’ll pay the Bank of Canada’s prime interest rate, instead of prime plus 2.5 points. And for the first six months after you graduate, you’ll pay nothing. The budget document introduces us to Angela, a recent psychology grad carrying $13,500 in student debt who landed a job at “a medium-sized consumer goods company.” (It doesn’t matter where she works. The writers just wanted to add some colour.) Angela will save something like $2,000 in interest over 10 years.

There’s also the new Canada Training Benefit, which the government intends to help Canadians with “the evolving nature of work.” (Maybe your parents were right, Angela. Maybe that psych degree wasn’t the best idea, Angela.) Starting in 2020, the feds will chip in $250 a year, and you can use the accumulated credit to pay up to half the cost of courses or training. And you can draw on up to four weeks of EI to complete it.

March 5, 2019

It’s almost as if we elected the actor, but really wanted the character he’d played on TV instead

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

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells calls Justin Trudeau an imposter:

… the problem for Trudeau — who came to power promising a new era of transparency — is that this phoniness is a trait he shows all too often.

In 2016, when the Globe and Mail reported that the Prime Minister had attended a Vancouver fundraiser attended by Chinese billionaires — one of whom promptly donated money to the private Montreal foundation named for Trudeau’s father — the Liberal Party of Canada said no government business is discussed at such events. Trudeau later admitted they asked about policy and he talked about jobs.

Legalizing cannabis is one of the signature achievements of this government. But Trudeau has never been able to say he did it so affluent consumers could more readily get high. Instead, he had everyone in his government swear the goal was to drain the black market and keep the stuff out of the hands of teenagers. Neither goal has come anywhere close to being reached. Judged by the standards of a bake-off for the children of privilege, legalization has been a great success. Judged by the standards the Prime Minister claims, it’s a mess. The operating assumption seems to be that we’re simply supposed to read between the lines — that we’ll understand that when Trudeau speaks he is not to be taken seriously.

[…]

I could keep picking examples of Trudeau acting one way and talking another (climate change, Indigenous reconciliation) until the cows come home. But at some point you’d say, with reason, that this is not exactly innovative behaviour for an elected politician. But what’s so damaging about the SNC-Lavalin affair is that, in private, there’s no evidence Trudeau governs as the future-looking sophisticate he plays on TV.

[…]

There’s a stack of assumptions behind that strategy as long as your arm: that SNC does work so good it could never be replaced, that a trial would wreck it, that a mere judge couldn’t possibly weigh the company’s social contribution in determining its legal liability. And the biggest assumption of them all is that all of this is so obvious, none of it needed explaining in two years of feverish PMO activity. Not to the attorney general — she got earfuls of explanation, delivered in shifts working overtime, for months after she made what Trudeau felt was the wrong decision. And not to you and me. Trudeau never thought you and I deserved to know why he was trying to keep SNC out of a trial court. This makes a mockery of a simple idea: the consent of the governed.

It turns out that behind the curtain, the wizard from the woke future of politics was indulging the oldest of old-fashioned industrial policy. Navdeep Bains, the so-called innovation minister, might as well legally change his name to C.D. Howe for all the innovation going on here.

As for Wilson-Raybould’s diversity of background and perspective, it turned out to be inconvenient. She didn’t buy into a cozy meeting of minds along the Toronto-to-Montreal corridor. And the meeting of minds was what really mattered. Because it’s 2019.

The day got worse for Trudeau, as another cabinet minister resigned rather than stick around for the deck chairs to start floating away:

February 5, 2019

The looming threat of agents plotting to influence the next federal election

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

Andrew Coyne has the details:

I have an urgent warning for the people of Canada. Even now, certain agents are plotting to influence the result of the next election campaign by means of stealth and deception.

Posing as ordinary Canadians, they plan to use social media to spread falsehoods designed to inflame public opinion, using the latest micro-targeting technologies to tailor their messages to the reader’s particular fears and prejudices.

These agents are better known as the political parties.

One of the problems with the Liberal government’s recently announced plan to “defend Canadian democracy” from foreign interference, notably in the form of “fake news,” is the basic premise: that the principal threat to the integrity of the Canadian electoral process is posed by outsiders, third parties and foreign agents, rather than the participants.

