Quotulatiousness

July 5, 2025

NYC selects its own Justin Trudeau clone

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

The winner of the Democratic primary is almost always subsequently elected as the mayor of New York City, so it’s fair to assume that Zohran Mamdani is going to be NYC’s next mayor. And he’s an American version of ultra-progressive former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:

New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani photographed in Assembly District 36, 10 February 2024.
Photo by Kara McCurdy via Wikimedia Commons.

American politics often seem to balance themselves out in the worst possible way. Even as the GOP sheds its last vestiges of affection for limited government and free markets, the opposition Democrats openly embrace bigotry and crazy economic nostrums. Case in point: the rise in New York City of Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist who flirts with antisemitism, to represent the Democratic Party in this year’s mayoral election.

The primary race in New York was a snapshot of the Democratic Party’s woes. Despite the presence of other candidates seeking the mayoral nomination, the race ultimately came down to two candidates: Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York.

Before resigning over allegations of sexual harassment, Cuomo, the 67-year-old son of another former governor, was best known for a “controversial directive that told nursing homes they couldn’t deny patients coming from hospitals admission based on a COVID-19 diagnosis”, according to StatNews. He then covered up the large number of ensuing deaths. He was the favoured candidate of the Democratic establishment and the early front-runner for the nomination.

Standing out from the pack of political hopefuls facing Cuomo was Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old son of an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and a Columbia University political science professor. Before being elected to the state legislature as a Democrat and a socialist, Mamdani tried his hand as a government employee and a rapper. His musical output included the song “Salaam”, which, as The Independent put it, “praised the ‘Holy Land Five’ — five men convicted in 2008 of donating over $12 million to Hamas”.

To say that New Yorkers are tired of Cuomo is a wild understatement. Like most Americans, New Yorkers are deeply sick of the old party establishment that rallied around Cuomo as well as the man himself. Yet, he was expected to walk away with the nomination and then cruise to victory in a largely one-party city.

But Mamdani sweetened the pot in the expensive metropolis with promises to freeze rent, make buses free, offer no-cost childcare, lower grocery prices with city-owned grocery stores, and use “public dollars” to build 200,000 apartments. He swears that he “knows exactly how to pay for it, too” with higher taxes on those making more than $1 million per year. Not explicitly part of his campaign, but on the record as his intention, is “the end goal of seizing the means of production”.

In the 2021 recording in which he advocated seizing the means of production, Mamdani endorsed BDS as an issue “that we firmly believe in”. The BDS movement — shorthand for “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” — aims to economically pressure Israel into withdrawing from so-called “occupied territories” and allowing Palestinians to settle throughout Israel. At its extremes, BDS seeks to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority state. It’s inspired by the movement against South Africa’s old apartheid regime.

June 26, 2025

NYC doubles down on Luxury Beliefs

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

New York City voters appear to have selected the ultimate “luxury beliefs” candidate as the presumptive next mayor of NYC in Zohran Mamdani:

The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.

Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.

Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.

And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.

Many politicians and media outlets act like the public disorder problem is overblown. But fare evasion, open drug use and serious mental illness on the subway are still part of daily life.

It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.

And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.

“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.

As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.

But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.

May 21, 2025

Canadian voters got fooled again

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

Roxanne Halverson on Canadian voter gullibility that Mark Carney and the Liberals took full advantage of in the election campaign:

Offer not applicable in Canada, apparently.

Liberals voters on your elbows up crusade — do you feel foolish, do you feel shamed? Are you ready to admit that you were duped? That you were played like the fiddle in the Devil went down to Georgia. How does it feel to know that you fell for Mark Carney’s fear mongering fabricated crisis that made him Prime Minister. Or is your Trump Derangement Syndrome so severe that you cannot recognize how the Liberals used it and used you to win an election they didn’t deserve to win. It wouldn’t be so bad if only you had to pay the price, but unlike the phony COVID mantra, of we’re all in this together, we really are all in this nightmare together for another possible four years of Liberal rule and corruption, and we’re all going to pay the price. That includes those of us who didn’t get fooled again, but most of us are the same ones who also didn’t get fooled in the last three elections that gave the country the Liberals under Justin Trudeau for a decade of destruction.

Did you see the interview Prime Minister Mark Carney did with Sky News Australia?

