Quotulatiousness

September 21, 2018

Doug Ford is a bit like Trump in the way he gets his critics to froth and fizz on demand

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

For all the claims that Doug Ford would be “just like Trump”, they’re not all that similar, but one way the Ontario Premier does resemble the American President is the way that they both can send their opponents into rhetorical hysteria almost without effort:

Doug Ford at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Canada.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

As much as Ford’s government has violated political norms, we shouldn’t want the remedy to do likewise — whether it’s the feds invoking Disallowance (as a majority of Toronto city councillors voted to support) or the Lieutenant-Governor refusing Bill 31 Royal Assent (as requested Tuesday by various petitioners led by former lefty Toronto mayor John Sewell), or a judge undermining provincial authority over municipalities on grounds that collapse in higher courts.

So now, perhaps, Toronto can return to reality — or as close as you can get during an election campaign.

No, there was no magic brand of fit Mayor John Tory or hypothetical mayor Jennifer Keesmaat or anyone else could have pitched that would have stopped Ford in his tracks. Torontonians’ fits are a feature for Ford, not a bug. In defending Bill 5 he has repeatedly namechecked various left-leaning allegedly do-nothing councillors. Their apoplexy sustains him. In his book about Rob Ford, councillor John Filion quoted Doug Ford on his plans for Tory after losing the 2014 mayoral election: “He’s going to take off the sheets in bed at night and find my teeth wrapped around his nuts.”

Note that Chris Selley is careful to include the “allegedly” there … no need to invite lawsuits for the National Post.

And no, there is no real hope of relief in the ongoing appeals process over Bill 5. Even if the Supreme Court were to side with Belobaba, it would only repudiate the way in which the province wielded its powers — i.e., in the middle of an election — not the powers themselves. Had the government waited four years, or even legislated a two-year council term at 47 wards to be followed by an election at 25, it would have been on plenty-thick ice. It could easily re-legislate a 25-ward Toronto after such a ruling, and without using the notwithstanding clause.

Toronto politicians are destined to be Doug Ford’s favourite punching bag at least until they stop reacting so hysterically every time he so much as looks in their direction. He may not be a Twitter troll of the same mastery as Donald Trump, but he doesn’t appear to need social media to get his critics all panty-bunched.

Similarly, while there is no telling how much Ford might meddle in Toronto’s affairs in the coming years, at every step along the way he will make the idea of meddling in Toronto affairs more toxic for future non-Conservative governments. All provincial governments have screwed over Toronto now and again; as of this summer, screwing over Toronto is Something Doug Ford Does. And no Liberal or New Democrat wants to be like Doug Ford.

When things die down a bit, the opposition parties will have to take a break from denouncing Ford and explain what they’ll do in future to strengthen Toronto’s democracy: restore control over its political boundaries, provide more taxation powers, allow road tolling, whatever. It would be Pollyannaish to suggest Ford has caused a political awakening in Toronto, but he has certainly made it more attractive for the other parties to take Toronto more seriously, and concurrently much more risky for them to be seen reneging on such promises in future.

September 18, 2018

Mad Max and the 338-candidate promise

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

Colby Cosh offers some electoral advice to Maxime Bernier and the still-hot-off-the-presses PPC/PP proto-party:

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have high hopes for the new Max Bernier Party. Perhaps you believe, as my colleague Andrew Coyne does, that there is still far too much fly-blown 1970s-style intervention and protectionism in Canada’s economy. Perhaps you are in favour of a more hard-headed approach to immigration policy, or you are allergic to “diversity” as a supreme ideal. Maybe you just appreciate Bernier’s devil-may-care swashbuckling spirit.

Assuming some or all of these things are true, as some or all of them are true of me: were you especially impressed by Friday’s launch of the People’s Party of Canada? Bernier, I have to say, does not seem at all sure about the order in which he wants to go about things. Sixteen months ago he came close to winning the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada: perhaps it was on the day he lost (May 27, 2017) that he decided the big Conservative tent was, as he has now described it, “intellectually and morally corrupt,” meriting only destruction. That hypothesis makes his secession from the Conservatives seem like a spasm of arrogance.