If there is something ominous about the government involving itself, however indirectly, in deciding what is and is not fake news, there is something quite ludicrous about a political party raising the alarm over the spreading of falsehoods during an election campaign. Indeed, a good short definition of an election campaign would be “a sustained, intense, all-party burst of falsehood, slander and misrepresentation.”

There isn’t a lot else. A modern campaign consists mostly in what is gently termed “defining” opposing party leaders, in a way calculated to make them unrecognizable to their own mothers. The rest is devoted to deliberately misrepresenting the other parties’ positions, while making false or exaggerated claims about their own.

There remains a gentlemanly expectation that these falsehoods should not be obviously detectable as such — that is, that the lie should itself be artfully concealed, disguised as an elision, half-truth or what a Liberal MP recently called “rhetorical advantage,” rather than rubbed in the public’s faces in the manner pioneered by Donald Trump.

January 30, 2019

The high cost Canadians pay to support our oligopolies

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

In the National Post, Andrew Coyne compares the Liberal and Conservative parties’ respective claims to lower the cost of living for Canadians, and points out some examples that neither party is willing to address:

For example, there is the notorious system of agricultural quotas known as supply management — a price-fixing ring the government not only approves but organizes and enforces, whose effect is to double or even triple the prices of such basic food items as milk, cheese, eggs and chicken. For all their pretended concern for affordability, all parties and every MP, with the sole exception of Maxime Bernier, are publicly, nay fervently in favour of it.

But while the farm cartel gets a lot of ink, there are plenty of other examples. Canadians pay among the highest wireless telephone fees in the world, for starters — maybe even the highest — as study after study has found. The latest report from Tefficient, a European consultancy, found Canada’s carriers take in more revenue per gigabyte of data than their counterparts anywhere else in the world — 23 times more than in Finland.

Similarly, Canadians pay among the highest air fares in the world. The travel website Kiwi. com recently found flights from Canada on a full-service airline cost roughly five times as much per 100 kilometres as flights from the United States. The situation was a little better for domestic flights, where costs were only twice as high as in the U.S. The makers of Hopper, the travel app, note it is typically cheaper to fly from Vancouver to Hawaii than from Vancouver to Regina, though Regina is 3,000 km closer.

Finally, there are Canadian bank fees, also — you guessed it — among the highest in the world, particularly for mutual funds. What is the common thread among these three industries? All are highly concentrated oligopolies: three big wireless carriers, two big airlines and five big banks dominate their respective markets.

Rather than compete as vigorously as they might for Canadian consumers, these quasi-cartels are permitted, in effect, to harvest them. They do so, again, not only with the tolerance but the active participation of the government. Foreigners are effectively precluded from competing in any of them, whether by foreign-ownership restrictions or outright prohibitions on competition — foreign airlines may not fly from one Canadian city to another, for example.

None of the parties currently boasting of their desire to make life more affordable for Canadians proposes to change a line of this, either. Whatever else may be in (artificially) scarce supply, in Canadian politics there’s never any shortage of rank hypocrisy.

January 20, 2019

Identifying the real victim in the Burnaby South byelection mini-scandal

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

Andrew Coyne suggests that we should sympathize with the true victim:

You have to feel for the Liberal Party of Canada, who are surely the real victims in the Karen Wang affair.

The party had innocently selected the B.C. daycare operator to run in next month’s byelection in Burnaby South based solely on her obvious merits as a failed former candidate for the provincial Liberals in 2017, and without the slightest regard to her Chinese ethnicity, in a riding in which, according to the 2016 census, nearly 40 per cent of residents identify as ethnically Chinese.

Imagine their shock when they discovered that she was engaging in ethnic politics.

In a now-infamous post on WeChat, a Chinese-language social media site, Wang boasted of being “the only Chinese candidate” in the byelection, whereas her main opponent — NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — is “of Indian descent.”

The party was instantly and publicly aghast. Pausing only to dictate an apology to be put out under her name (“I believe in the progress that Justin Trudeau and the Liberal team are making for British Columbians and all Canadians, and I do not wish for any of my comments to be a distraction,” etc etc), party officials issued a statement in which they “accepted her resignation.” Her online comments, the statement noted, “are not aligned with the values of the Liberal Party of Canada.”

Certainly not! How she got the idea that the Liberal Party of Canada was in any way a home for ethnic power-brokers prized for their ability to recruit members and raise funds from certain ethnic groups, or that it would even think of campaigning in ridings with heavy concentrations of voters from a given ethnic group by crude appeals to their ethnic identity — for example by nominating a candidate of the same ethnicity — must remain forever a mystery.