You really should watch it. Because in it he admits what those of us who didn’t vote for him knew, and what he, himself also knew. There was never any real threat from Trump to annex Canada. And when pushed on it by the Sky News interviewer Samantha Washington who asks if he inflated the threat as political tool to inflame voters who hated Donald Trump, Carney dances around it saying one minute it wasn’t a threat and the next minute, well he thought it was and so did the Canadian people and well maybe he did use it to kind of stir them up. Essentially he was trying to dodge the fact that he lied and knew all along that Trump wasn’t really going to make Canada the 51st state.

So, let’s begin with the Trump threat — the existential threat to the existence of our country! According to Carney, Trump “wanted to take Canada, he wanted to break it“. But when asked by Washington about that ‘existential threat’, Carney walked it back. In his words, “No the existence is not at stake, it was more of economic crisis, and had a heavy element of national security comes with it, the extent to which we will be cooperating with others, particularly with the United States“.

Now wait a minute, Carney told voters — the elbows uppers — that Canada’s existence was at stake. And now he’s adding in a national security element? I don’t recall Trump ever saying anything about invading Canada or threatening our national security, in fact it was quite the opposite, he said the United States would always protect Canada for any foreign threat. His interest in national security had to do with Canada’s porous border and the fentanyl trade that the Liberals chose to ignore. This response is a typical Carney word salad dancing around answering the question. Something he seems to have in common with his predecessor Justin Trudeau. But at its core, he says, no Canada’s existence was never in danger.

Yet, he repeatedly told crowds at rallies that the US wanted to break us, when it was really just an economic crisis — something Canada has faced many times before, often due to bad Liberal policies.

But that’s what Mark Carney, with the help of his cartel media echo chamber, drummed into the heads of the elbows up crowd during his leadership campaign and during his entire election campaign. Trump was going to come and take our country — “he wants our resources, he wants our land, and he wants our water“.

Now here’s another word salad, walking back the ‘threat’ from Trump. When Washington asked him why he met with Trump when he was still disrespecting Canada by talking about making it the 51st state, even during their meeting in the Oval Office, which he said it, as she described it, “right to your face“. According to Carney this was ‘different’, and then he delivers another word salad because apparently, “Trump was expressing a desire … he had shifted from an expectation to a desire for that to happen. He was also coming from a place where he recognized that that wasn’t going to happen. I made it clear to him in that context.”

May 5, 2025

Post-election Bullshit Bulletin from The Line

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

Last week’s federal election has left us in the weird, unresolved situation of being not significantly different than the situation before the writ dropped. We still have a Liberal minority government, probably supported by the rump of the NDP caucus (minus Jagmeet Singh) and a reliable vote from the Green MP, which is enough to pass at least an initial confidence vote in the Commons. Before The Line‘s editors put the Bullshit Bulletin back into mothballs, we get a useful wrap-up post:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

We want to now offer some advice to Pierre Poilievre: grow up.

Seriously. Because not calling your opponent to congratulate him is bullshit.

We don’t mean Mark Carney! We do think Poilievre should call Carney and offer congratulations and also test the waters to see what extent, if any, there is room for cooperation. We aren’t naive idealists. We know neither man is going to want to hop into the sack — politically speaking — with the other. But there are still norms in a democracy, and they should be observed. Poilievre did congratulate Carney in his remarks on election night, and did so with professionalism and grace, and that’s good.

But we’re actually talking about Bruce Fanjoy, the newly elected Liberal MP for Carleton, the riding that had been held for many years by … Pierre Poilievre. Fanjoy defeated Poilievre on Monday, and by a decisive margin. In an interview with NewsTalk 1010 in Toronto, Fanjoy said that he hadn’t received a call from Poilievre to congratulate him. Calls to the winners of a riding race by the opponents in that riding are routine. Fanjoy doesn’t seem much fazed by the lack of a call, but still. It’s not a great look.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that not making a call will be seen as confirmation in the eyes of some voters of what they already thought about Poilievre. We aren’t the first to note that the Conservative leader is polarizing and has high “negatives” — Canadians tell pollsters that they dislike him. We understand that congratulating the guy that beat you must be like pulling your own teeth out. We also think we have a good enough read on Poilievre’s personality to know why this is particularly difficult for him.