[…]

So, to skip past those already familiar critiques of the Liste Maxime in the hope of adding a new one: why a full slate? Promising to run 338 candidates is a good way of maximizing the harm to the CPC, if this is just a plan for samurai revenge. A leader like Bernier, who is thoughtful about ideology and does enjoy recognition from coast to coast, would be a good central building block for a libertarian-ish or classical liberal political party, if you want such a party. But his party is bound to be judged by its 10 dumbest, least careful candidates. (They all are, with the possible exception of the Liberals!) Why couldn’t Bernier start out by using the first part of his 13 months to find 20 or 30 really good ones, and run only those?

As far as anyone knows, he is starting out with zero potential candidates who have any credibility or experience to speak of. There definitely weren’t any on the dais with him Friday. Nobody thinks Bernier is aiming to create a purely regional party, but if that is his concern, he would only have to make sure that his wedge of 10 or 20 or 50 candidates was spread around suitably.

Frankly, if I were the megalomaniac in charge of this thing, I would take some care not to launch my movement shortly before a general election, but as soon as possible after. You know what’s a good way to build an insurgent party? By-elections! In a by-elections, a party leader can work closely with a single candidate and move into the riding himself for personal appearances. Other non-cash resources can be concentrated. Turnout is usually low in by-elections, and the establishment candidates are often dire. But, then, I lived as a sullen, dopey teen in Deborah Gray’s riding, and have some memory of a thing called “Reform,” and they say those early-life experiences are often powerful obstacles to understanding.

I think this is quite sensible advice, as even finding a full slate of “paper” candidates can be a difficult task for small parties — and the PPC is quite small for the time being — so concentrating on finding credible candidates to run in winnable or merely competitive races makes a heck of a lot of sense. Even a limited slate of 30 still allows the media to find one or two who can be baited into making statements that can be played for all they’re worth by hostile editorialists, but over 300? The media sharks would be spoiled for choice. With a more limited group of viable candidates, there are fewer chances of a random blowhard (or a closet racist) suddenly being elevated by CBC anchors as the visible face of the new party.

September 15, 2018

Maxime Bernier announces the name of his new federal party: the People’s Party of Canada/Parti Populaire

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

The new party’s website is here.

September 10, 2018

Speculation on an early federal election

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

Ted Campbell on the recent musings in the official party organ Toronto Star on the pros and cons of the Prime Minister going to the polls this fall rather than next year:

The Star, a pretty Liberal friendly journal, says, in an article by Robin Sears, a former NDP insider (in fact he was national director of the NDP for seven years), that “Liberal hawks, like those of a generation earlier, are heatedly debating a snap election call. Not entirely surprising, since [we] have not seen a decade since the ’50s when a government has not been forced by events, or decided to seize a strategic advantage, and called an early election … [and] … The Liberal hawks’ arguments are getting stronger. Neither of their opponents is ready, and each will likely be stronger a year from now. The Federal Court and Donald Trump have both just stuck a finger in the Prime Minister’s eye. This is an opportunity to return the favour with a much harder counterpunch, a strong new political mandate.“

[…]

I agree with Robin Sears … going [to] the polls sooner, in the fall of 2017, and running against Donald Trump (and the ghost of Stephen Harper) makes good political sense because it seems, to me, highly unlikely that Justin Trudeau and his gang that cannot shoot straight are going to get any better in the next year or so. In fact the Trudeau regime’s record, to date, suggests that a year from now the country might be in ruins.

Right now the NDP appears to be in shambles; Jagmeet Singh’s leadership is being questioned at pretty high levels, and the Conservatives are still reeling from Maxime’s Bernier’s defection. Waiting until October 2018 risks giving both the Conservatives and the NDP time to reorganize and present new, attractive programmes and, perhaps even new, more attractive leaders, too.

Will he go to the polls in 2017? Who knows? Parliament is due to reconvene, after the long summer recess, in a week ~ on 17 September. Many people were expecting a new Throne Speech outlining a pre-election platform filled with promises that will, most likely, never be kept, but Robin Sears makes a good case for Prime Minister Trudeau to go to the Governor General, next week, and to tell her that the situation is such that Canada’s government needs a new mandate.

August 26, 2018

Maxime Bernier’s proposed new federal party

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

Andrew Coyne on the plan to create a new conservative party at the federal level:

No one with any familiarity with the modern Conservative Party could disagree with much of what its former-almost-leader Maxime Bernier now has to say about it.