January 17, 2019

Jagmeet Singh and the federal NDP

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

Chris Selley on the political issues afflicting federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh as he tries to win a byelection in British Columbia:

More and more New Democrats seem concerned that Jagmeet Singh mightn’t have been the best choice for leader, let alone deserving of a whopping 54 per cent first ballot victory. His various alleged crimes include rendering himself invisible for months, imposing draconian punishments on popular MPs, and going on TV to suggest we stop importing Saudi oil and get it from other countries instead — at a time when Alberta’s NDP government is fighting both for pipelines and for its continued existence.

[…]

Tom Mulcair was a pro. Dumping him appears to be the dumbest thing the NDP ever did. Still, if Singh wins his seat, there is reason to hope he might grow into the job. To skeptics he evinces a distinctly Trudeauvian brand of superficiality, and a similar gift for quotes that land well but fall to pieces if you actually read them back. That hasn’t hurt Trudeau, though — not much and not yet. Singh, a criminal lawyer, certainly boasts a more impressive resumé outside of politics. And goodness knows there are more than enough avenues for any NDP leader to attack a Liberal government that promised us the moon but left us conspicuously earthbound.

If Singh is an anchor on NDP fortunes, it doesn’t seem to be massively heavy one. Nanos Research has them at 15.4 per cent, as of last week — not good at all, but well within recovery distance of their 19.7 per cent performance in the 2015 election. Pre-campaign polls are generally held to be meaningless. Again assuming Singh wins his seat, he has plenty of time to introduce himself and his vision for the NDP.

It’s also possible, though, that the federal NDP in 2019 is a busted flush no matter who’s leading it. The combination of personal charisma and political circumstance that propelled it to Official Opposition status in 2011 might just be throttling back down toward cruising speed.

We shouldn’t overestimate just how improbable Jack Layton’s achievements were. He dragged the NDP to the political centre, where the votes are, marginalizing various breeds of crackpots along the way, while keeping the famously restive portside of the party relatively content. Then he stole a huge chunk of the Quebec nationalist vote in the dead of night.

When Jagmeet Singh was elected NDP leader, I really did think he’d be a significant challenge to Justin Trudeau due to the media’s apparent fascination with Singh (a love affair that appeared to be as deep and lasting as that of Justin’s teeny-bopper fan club for their darling), but it faded very quickly indeed. I guess as far as the Canadian media is concerned, there can only be one…

The byelection is looking pretty safe for Singh, as his Tory opponent beclowned himself quickly, and news broke on Wednesday that the Liberal candidate has withdrawn, after similarly beclowning herself:

January 15, 2019

Jagmeet Singh’s conservative opponent in Burnaby South

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

Normally, the byelection campaign by a major party leader to gain a seat in the House of Commons doesn’t get quite this … snippy:

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

Maybe someone should put in a kind word for Jagmeet Singh on the rare opportunities when an occasion presents itself. The federal NDP leader found himself on the right side of a ridiculous argument over the weekend as his byelection in the riding of Burnaby South got officially underway. Singh’s Conservative opponent for the open seat, commercial lawyer Jay Shin, promptly issued a press release suggesting that Singh was … apparently the wrong species of lawyer?

“While Jagmeet Singh has spent his pre-political career as a criminal defence lawyer keeping criminals out of jail, I have spent my legal career building Canadian businesses that create jobs and promote international trade,” Shin’s statement read.

When challenged by the Burnaby Now newspaper on his apparent suggestion that, as a former university instructor in International Mining Transactions, he was somehow ethically superior to the underpaid schmucks who provide criminal defence, Shin disavowed any such meaning.

Criminal lawyers “play an important role; everybody has a right to defence,” the Conservative candidate insisted. (Whew!) “What I’m saying is, he played that role. As a criminal lawyer, he defended criminals. That’s all I’m saying.”

One notices that even this characterization may leave a civil libertarian uneasy, since criminals aren’t criminals until the Crown successfully convicts them. A defence lawyer doesn’t “defend criminals”: he defends the accused. But maybe that is the sort of distinction you forget when you are busy building Canadian businesses, or trying to become a Conservative MP.