Too bad. A would-be national leader is expected to sometimes do unpleasant things. And we’re calling about a two-minute phone call here, not making a decision to send troops into battle (some of whom will die) or a decision that will alter the trajectory of our national history.

Make the call, offer congratulations, wish him well, offer any cooperation you can, and get it over with. And if you don’t, Canadians will be right to call bullshit on that.

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte notes the oddly incurious attitude of the Canadian mainstream media toward the man who became Trudeau’s successor as PM and leader of the Liberal Party:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Carney became prime minister of Canada in March without our media delivering a single meaningful profile of him.

There was a time, only recently ended, when every party leader and most prospective party leaders (and most senior cabinet ministers and chiefs of staff) were subjected to scrutiny the moment they were deemed serious players. A reporter, usually a high-ranking feature artist, would be assigned by Maclean’s, Saturday Night, Report on Business, The Walrus, The Globe & Mail, The National Post, a CBC documentary desk, or any number of other outlets, to dig into the person’s past, read everything on the record, speak to friends and enemies and knowledgeable observers, weigh all the evidence and craft a narrative to give readers (or audiences) a sense of what made the person tick, and some idea of how to think about him or her in relation to public office. At their best, these profiles would provide a welcome counterpoint to how political actors chose to define themselves and how they were defined by their opponents. They were an arbiter of sorts, a first draft of history depended upon by participants in the political process, other media, and the informed public.

No one bothered to profile Carney, even though his advent in our politics had been rumoured for years. It was as though the press gallery in Ottawa assumed he was a known quantity because he’d shown up at the Politics & The Pen Gala for several years in his capacity as governor of the Bank of Canada.

Carney was not only sworn in as prime minister without sustained scrutiny, he made it all the way to the last week of a national campaign before the Globe landed what read like a well-intentioned but hastily assembled and not terribly revealing profile of him. Also in the last week, The Logic, a very good upstart business news site, produced a better one, but for a relatively tiny audience behind an expensive paywall.

Thinking and reporting in depth about the careers and characters of our leaders is perhaps the most important thing that journalists do. Yet Carney’s experience is not unique. If you want to know anything about our last two prime ministers, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, you won’t find much in newspapers, magazines, or documentaries. You’ll need to read the books about them: Stephen Harper by John Ibbitson, Right Side Up and The Longer I’m Prime Minister by Paul Wells, Party of One by Michael Harris; Trudeau by John Ivison, Promise and Peril by Aaron Wherry, The Prince by Stephen Maher, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes by Paul Wells. There is a whole other shelf of aggressively critical takes on the two leaders which offer valuable insights amid their axe-grinding: Tom McMillan’s Not My Party (Harper), Mel Hurtig’s The Arrogant Autocrat (Harper), Brooke Jeffrey’s Dismantling Canada (Harper), Mark Bourrie’s Kill The Messengers (Harper), Yves Engler’s The Ugly Canadian (Harper), Ezra Levant’s Libranos (Trudeau), Candice Malcolm’s Losing True North (Trudeau). Additionally, there are books by the leaders themselves, Harper’s Right Here, Right Now, and Trudeau’s Common Ground, and a range of others written about particular issues or by other participants in their governments.

The past year has brought a wealth of books on our political leadership. Justin Trudeau on the Ropes (Sutherland House) and The Prince (Simon & Schuster) chronicled the last days of Trudeau’s prime ministership. Catherine Tsalikis’s Chrystia (House of Anansi) profiled the woman who ultimately brought him down. Andrew Lawton’s Pierre Poilievre (Sutherland House) and Mark Bourrie’s Ripper (Biblioasis) treated the Conservative leader who sought to replace him. Carney, seemingly intent on dominating the conversation about himself, was ready with another book this spring. The election delayed it until summer.

May 2, 2025

Trump’s victory lap after getting his preferred PM elected in Canada

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper rounds up American reactions to the Liberal victory in the Monday election, as many Americans seem to agree that Carney’s win was at least partly their doing:

As the U.S. awoke to a renewed Liberal government on their northern border, Americans of all political persuasions embraced the view that they — for better or worse — had caused it.

“Carney owes his job to President Donald Trump,” was the Tuesday view of the Washington Post editorial board, declaring that the U.S. president had singlehandedly thwarted the election of a populist Conservative government in Canada.