“Intellectually and morally corrupt” might be a bit over the top, but “avoids important but controversial issues”, “afraid to articulate any coherent policy”, offers “a bunch of platitudes that don’t offend anybody but don’t mean anything [or] motivate anyone” while pandering to interest groups and buying votes “just like the Liberals”? Checks out, as many Conservatives would be the first to say.

Neither is there anything objectionable in principle about Bernier’s proposal to launch a new party of the right. Obviously it would not be in the partisan interest of the Conservative Party, but whether it would be harmful to the broader cause of conservatism, as so many reflexively insist, is less clear.

As I’ve argued before, the splitting of the left-of-centre vote between two (later three, and four) parties since 1935 has not stopped the Liberals from winning 16 out of 25 elections in that time. It may even have helped. The presence of two parties saying broadly similar things has entrenched progressivism as the default mode of Canadian politics, leaving the Conservatives, to the extent they have occasionally demurred, looking like the outliers.

Rather than simply splitting a fixed percentage of the vote, that is, the two parties may have combined to expand the pool of voters from which they both fish. An upstart conservative party, more robust in its advocacy, might play the same role as the NDP on the left, pushing out the boundaries of acceptable opinion and freeing the established Conservative Party to compete more aggressively for the median voter — in part by pulling the median to the right. If nothing else it would restore some balance to the equation.

But to say that a new conservative party might be a useful addition to the political landscape is not to say that this is that party, or that now is the time, or that Bernier is its leader.

The New Democrats have never come all that close to forming a government, but over the years, they’ve gotten the other two major parties to adopt and implement almost everything they’ve ever demanded … eventually. That does show that a party doesn’t necessarily need to win the vote to win the issues. As Jay Currie suggested a few days back, a new Bernier-led small-C conservative party might not automatically lead to another term for Justin Trudeau:

Bernier does not have to play the traditional Canadian political game. The world has changed. First off, he does not have to run a candidate in every single riding in Canada. While he said he would today, he needs to rethink that position. Thirty or forty will be more than enough to ensure his new party has a national presence. But, and this is important, he can make a virtue of this necessity by making sure not to run against the many actual conservatives who currently sit, silently, in Parliament. Even better, he can endorse them.

Using a targetted riding strategy would put paid to the idea that a vote for Max is a vote for the Liberals.

With a targetted riding strategy Max can also avoid the always looming disaster of a crazy person – actual Nazi, major anti-Semite, massive homophobe – gaining a nomination in a hopeless riding and then being pinned to the party by a hostile media. Finding 30 or 40 really excellent candidates and then backing them hard pre-Writ might create the conditions for multiple wins.

Which ridings to target will be a tough choice but other than making sure to have a couple in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal – for media exposure – they should be ridings without a currently sitting Conservative and where the demographics do not massively favour the Liberals (thus suburban and rural). And they need to be air accessible because Bernier is going to spend his campaign on an airplane.

Most importantly, Bernier needs to create a positive message. One of the problems the Conservatives have is that they are barely against most of the Trudeau Liberal positions and don’t seem to have any of their own. Bernier needs to define a Canadian message. Free Trade, economic expansion, jobs are one side of it, Canadian unity instead of division could be the other. Bernier’s objection to increased immigration and the fragmentation of multiculturalism will resonate if he can package them in a “making Canada stronger” theme.

Right from the go Bernier should avoid any suggestion that his party will form a government. Instead he should be talking about keeping the politicians in Ottawa honest and in touch with Canadians. Balance of power is the goal.

August 6, 2018

QotD: Voting

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

Most people vote in elections for the candidate they dislike the least, and perhaps this is as it should be: positive enthusiasm for candidates and politicians in general is likely to give them an inflated idea of their own importance and thereby promote the politicization of life.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Self-Anointed v. Resentful: A view from across the Atlantic”, City Journal, 2016-11-08.

July 3, 2018

Andrés Manuel López Obrador wins Mexican presidential election

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

Tom Phillips and David Agren report from Mexico City for the Guardian:

A baseball-loving leftwing nationalist who has vowed to crack down on corruption, rein in Mexico’s war on drugs and rule for the poor has been elected president of Latin America’s second-largest economy.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President-Elect of Mexico, who will assume office on 1 December, 2018
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a silver-haired 64-year-old who is best known as Amlo and counts Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn among his friends, was elected with at least 53% of the vote, according to a quick count by Mexico’s electoral commission.