January 11, 2019

Jagmeet Singh’s plight

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

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh will finally get his chance to win a seat in Parliament on February 25 in the Burnaby South byelection. Things have not been going well for Singh since he was elected leader in 2017. At that time, I thought he would be a serious threat to Justin Trudeau’s popularity with the media (Justin’s teeny-bopper fan club) and allow the NDP to be taken more seriously as a potential government. That hasn’t happened and Singh’s media coverage has been much more critical than any NDP leader might have expected. Andrew Coyne explains:

It is safe to say Singh has not proved quite the rock star New Democrats hoped when they elected him leader in October 2017. Undertaker would be closer to the mark. While the party trundles along at a little under 17 per cent in the polls, about its historic average, Singh himself is in single digits, slightly behind Elizabeth May as Canadians’ choice for prime minister.

Singh’s trajectory is a cautionary tale on the importance of experience in politics. With just six years in the Ontario legislature, Singh was barely ready for the job of provincial leader, still less the much sharper scrutiny to which federal leaders are subject. It has showed.

He appears frequently to be poorly briefed, on one memorable occasion having to ask a member of caucus, in full view of the cameras, what the party position was on a particular issue. He badly mishandled what should have been a softball question on where he stood on Sikh terrorism, and alienated many in the party with his knee-jerk expulsion of Saskatchewan MP Erin Weir for what appeared to be no worse a crime than standing too close to women at parties.

The decision not to seek a seat in the House until now has robbed him of what visibility the leader of a third party can expect, though his manifest weakness as a communicator makes it debatable whether this is a plus or a minus. Fundraising has dried up. Party morale is in freefall. Caucus members speak openly, if not on the record, of their desire to be rid of him.

For the Liberals, on the other hand, Singh is the answer to all their prayers. The prime minister’s own approval ratings may have dropped precipitously, but as long as the NDP vote can be kept to current levels of support or less the Liberals are unlikely to lose. (The NDP’s average share of the popular vote when the Conservatives win: 19.5 per cent. When the Liberals win: 14.8 per cent.) And nothing so guarantees a calamitous NDP showing as Singh’s continued leadership.

Hence the curious unspoken subtext of the Burnaby South race, with Liberals more or less openly rooting for him to win — and New Democrats hardly less publicly hoping he loses.

January 7, 2019

People tend to become more conservative as they age … let’s just lower the voting age to “fix” that “problem”

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

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as people age they tend to develop more conservative or even reactionary views. This can, in extreme cases, lead to deplorable results — as our American and British friends discovered in 2016 (fortunately, we Canadians were lucky enough to avoid such unpleasantness by having our election in 2015). Some advanced forward-thinking on how to best address this problem was reported in the Guardian on suggestions by Cambridge professor David Runciman, who advocated lowering the voting age to six, as younger voters are generally much more open to progressive ideas.

This extension of the franchise was not proposed by an inmate of an asylum for the crim­in­ally insane but by a professor, David Runciman, of the University of Cambridge, supposedly one of the best three or four such institutions in the world. But no mere criminal lunatic could have dreamt up such an idea. Is it any wonder that many people feel the world has gone mad?

Sure enough, Runciman’s idea was given serious consideration by a writer in The Guardian. Admittedly, the writer came down against the proposal, but only after giving it credence. Nevertheless, it gave an insight into the mindset of those whose political ideas are to themselves so self-evidently virtuous that the only possible explanation for the fact others do not share them is stupidity in the case of the poor and wickedness in the case of the rich.

At the head of the article were the words: “Allow six-year-olds to vote? No, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Children tend to be more progressive and idealistic than their parents.”

I think it’s safe to say that if the US election and the Brexit referendum had included all those woke six-year-olds, the results would have been much more amenable to our moral and intellectual superiors in the media. However, I suspect that Professor Runciman’s proposal is only half of the necessary solution. In addition to lowering the minimum voting age, we should give careful consideration to lowering the maximum voting age as well. I’m sure that a properly funded study would find that not only do older voters tend to become more conservative as they begin to fall apart physically, but it also tracks directly with mental incapacity. Our study — perhaps a pan-national group drawn from Harvard, Berkeley, Cambridge and the London School of Economics — would almost certainly conclude that a pattern of voting for more conservative options is a clear indication of enfeeblement of judgement and society would be doing a kindness to remove the franchise from those who can no longer responsibly exercise it.