The Centre for American Progress Action Fund — a left-wing Washington, D.C.-based think tank — framed Carney’s win as a model for how anti-Trump rhetoric can win elections.

“Prime Minister Carney’s success demonstrates that resistance to President Trump’s bullying has mass popular appeal,” read a statement.

Actor Billy Baldwin, a perennial backer of progressive causes, cheered Carney’s victory with a viral social media post declaring “Trump singlehandedly delivers the election for the liberals in Canada with his 51st state bullsh-t.”

Even Rolling Stone, which put Justin Trudeau on the magazine’s cover in 2017, opined that Canada’s newest Liberal government was effectively a Trump creation. “Donald Trump single-handedly elected a new Canadian Liberal Government that was down 25 points in January with his endless ’51st State’ bloviation,” wrote the publication.

Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro broke down the Canadian election in an extended segment on his Tuesday show, framing it as a direct failure of Trump’s foreign policy.

“Let’s be real about this; the rhetorical attacks on Canada have not actually resulted in a net good for the United States,” said Shapiro. A perennial critic of Trump’s tariff policy, Shapiro said that the White House’s habit of “yelling at Canada” had helped install a “far left-leaning internationalist” hostile to U.S. interests.

“All of this started off as a joke, and I think President Trump is so committed to the bit at this point that he couldn’t get off the train,” said Shapiro, in reference to Trump’s repeated pledges to turn Canada into the “51st state”.

A Republican consultant quoted anonymously by Politico on Tuesday was of a similar view, saying the outcome in Canada was a “pretty specific result based on the tariffs and 51st state trolling.”

On his Substack, Paul Wells offers some advice to Mark Carney about his dealings with Pierre Poilievre at this awkward time for the Conservative leader:

Stornoway in the Rockcliffe Park area of Ottawa, Ontario. It has been the official residence of the leader of the Official Opposition in Parliament since 1950.

One danger for Mark Carney is that he will be taught how to be a terrible politician by terrible politicians. A low-stakes test case is at hand. In this as in all things, a decent guiding principle should be: Don’t be like your opponent, and don’t be like your predecessor.

The test at hand is the uncomfortable predicament of Pierre Poilievre, who used to be a Member of Parliament and may want to be one again. In the meantime he is still the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Poilievre lost his seat in Carleton on Monday night. This is not entirely his fault. Liberal campaign teams from neighbouring ridings were invited to spend part of their time door-knocking in Poilievre’s riding. But candidates should try to win even when their opponents work hard to defeat them. I bet this thought has occurred to Poilievre since Monday.

The usual route to the Commons, for a leader who is not yet an MP, is to run in a by-election. Often new leaders find a sitting MP somewhere to vacate their seat and enable a by-election. Brian Mulroney ran in Central Nova in 1983, Jean Chrétien in Beauséjour in New Brunswick in 1990, Stephen Harper in Calgary Southwest in 2002.

Assume Poilievre can find some Conservative MP-elect willing to abandon a seat they just won so Poilievre can try his chance (again). How should Carney react?

It’s really a question in three parts. Should a by-election be held quickly or much later? Should the Liberals run a candidate? Should the Poilievre family keep living at Stornoway, the Opposition leader’s official residence, in the meantime?

I’m hearing from a lot of people who say Carney should wait as long as the law permits — up to a half year after a seat opens — before calling the by-election; that the Liberals should definitely run a candidate; and that Poilievre and his family should be evicted from their current fancy abode.

I spent part of Wednesday debating these questions with readers on Substack Notes. Most of the people offering this advice — let him twist, then hit him hard — pointed out that if Poilievre had a say about an adversary’s career plans, he would do everything in his power to make that adversary hurt.

I think it’s bad advice. It manages to be bad tactics and bad for the soul. The two considerations don’t always line up, but here they do.

Carney should call a by-election as soon as possible after a sitting MP resigns — 11 days after the notice of vacancy is received, the minimum permitted in law. If asked, he should prefer that the Poilievre family stay at Stornoway in the meantime. And while the third question is less clear, I’d argue that the Liberals should refrain from running a candidate in the by-election.

This plan would have Poilievre back in the Commons as soon as possible, with minimal risk and discomfort. He’ll be lucky to receive such generous treatment and, while I’m less confident than ever that I know how he thinks, what he should feel is gratitude. I suspect the feeling would confuse him.