López Obrador’s closest rival, Ricardo Anaya from the National Action party (PAN), received around 22% while José Antonio Meade, a career civil servant running for the Institutional Revolutionary party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for most of last century, came in third with around 16%.

Addressing the media after those results were announced, López Obrador vowed to repay the trust put in him by millions of Mexicans. “I will govern with rectitude and justice. I will not fail you. I will not disappoint you. I won’t betray the people,” he said.

Mexico’s president-elect vowed to rule for people of all social classes, all sexual orientations and all points of view. “We will listen to everyone. We will care for everyone. We will respect everyone,” he said. “But we will give priority to the most humble and to the forgotten.”

[…]

Analysts also expect him to pursue a less aggressive and less militarised approach to Mexico’s 11-old ‘war on drugs’ which has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives and is widely viewed as a calamity. During the campaign, Amlo has argued “you cannot fight violence with more violence, you cannot fight fire with fire” and proposed an amnesty designed to help low-level outlaws turn away from a life of crime.

Eric Olson, a Mexico and Latin America specialist from Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Centre, said he saw Mexico stepping back from regional affairs under its new leader. “Amlo is not an internationalist … we can expect him to play less of an active role in the region on Venezuela, on Nicaragua and other trouble spots.”

Olson also expected tense moments with US president Donald Trump whose family separation policy Amlo recently denounced as arrogant, racist and inhuman. “But it’s impossible for the US to walk away from Mexico or for Mexico to walk away from the US. They are joined at the hip and need to work together even if their presidents don’t like each other and don’t get along.”

Carlos Bravo, a politics expert from Mexico City’s Centre for Economic Research and Teaching, predicted President Amlo would make fighting poverty a flagship policy, just as former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did after his historic 2002 election with projects such as Bolsa Família and Zero Hunger. Under Amlo he foresaw “massive investment in social policy” which Mexico’s new president could use to show he was attacking not just poverty and inequality but also the social roots of crime and violence.

However, Bravo said the “motley coalition” behind Amlo’s election triumph was so diverse – featuring former communists, ultra-conservatives and everything in-between – that trying to guess how he might rule was a fool’s errand. “Quite frankly, right now there is a lot of uncertainty regarding what the López Obrador government will do.”

June 29, 2018

Justin Trudeau’s emotional thinking style resonates with female voters

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

Brandon Kirby on, among other things, why Justin Trudeau polls consistently higher with women than with men:

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

Justin Trudeau gave one of his worst interviews during the campaign with a Maritime reporter, Steve Murphy.

Murphy continually asked him for the numbers on his spending promises, to which Trudeau had none to give. Eventually he went on the offensive against Murphy and suggested that Murphy approached politics with a calculator while Trudeau can speak to Canadians. People who think in terms of STEM find this remarkably absurd.

It’s problematic that if the numbers don’t add up in Trudeau’s budgets, he won’t be helping Canadians at all. Wages will remain stagnant while power bills go up, grocery bills go up, and our tax bills will go up.

Trudeau is on the record claiming that he will grow the economy from the heart outward, but as the calculator dictates, his plans have serious economic consequences and the rhetoric that appears caring is actually destructive.

Rational thinkers find the empty rhetoric of growing the economy from the heart outward, while simultaneously making life harder on the poor and middle class, highly offensive.

Feminists have supplied us with the premise that on average, women don’t think in terms of STEM. Economics as a science requires an appraisal that is thoroughly calloused at times, which people who don’t appreciate STEM will find highly offensive.

The end result is that if women don’t think in terms of calloused rationalism, they won’t find libertarianism at all appealing.

If it were the case that only Canadian women were permitted to vote, Trudeau would win a majority government easily. If only Canadian men were to vote, Trudeau would be swiftly defeated.

George W. Bush was the most unpopular president in the U.S. during my lifetime, and yet his approval ratings are polled higher for Americans than Trudeau’s are among Canadian men.

There’s a discrepancy between men and women but that doesn’t imply individualism is wrong.

[…]

We do need to encourage women to adopt the calloused STEM approach. $99 per case of water isn’t how most women think, but unlike the opposing view it has the virtue of actually being getting water to people; going beyond stage-one-thinking – it’s actually compassionate.