Perhaps, rather than directly revoking oldsters’ voting rights, we could offer a more gentle option of designating a responsible young voter (ideally between the ages of six and eighteen) to exercise the franchise on their behalf. This way, they are still fully represented, but the vote will be directed by someone with a direct stake in the outcome, as the young will have to live for far longer with the result of any election (and the oldsters are all going to die soon, anyway).

It might also make sense to revise the voting system so that the votes of younger people carry more weight than those of older folks. Perhaps double the weight of their parents’ votes and quadruple the weight of their grandparents’? We can’t be short-changing the people who matter the most, after all … that would hardly be progressive, would it?

The use of the word progressive is telling. It implies not only that there is a clear path in hum­anity’s moral ascent to perfection but also that its route map has been vouchsafed to certain adults. For self-proclaimed progressives, there are no complexities or un­intended consequences, let alone ironies: there is only progress and its opposite, reaction.

For the writer of the article, children are born with a knowledge of the route map of the ascent to perfection, as salmon, cuckoos and swallows are born with a knowledge of where to migrate to. Only the corruption of age causes them to forget: “Children do tend towards the progressive, having a natural sense of justice … and an underdeveloped sense of self-interest.” But what has caused the realisation that children may be suitable for enfranchisement? Our author cannot be clearer: “Most of the arguments against giving six-year-olds a vote have been capsized by the (Brexit) referendum.”

In other words, because the electorate got the answer wrong, it is necessary to change the electorate. If only it had answered the question correctly, it is a fair guess no one would have thought of lowering the voting age to six.

Why, then, does our author fin­ally reject the vote for six year-olds? “If parents could be trusted to use their influence wisely and inculcate children with the politics it will take to assure a better future, then I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with that, apart from, obviously, that culture is already wildly skewed towards parents … But that’s moot anyway, because parents can’t be trusted, otherwise we’d all already vote Green.”

November 16, 2018

The political wrangles ahead over the federal carbon tax

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

Andrew Coyne — for once not beating the drum for electoral reform — discusses the challenge facing the federal government in the wake of provincial resistance to their carbon tax plans:

But the real test, of course, is yet to come. The provinces cannot stop the tax on their own. The court challenges are likely to fail. Provinces that refuse to implement carbon pricing will simply find the federal “backstop” tax imposed in its place. It is the election that will decide the issue, not duelling governments. Or so Conservatives hope.

Certainly there are abundant grounds to doubt the political wisdom of the Liberal plan. A tax, or anything that resembles it, would be a hard enough sell on its own. But a tax in aid of a vast international plan to save the earth from a scourge that remains imperceptible to most voters, to which Canada has contributed little and against which Canada can have little impact, while countries whose actions would be decisive remain inert? Good luck.

What seems clear is that voters’ support for carbon pricing is shallow and tentative. The Conservative strategist who chortled to the National Post that the Liberals are asking Canadians “to vote with their hearts, not their wallets” — an impossibility, he meant — was correctly cynical. Just because people want to save the planet doesn’t mean they want to pay for it.

The best way to read the public’s mood is in the positions of the political parties, who are in their various ways each trying to assure them that it won’t cost them a dime. The Liberal version of this is to promise to rebate the extra cost of the federal tax to consumers — indeed, they pledge, 70 per cent of households will make a profit on the exchange.

The Conservatives have been less forthcoming, but it would appear their plan is to hide the cost, substituting regulations, whose effects are largely invisible to consumers, for the all-too-visible tax at the pump. Here, too, I suspect they may have a better (i.e. more cynical) read on popular opinion. The public often prefer to have the costs of government hidden from them, even if they know they are paying them — even if they know they are paying more this way, as indeed they are in this case. Do what you want to us, they seem to say, just don’t rub our faces in it.

So I would be skeptical about polls showing majority support for the federal plan: 54 per cent, according to Angus Reid, while Abacus finds 75 per cent would either support or at least accept it (versus 24 per cent opposed). These were taken shortly after the announcement of the federal rebates. Yet it is far from evident the rebates will still register with people a year from now. Indeed, the Conservatives barely paused to acknowledge them as inadequate before going on to pretend they had never been mentioned.

October 25, 2018

It’s not a “bribe” … it’s an “incentive”!

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

Terence Corcoran explains why the federal government’s promised “incentive” isn’t in any way, shape, or form any kind of bribe:

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard the all-new Canadian Cynical Circular Carbon Circus, the amazing Liberal climate control spectacle that will send you on a great environmental ride into the future.