May 1, 2025

Canada’s Conservative Party – every silver lining has a cloud

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

In the National Post, Colby Cosh considers the state of the party for the federal Conservatives after an election campaign that looked radically different than the one they had prepared to fight for more than a year:

Pierre Poilievre’s riding had an insane number of protest candidates registered for the election. Oddly, the same wasn’t true in any other riding in the country. This was an organized protest for electoral reform, supposedly.

The Conservative opposition is now bound to have a difficult year, with their leader inexplicably, inexcusably ejected from the Commons. Dedicated haters of Pierre Poilievre won’t find anything at all inexplicable about the Carleton disaster, but there will need to be a proper autopsy. Especially since Poilievre’s party gathered more vote share nationally than any right-wing party — or combination thereof! — has achieved since the days of Mulroney.

Even in Ontario, Poilievre’s Conservatives got over a million more votes than the hyper-critical Ford PCs did in a provincial election 60 days earlier, and they are headed toward a higher vote share within the province. So is Poilievre a generational leader potentially on the brink of a dynasty, or an unloved boob who got caught flat-footed by a change in public mood? I promise you that the quarrelling over that question is well underway.

I assume the CPC will keep its unlucky leader, which leaves only the question, “So then what?” The Liberals don’t have to call a by-election until six months after someone decides to resign to make way for Poilievre. And maybe I ought to say “if someone decides”. It’s not essential for a party leader to have a Commons seat, but it would certainly be ideal, especially with the Commons hung.

The Conservatives are bound to find themselves adopting more of a team approach to the Opposition job by default, and maybe this ought to have been considered while it was still optional. Even by Canadian standards, the CPC campaign was very leader-focused, and was obviously predicated on the idea that the people really wanted Poilievre and would like him more as they saw more of him. (And, again, this may actually have happened!) Now there’s a chance the CPC’s House leadership performs well over the next year or so — and then has to fade into the wallpaper behind the guy who already lost.

April 30, 2025

After the votes were counted

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

John Carter suggests that votes should be allocated to reflect the costs imposed on the voters by taxation, that is to ensure that those with the most “skin in the game” at least have their votes weighted more than those who pay little or no taxes but can still vote themselves more benefits:

Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs taxeater status?

So anyhow.

For my American readers, in Canadian elections the Liberal Party is denoted by red, as the Devil and Karl Marx intended.

It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups: migrants, public sector workers, and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups, and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation’s capital.

Perhaps it’s that it’s tax season and I’m in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but I can’t help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote. It’s common for “taxpayers” to be used as a synonym for “the voting public”, but this is a bit of linguistic legerdemain which obscures a core dynamic rotting the heart out of every liberal democracy: most of the population are not, in fact, taxpayers. First there are those who don’t earn enough to pay taxes, such as university students; then there are those receiving direct welfare payments of one form or another; then there are public employees, who although they pay tax on paper, are clearly net recipients of government largess since their paychecks come from taxes in the first place.

The most successful parties in country after country are the parties that mobilize client groups by promising to steal money from productive citizens and transfer that wealth to their non-productive clients. This dynamic is baked into the cake of any universal suffrage democracy, which is why Universal Suffrage is a Suicide Pact. Parties need client groups for electoral support; wealth can only be plundered from the productive; therefore the only available relationship is to cultivate non-productive clients.

The problem, of course, is that over time this destroys the economic productivity of the liberal democracy, because the productive groups will become less productive because what’s the point, or they’ll just look for the exits, while the client groups will swell, becoming simultaneously too expensive to maintain and to electorally heavy to dislodge.

I suspect you could fix all of this by simply tying votes to tax receipts, with only those who are net taxpayers being given the franchise in any given election. At a stroke this would disenfranchise the welfare underclass, government bureaucrats, and university students, all of whom should be prohibited from voting as a matter of principle. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could implement a tax-weighted vote: the more taxes you pay, the more your vote counts.