June 9, 2018

Various comments on the Ontario election

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

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

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

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

David Warren commented on the election results:

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

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

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

Kathy Shaidle posted on Facebook:

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

June 1, 2018

QotD: Travelling with a political campaign

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

One of the constant nightmares of traveling with politicians is the need to keep them in sight at all times. Every presidential campaign has its own fearful litany of horror stories about reporters – and, occasionally, even a key staff member – who thought they had plenty of time to “run across the street for a quick beer” instead of hanging around in the rear of some grim auditorium half-listening to the drone of a long-familiar speech, only to come back in 20 minutes to find the auditorium empty and no sign of the press bus, the candidate or anybody who can tell him where they went. These stories are invariably set in places like Butte, Buffalo or Icepick, Minnesota, on a night in the middle of March. The temperature is always below zero, there is usually a raging blizzard to keep cabs off the street, and just as the victim remembers that he has left his wallet in his overcoat on the press bus, his stomach erupts with a sudden attack of ptomaine poisoning. And then, while crawling around on his knees in some ice-covered alley and racked with fits of projectile vomiting, he is grabbed by vicious cops and whipped on the shins with a night stick, then locked in the drunk tank of the local jail and buggered all night by winos.

These stories abound, and there is just enough truth in them to make most campaign journalists so fearful of a sudden change in the schedule that they will not even go looking for a bathroom until the pain becomes unendurable and at least three reliable people have promised to fetch them back to the fold at the first sign of any movement that could signal an early departure. The closest I ever came to getting left behind was during the California primary in 1972, when I emerged from a bathroom in the Salinas railroad depot and realized that the caboose car of McGovern’s “victory train” was about 100 yards further down the tracks than it had been only three minutes earlier. George was still standing outside on the platform, waving to the crowd, but the train was moving – and as I started my sprint through the crowd, running over women, children, cripples and anything else that couldn’t get out of my way, I thought I saw a big grin on McGovern’s face as the train began picking up speed….… I am still amazed that I caught up with the goddamn thing without blowing every valve in my heart, or even missing the iron ladder when I made my last-second leap and being swept under the train and chopped in half by the wheels.

Ever since then I have not been inclined to take many risks while traveling in strange territory with politicians. Even the very few who might feel a bit guilty about leaving me behind would have to do it anyway, because they are all enslaved by their schedules, and when it comes to a choice between getting to the airport on time or waiting for a journalist who has wandered off to seek booze, they will shrug and race off to the airport.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.

May 30, 2018

Eurocrats send Italy back to the polls, to get it right this time

Filed under: Europe, Government, Italy, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

What were the Italians thinking? Didn’t they realize that the election of Euroskeptics would just result in the powers-that-be sending them back to vote (and possibly to vote again) until they get the right answer? Brendan O’Neill calls it a putsch:

There has been a putsch in Italy. A bloodless putsch, with no guns or jackboots, but a putsch nonetheless. The president’s vetoing of the finance minister put forward by the populist parties that won a huge number of votes in the General Election in March represents a grave assault on the democratic will. It is a technocratic coup, an EU-influenced, big-business-pleasing attempt to isolate and weaken the popular anti-Brussels sentiment that has swept Italy. Indeed, it has brought about the collapse of the talks to form a new populist government and made it necessary to hold fresh elections. Let’s be honest about what has happened here: March’s democratic election has essentially been voided by technocrats who care more about Euro financiers than they do about the ordinary people of Italy.

Italy has been plunged into political crisis by establishment figures who are repulsed by the Euroscepticism spreading through the nation. In the election in March, the mainstream parties – the Democratic Party and Forza Italia – were decimated by voters. They suffered an historic blow at the ballot box, the Democratic Party getting 18.7 per cent of the vote, and Forza Italia an even sadder 14 per cent. Meanwhile, populist parties, in particular the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League (formerly the Northern League), soared to the forefront of political life. M5S won 32.7 per cent of the vote, and the League won 17.4 per cent – a huge rise on the four per cent it got in the election in 2013.

[…]

The usurping of the popular will is best summed up in who has been promoted by Mattarella to replace Conte as the interim prime minister: Carlo Cottarelli, a former senior official in the International Monetary Fund who is referred to as ‘Mr Scissors’ for his insistence on cuts to public spending. So even though millions of Italians voted for populist parties that said they would reverse spending cuts and challenge Eurozone stability rules, now they find themselves ruled, for the time being, by a technocrat who takes an entirely different view. They have ended up with the opposite to what they voted for. This is the putsch; this is the technocratic coup; this is the thwarting of the democratic outlook by an establishment that thinks it knows better than ordinary people how their lives should be run.