Come on in! We will pay you to not consume fossil fuels — as individuals and as industries. It’s an economic revolution that takes us beyond blockchain and cryptocurrencies and cannabis into a brave new universe in which money goes round and round and everybody wins. We will pay Canadians with their own money — more than $20 billion over five years in carbon taxes that will raise the price of gasoline by 11 cents a litre by 2022, and ever higher thereafter if not sooner. Everybody pays and everybody wins, except for those who don’t. And some people win more than they pay. It’s better than a lottery!

For the people of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick, the federal carbon circus cash comes via a new “Climate Action Incentive Payment.” An Ontario family of four will receive $307 for this year, the amount to be claimed on 2018 income tax returns. A Saskatchewan family will get a Climate Action Incentive Payment of $609.

What’s the Climate Action Incentive Payment for? The Liberal plan unveiled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna Tuesday doesn’t specify. What are taxpayers in the four provinces being incented to do, exactly, with this new wad of free cash? There is only one explanation: Vote Liberal in 2019!

The payments are based on a 2019 carbon price of $20 a tonne, rising to $50 by 2022. As the carbon tax goes up, Ontario families will receive $718 in 2022 and Saskatchewan families $1,459. And there will be more to come, presumably, since the latest doomsday scenario from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the font of all speculation and data manipulation on climate issues — warned that by 2030 (only 12 years from now) a carbon price of somewhere between $135 to $5,500 per tonne would be needed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

October 24, 2018

Scheer’s campaign opening has about as much attraction as a cold bucket of sick

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

Some guy we’re supposed to believe is the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition … Andrew Shear? Shea? No, that’s not it. Something like Scheer? Yeah, maybe it’s Scheer. He’s been in some kind of witness protection for the last year or so, I guess. Anyway, he’s finally emerged to announce the start of the Conservative Party’s year-long campaign to get Justin Trudeau re-elected and to protect our sacred Supply Management system.

No, wait. That’s not quite it. Oh, it’s to get Scheer elected? Okay, then. Got it.

In the National Post, Colby Cosh attempts to find reasons for Canadians to support the Tories next year:

Andrew Scheer meets British Prime Minister Theresa May
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Andrew Scheer published an “open letter to Canadians” in the Toronto Sun this Saturday. “Sunday marks exactly one year until the next federal election,” the federal Conservative leader observed, proceeding thereupon to a critique of Justin Trudeau’s government. As someone who is still trying to take stock of Scheer, I read the letter hoping for clues to his plan of attack for the 2019 election. I’m afraid it merely served to emphasize how much Scheer has remained on the defensive since winning the Tory leadership almost a year and a half ago.

That is part of the issue here: does it seem to you like a year and a half since Scheer became leader? Forgive me a very subjective observation, but I found myself hardly believing that we are much closer in time to the next election than we are to the choosing of an opposition leader who still seems like the enigmatic new guy. What are his signature issues? I am afraid the first answer that springs to mind is “dairy supply management” — which is a continuing controversy that has exposed Scheer to embarrassment, and has helped to split his party, albeit in what is likely to be an electorally insignificant way. (Maxime Bernier won’t be the next Prime Minister of Canada, but party morale is a thing in elections.)

The other major issues that have presented themselves to Scheer as opportunities haven’t proved much more helpful. When it comes to the federalization of carbon taxation, Scheer still has no good answers when he is called upon to reconcile his hypothetical support for emissions reductions with his opposition to the Trudeau plan. He doesn’t like carbon taxes, period, which will play well with climate skeptics who have three-SUV garages; I do not underestimate the impetus of that voting bloc, but the Conservatives own those voters already. Scheer also cornered himself into a lame position on the campus free-speech wars, and he is pulling sour faces about marijuana legalization, even though he is one of the few Canadian politicians who will admit to having smoked the stuff personally.

October 3, 2018

Quebec election results – Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) majority

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

Global News rounds up the final poll results from Monday’s Quebec election:

After a 39-day election campaign, voters in Quebec headed to the polls Monday and elected the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) to power.

The CAQ, headed by François Legault, won a majority of seats delivering a crushing blow to the Quebec Liberal Party, who had held power for 13 of the last 15 years.

The CAQ was elected in 74 of the province’s 125 ridings, compared to 32 for the Liberals.