In addition to the salutary effects of reducing the electoral weight of female voters (since men tend to pay more in taxes), weighting votes by tax receipts would lead to a very interesting incentive structure. On the one hand, everyone hates paying taxes, and wants to minimize the taxes they pay; if only taxpayers were voting, this would place a strong downward pressure on taxes and, hence, on the size of government (thus forcing states to find other ways of funding themselves, via e.g. tariffs or service fees). On the other hand, people like to vote, so there would be a strong incentive not to evade taxes. On the gripping hand, since paying more tax means your vote counts for more, there would be a countervailing incentive to pay as much tax as you can afford. One might imagine a state functioning as a sort of de facto oligarchy, with the billionaires happily paying obscene levels of tax in order to gather as much political power to their class as possible, and enforcing their tyranny by voting to keep taxes on everyone else to the absolute bare minimum. This would be a truly dystopian brier patch to be thrown into.

Alas, we do not inhabit such a political experiment. Returning to the ostensible topic of yesterday’s Canadian election, however, it would probably not be an exaggeration to posit that if we did inhabit such a system, Canada’s Conservative Party would have rolled the Liberals in this and, in all likelihood, almost every other election.

That is not, however, what happened.

The high-level outcome is that, after running the country into the ground for the last decade, the Liberal Party has been elected for the fourth consecutive time, with a mandate to complete the project of crashing the plane of Dominion with no survivors. It brings me absolutely no pleasure to report that I predicted the Liberals would win before the election was even called. The Liberals are four seats short of forming a majority in parliament, meaning they cannot quite form a stable government on their own. This is not a problem for the Liberals, however. Despite the glorious collapse of the New Democratic Party – which plummeted from 25 seats in the last federal election to 7 in the current election, by far their lowest in 30 years – the NDP retains just enough seats for them to form a stable coalition government with the Liberals. In other words, the outcome of this election is that Canada will be in essentially the same situation it was in before the election, with the only meaningful difference being that the Liberals have a few more seats than they did before.

April 29, 2025

Canadian federal election result

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

April 27, 2025

“[T]he practical reality of electoral politics throughout the west: the choice is between a Leftward Ho! party and a Ratchet party”

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

Mark Steyn on the steady leftward march of pretty much every western nation that never, ever stops and only rarely slows down:

A ratchet allows rotation in one direction, but prevents rotation in the other direction. That’s been a common explanation of most western governments for decades … leftward motion occurs, but can only be stopped, never reversed.

In a shrewd assessment of the current campaign Down Under, Paul Collits cites a certain “niche Canadian”:

    Mark Steyn says that we cannot vote our way out of the Western mess. The 2025 Australian election is living proof of the truth of his claim. Whoever wins here will inherit an unholy mess, and will not have the will to address it.

Of course, he could be talking about next week’s Canadian election or last month’s German election. As we have noted, Fred Merz, the incoming chancellor in Berlin, has yet to take office but what Americans call the honeymoon is over before the coalition has been officially pronounced man and wife. Hermann Binkert, head honcho of Germany’s INSA polling agency, says the country has never seen loss of approval on this scale between the election and the formation of the government. The so-called “far-right” AfD is now leading in multiple polls. Which would be super-exciting if voting hadn’t already taken place.

In America, the new administration certainly has the “will to address” the “unholy mess” but the Trumpian Gulliver is beset on all sides by District Court Lilliputians whose position is that what a Democrat president has done cannot “lawfully” be undone. This is a pseudo-“constitutional” recognition of the practical reality of electoral politics throughout the west: the choice is between a Leftward Ho! party and a Ratchet party. If the Left wins, they dissolve the border and trannify your kids. If the “Right” wins (Stephen Harper, Scott Morrison), they may pause some of the more obviously crazy stuff but they never actually reverse the direction of travel. Unless they’re the UK Tories (Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak), in which case they stay in the leftie lane without even shifting down to third gear.

So “politics”, as increasingly narrowly defined, is less and less likely to save you. Because the gap between “politics” and reality grows ever wider. Consider the instructive example of one Hashem Abedi. Mr Abedi and his brother plotted the Ariana Grande concert bombing in Manchester. It was, from the Abedi viewpoint, a huge success: twenty-two dead, half of them kids, plus a thousand injured. It was a big deal at the time: lots of flowers, teddy bears, and heart-rending renditions of “Don’t Look Back in Anger”.