This is how life in the Eurozone, and in the EU more broadly, works now. The people and the parties they vote for are written off by the expert class and technocrats and the forces of big business as irrational or prejudiced or dangerous, and the popular will is overriden in the name of maintaining the status quo. We saw this in the EU fury that greeted the French, Dutch and Irish revolts against the EU Constitution a decade ago; in the enforcement of spending cuts in Greece and Ireland that the people in those countries did not want; and we see it in the ongoing efforts by Brussels and its useful idiots in Britain to weaken or even kill off our mass vote for Brexit. Remainers, behold the truth of the institution you are fighting to defend: not the happy-clappy union of European peoples of your deluded dreams, but rather a vast oligarchical machine that laughs in the face of national sovereignty, views the democratic will as a pesky fly to be swatted away, and looks upon ordinary people as too pig-ignorant to make big political decisions. We need more rebellions against this elitist Euro-hatred for the views of ordinary people, and an all-out defence of the hard-won European principle of democracy.

May 18, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

May 11, 2018

Imagine Ontario’s election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 7, 2018

QotD: Running for the presidency

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

One of the most difficult problems for a journalist covering a presidential campaign is getting to know the candidates well enough to make confident judgments about them, because it is just about impossible for a journalist to establish a personal relationship with any candidate who has already made the big leap from “long shot” to “serious contender.” The problem becomes more and more serious as the stakes get higher, and by the time a candidate has survived enough primaries to convince himself and his staff that they will all be eating their lunches in the White House Mess for the next four years, he is long past the point of having either the time or the inclination to treat any journalist who doesn’t already know him personally as anything but just another face in the campaign “press corps.”

There are many complex theories about the progressive stages of a presidential campaign, but for the moment let’s say there are three: Stage One is the period between the decision to run for president and the morning after the New Hampshire primary when the field is still crowded, the staff organizations are still loose and relaxed, and most candidates are still hungry for all the help they can get – especially media exposure, so they can get their names in the Gallup Poll; Stage Two is the “winnowing out,” the separating of the sheep from the goats, when the two or three survivors of the early primaries begin looking like long-distance runners with a realistic shot at the party nomination; and Stage Three begins whenever the national media, the public opinion polls and Mayor Daley of Chicago decide that a candidate has picked up enough irreversible momentum to begin looking like at least a probable nominee, and a possible next president.

This three-stage breakdown is not rooted in any special wisdom or scientific analysis, but it fits both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic campaigns well enough to make the point that any journalist who doesn’t get a pretty firm personal fix on a candidate while he’s still in Stage One might just as well go with his or her instincts all the way to Election Day in November, because once a candidate gets to Stage Two his whole lifestyle changes drastically.

At that point he becomes a public figure, a serious contender, and the demands on his time and energy begin escalating to the level of madness. He wakes up every morning to face a split-second, 18-hour-a-day schedule of meetings, airports, speeches, press conferences, motorcades and handshaking. Instead of rambling, off-the-cuff talks over a drink or two with reporters from small-town newspapers, he is suddenly flying all over the country in his own chartered jet full of syndicated columnists and network TV stars……. Cameras and microphones follow him everywhere he goes, and instead of pleading long and earnestly for the support of 15 amateur political activists gathered in some English professor’s living room in Keene, New Hampshire, he is reading the same cliché-riddled speech – often three or four times in a single day – to vast auditoriums full of people who either laugh or applaud at all the wrong times and who may or may not be supporters……. And all the fat cats, labor leaders and big-time pols who couldn’t find the time to return his phone calls when he was desperately looking for help a few months ago are now ringing his phone off the hook within minutes after his arrival in whatever Boston, Miami or Milwaukee hotel his managers have booked him into that night. But they are not calling to offer their help and support, they just want to make sure he understands that they don’t plan to help or support anybody else, until they get to know him a little better.

It is a very mean game that these high-rolling, coldhearted hustlers play. The president of the United States may no longer be “the most powerful man in the world,” but he is still close enough to be sure that nobody else in the world is going to cross him by accident. And anybody who starts looking like he might get his hands on that kind of power had better get comfortable, right from the start, with the certain knowledge that he is going to have to lean on some very mean and merciless people just to get himself elected.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.

May 3, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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