The Parti Québécois (PQ) suffered a double blow going from 28 seats to 9 and is once again without a leader, after Jean-François Lisée announced he was stepping down after losing his riding of Rosemont.

I really haven’t been following Quebec politics at all, so I didn’t know much about the CAQ’s stance on the issues. Here, cribbed from the Wikipedia page are some of their issues gleaned from the party platform (selective emphasis mine):

  • CAQ Leader François Legault has promised to reduce the tax burden of Quebecers. A CAQ government, he says, will further harmonize school taxes across the province, a tax cut valued at $700 million.
  • A long-standing party proposal is to create a Quebec version of Silicon Valley, which they’ve dubbed “The Saint-Laurent Project”. It envisions turning the Saint-Lawrence Valley into a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, with the collaboration of universities.
  • Hoping to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs from the province’s civil service.
  • As premier, Legault says he would temporarily reduce the number of immigrants Quebec accepts annually from 50,000 to 40,000.
  • To qualify for a Quebec selection certificate, the CAQ wants immigrants to pass a values and language test. Immigrants would also have to prove they have been looking for employment. Some experts have questioned the legality of the plan.
  • The party favours decentralizing health-care administration, while maintaining a universal free public health care system, Legault was quoted saying “The important thing is the universality of care. … I do not want more private. Our public [health care] is a jewel of Quebec.”
  • Like the PQ, the CAQ also vowed to renegotiate with the Quebec’s medical specialists in order to cut their compensation by an average of $80,000 per year. Legault believes the specialists will be open to striking a new deal.
  • Would overhaul the province’s longterm care system (CHSLDs) with a new network of smaller, more “humane” homes at an initial cost of $1 billion.
  • Wants to abolish school boards and replace them with service centres that would provide administrative support to schools. The party believes this would give schools greater autonomy and make the education system cheaper to run.
  • Wants to increase the mandatory age of staying in school to 18, to reduce the drop out rate.
  • Wants added homework help, extracurricular activities (sport and culture), additional funding for career guidance and tutors assigned to more vulnerable students.
  • The CAQ is also proposing to do away with progressive daycare pricing, though over a period of four years. All Quebec parents would be charged the same daily rate, regardless of their annual income.
  • Opposes the wearing of religious symbols, including the hijab, by police officers and others who wield coercive state power. The party would also ban school teachers from wearing religious symbols.
  • Would pass a “Secularism Charter” to reduce the scope of religious accommodations available to civil servants.
  • Calls itself nationalist. It wants more power for Quebec, but within Canada. Legault, a former PQ cabinet minister, has promised a CAQ government will never hold a referendum on Quebec sovereignty.
  • Legault wants to seek additional powers for Quebec, including control over immigration, increased fiscal capacity and a say in the nomination of Supreme Court justices. Some of these measures would require re-opening the Constitution.
  • Supports international greenhouse gas reduction targets and would promote “technological innovations to ensure their achievement”.

October 1, 2018

The rebirth of Quebec separatism?

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

Conrad Black wants to provoke clinical depression in anyone who was around for the last round of Quebec separatism, and warns that we’ve been ignoring the issue while it’s been reviving in La Belle Province:

Canada is very late and very laconically beginning to consider the implications of the Quebec election on Oct. 1. If, on Monday night, as polls indicate, 40 per cent of Quebecers have voted for overtly separatist parties (Québec solidaire and the Parti Québécois) and 30 per cent for a party that declines to say separation is undesirable, only that it will not hold a referendum (Coalition Avenir Québec, or CAQ), no one should imagine that this is not a threat to this country. I have written here before that Canada would regret the refusal of Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau to discuss methods of reintegrating Quebec into the Constitution, which would not have solved the problem permanently, but would have greatly strengthened federalism.

The issue of separatism appeared to die, but that is the nature of Quebec nationalism: it never dies, it just becomes comatose for a time. And though almost no one yet describes this Quebec election in these terms, the governing Liberals of Premier Philippe Couillard seem to be about even at 30 per cent with François Legault’s moderate left, constitutionally ambiguous CAQ. Legault was long an explicit separatist, and has not renounced that view (and his wife, Isabelle Brais, thinks English Canada has no culture and should have no status in Quebec). The Quebec Liberal party, like the British Columbia Liberal party, is really a Liberal-Conservative coalition. It governed very efficiently these past four years, but became an ecologically obsessed and eccentric regime. While it retains the support of most of the non-French, it is now pulling only a very unfeasible 17 per cent of the French Quebec vote.