So you’d have thought even the British state would have at least pretended to take it seriously. Hashem Abedi was detained at His Majesty’s Pleasure, and under one of the three supposedly toughest prison regimes in England and Wales. Nevertheless, on April 12th he put three of his guards in hospital with what were described as “life-threatening injuries“. A fortnight later, two are still there. How did a maximum-security prisoner manage to do that? Well, he used boiling cooking oil and weaponised kitchen utensils.

So how did he get hold of boiling cooking oil? Was he a finalist for Maximum Security Masterchef? Ah, well. The details remain vague, and as usual the worthless UK media has shown not the slightest curiosity in how the Ariana Grande perp came close to bulking up his death toll by fifteen per cent.

April 26, 2025

The week-before-the-vote Bullshit Bulletin

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Line‘s invaluable bullshit tracker includes some steaming bullshit from Mark Carney, the Conservative campaign, and, perhaps the most acrid bullshit from the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh:

Jagmeet Singh, the empty turban. He is the current (and possibly last) leader of the federal New Democratic Party, and it’s his conscious actions that may have doomed his party to parliamentary oblivion.

This article, about a recent meeting between Singh and the Toronto Star editorial board, is just absolutely bonkers. Jagmeet. Our dude. We like you. We do. But this is some epic bullshit.

This passage, in particular:

    The NDP leader stood by his decision not to plunge the country into an early election last fall while support for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals plummeted, telling the Star‘s editorial board he “couldn’t stomach” the idea of causing Pierre Poilievre’s seizure of power, and that he made the choice to put Canada’s interests ahead of those of the New Democratic Party.

    “While we could have won lots of seats, it would have meant a Pierre Poilievre majority Conservative government, and I could not stomach that,” Singh said, making the argument that an election would have jeopardized progress on pharmacare deals and dental care expansion. “I love my party. I care deeply about it. I want us to win. I want us to up our seats. I know we’re good for people. But in that moment, I made a decision for the interest of the country ahead of my party. And that was a decision I made wide-eyed, and I stand by that decision.”

Hmmm. Okay. So. Let’s take that at face value. If only for the sake of argument.

Singh realizes what the logical endpoint of that argument is, right? … right?! The story of this election, to the extent there is a single one, is that the NDP collapse made it impossible for the Conservatives to win. We have lots of criticisms of the CPC campaign; we’ve made some already and we’ll have more to say when it’s over. But we recognize the truth that without a strong NDP, even a perfect and flawless Conservative campaign was always going to be an uphill battle. It’s just a really difficult situation for the Conservatives to overcome.

And you know what Singh could do to make that a permanent state of affairs? Give up! Tank the NDP completely. Do a national tour asking everyone to vote Liberal. Defect and become a Liberal. Spend his post-politics career, which seems set to start sometime early next week, campaigning for a two-party system, under which the Liberals defeat the Conservatives over and over.

End the vote splitting by ending the NDP. That’s a case that many Liberals have made before. And fair enough. But it’s some kind of bullshit to see Singh himself making it, and we can’t imagine his NDP colleagues are particularly pleased to see their leader taking a position that the Liberals took years ago: that the best way for left-leaning voters to stop the Conservatives is to put the country first, and vote for them.

April 24, 2025

“Call for Admiral Ackbar! Paging Admiral Ackbar. Admiral Ackbar to the white courtesy phone, please.”

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

What a wonderful, heartwarming story: those cuddly folks in Beijing are reaching out to Canada to “partner with” as a way of warding off American “bullying”. How nice! What a great idea! With the best possible intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

China’s ambassador says Beijing is offering to form a partnership with Canada to push back against American “bullying”, suggesting the two countries could rally other nations to stop Washington from undermining global rules.

“We want to avoid the situation where humanity is brought back to a world of the law of the jungle again,” Chinese Ambassador Wang Di told The Canadian Press in a wide-ranging interview.

“China is Canada’s opportunity, not Canada’s threat,” he said through the embassy’s interpreter.

Wang — whose office requested the interview with The Canadian Press — said that China and Canada appear to be the only countries taking “concrete and real countermeasures against the unjustified U.S. tariffs” imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

“We have taken notice that, faced with the U.S.’s unilateral bullying, Canada has not backed down,” he said. “Instead, Canada is standing on the right side of the history, on the right side of international fairness and justice.”

He said Beijing and Ottawa should work together to convince other countries not to placate the Trump administration and to make Washington pay a price for breaking global trade rules.