Though the CAQ has been slipping, it has been losing ground to Québec solidaire, a rabidly separatist party that proposes immediate, unconditional secession. It is led by a declared Marxist who opposes the right of the State of Israel to exist, and, astonishingly, it may hold the balance of power in the National Assembly. It threatens to pass the original separatist PQ of former premiers René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, which hasn’t changed its tune but is whistling it more softly. The independence of Quebec has not been much raised in the campaign, but the implications of the emerging voting patterns assure that it will re-emerge.

And no discussion of the separatism question is complete without at least a nod in the direction of the Charlatan Accord:

The Charlottetown agreement on a substantial decentralization, put to a countrywide referendum in 1992, was defeated by 54 per cent of Canadians, though it had been approved by the federal parliament and all the provincial legislatures. Bouchard, Mulroney’s most prominent Quebec MP, deserted the government, founded the separatist Bloc Québécois, and led the 1995 referendum campaign in Quebec after Parizeau was elected premier. It was a slightly more explicit separatist question than Lévesque had posed 15 years before. Chrétien was over-confident, mishandled the campaign, and gave a slightly panic-stricken appeal to Quebec voters on referendum-eve. It was 50.6 to 49.4 per cent for the federalists, a clear separatist victory for the French Quebecers, and the turnout was 93.4 per cent.

Chrétien somewhat redeemed himself with the Clarity Act of 1999, based on the results of a Supreme Court referral, which held that any secession had to be on the basis of a substantial majority supporting a clear referendum question to secede. (I was one of those who urged that the Act also provide that any county in a seceding province that had voted not to secede and was contiguous to another province, should secede from the province and remain in Canada. My precedents, though I never got to cite them, were West Virginia and Ulster.) Lucien Bouchard lost interest in the idea of independence, and the Liberal party has governed in Quebec for 13 of the past 15 years. The present premier, Couillard, is the most unambiguously federalist Quebec premier since Jean-Jacques Bertrand in 1970, and it will not be long before he is missed by those in Ottawa who declined to discuss these issues with him. If he is out on Monday night, Couillard’s successors will blow a cold wind on Ottawa and across Canada just as the Trudeau government appears to be set to break up the relationship with the United States, and our automobile industry prepares to repatriate to the U.S. Justin might do better as the next leader of the Quebec Liberals.

September 30, 2018

Contempt for the voters (even their own voters)

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

Steve Kates has been watching the confirmation hearings and associated circus acts in the US senate:

Let me start by explaining the basic framework. This is all politics. No one among the Democrat senators believes a word of Ford’s testimony. Not one of them would say a word were Kavanaugh a Democrat nominee. It is all show for the morons who vote for them. The disdain the Democrats have for their own voters is gigantic. They see them in the same way as I do: as low information, dumb beyond belief fools without a shred of common sense. They can see perfectly well that all of this has no other purpose but to make it harder for a government from the other party to govern. They want to pack the court with judges who will vote to do those things that cannot be done via a democratic legislative process. They understand perfectly well that they are trivialising accusations of rape. They comprehend without a shred of doubt that they are making the United States less governable. They can see without any hesitation that Ford is a stooge that has been put forward because the saps in their electorates across America eat all this up and hunger for more. They therefore do it because they enjoy the power this provides to them. They do it because they believe it will attract more voters than it will repel. They are making it as plain as day that they think their own constituency is ignorant and repulsive. But this is their line of work and if they are to keep their jobs, this is what they must do.

The Republicans think exactly the same – that Democrat voters are fools. And they know just as well as the Democrats that there is a proportion of the voting population that will make their vote depend on this and this alone. They understand rape is a terrible event in anyone’s life and would not nominate anyone if there were any genuine evidence that any of the accusations made against Kavanaugh are true. Aside from those members of their Senate caucus who prevented a majority vote from succeeding, they would have nevertheless taken the risk of the bad press that will follow when and if they confirm Kavanaugh’s nomination. They have a razor-thin majority in the Senate that can only survive a near-unanimous vote from their side of the aisle. They are counting on there being enough common sense and sound judgment left with the voting public to be able to succeed and retain the House and Senate majorities in November. They see the Democrat tactics for what they are.

As for the notion of sexual assault, to really believe that is the issue makes you so stupid that it is painful to see what nitwits politicians have to deal with routinely.

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