Roland Paris, who leads the University of Ottawa’s graduate school of international affairs, said Beijing has long sought to reshape international institutions to advance its own interests — efforts that often have put China at odds with Ottawa’s foreign policy.

He said Canadian businesses should take a cautious approach to China, where they still face the risk of import bans and arbitrary detainment.

“The mercenary use of tariffs and non-tariff barriers that we’re seeing from the Trump administration has been practised for a long time by China in different forms,” Paris said.

“China has played its own version of hardball and abused trade rules in the past to coerce countries, including Canada, that have dared to displease Beijing.”

As the rivalry between the U.S. and China has intensified, Canada has generally followed Washington’s lead on restricting certain types of commerce with China.

Last fall — in an effort to protect Canadian auto sector jobs and allay American concerns about threats to supply chains — the federal government imposed 100 per cent tariffs on imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles that all but banned Chinese EVs from the Canadian market.

Canada alleged unfair trade practices including “a state-directed policy of overcapacity and oversupply,” and “lack of rigorous labour and environmental standards”.

Beijing retaliated by imposing large tariffs on Canadian canola and pork — duties Wang said Beijing is happy to drop if Ottawa drops its own tariffs.

In totally unrelated news, a Conservative candidate has been advised by the RCMP to “pause in-person campaigning” in the current federal election campaign due to threats originating in the People’s Republic of China:

Joseph Tay, the Conservative candidate identified by federal authorities as the target of aggressive Chinese election interference operations, paused in-person campaigning yesterday following advice from federal police, The Bureau has learned.

Two sources with awareness of the matter said the move came after the SITE Task Force — Canada’s election-threat monitor — confirmed that Tay is the subject of a highly coordinated transnational repression operation tied to the People’s Republic of China. The campaign seeks not only to discredit Tay, but to suppress the ability of Chinese Canadian voters to access his campaign messages online, via cyber operations conducted by Beijing’s internet authorities.

Now, with six days until Canada’s pivotal vote — in an election likely to be decided across key Toronto battleground ridings — it appears that Tay’s ability to reach voters in person has also been downgraded.

Tay, a journalist and pro-democracy advocate born in Hong Kong, is running for the Conservative Party in the Don Valley North riding. Federal intelligence sources have confirmed that his political activities have made him a top target for Beijing-linked online attacks and digital suppression efforts in the lead-up to next week’s federal election.

Tay’s need to suspend door-knocking yesterday in Don Valley North echoes concerns raised in a neighbouring riding during the 2021 federal campaign — where The Bureau previously uncovered allegations of Chinese government intimidation and targeting of voters and a Conservative incumbent. According to senior Conservative sources, Chinese agents attempted to intimidate voters and monitor the door-to-door campaign of then-incumbent MP Bob Saroya in Markham–Unionville.

Update: Spotted on the social network formerly known as Twitter:

April 23, 2025

“Liberals have never met a crisis they didn’t think they could spend their way out of”

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

Jesse Kline refutes Mark Carney’s recent diss against libertarians:

The Liberal Boomer in his natural state (spotted on social media, 20 April, 2025).

“The capacity of the federal government to invest in the economy, to support businesses and individuals, will ensure that we bounce back strongly.”

That was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announcing an $82-billion support package at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it could just as easily have been Carney, who said over the weekend that, “In a crisis … government needs to step up.”

At a Saturday news conference, the Liberal leader unveiled his party’s election platform, which includes $130 billion in new spending over four years to fend off the threats posed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

“It’s said there are no atheists in foxholes, there should be no libertarians in a crisis,” Carney argued to justify the continued spending spree.

This offends me as both a libertarian and an atheist. In fact, Canada would be in much better shape today if there were a few libertarians in the room when the Liberals were dealing with the numerous emergencies they’ve faced over the past decade.

The problem with crises is that there’s no way to predict when the next one will hit. But a prudent government should expect the unexpected and leave some fiscal room in the budget to address unforeseen events, while working to fortify the economy during good times so it can withstand the bad. This is not what the Liberals have done.

They took a $1.9-billion surplus in the 2014-15 fiscal year and turned it into a $25-billion deficit in 2016-17.

[…]

And so, we got more Big Government programs that we could ill afford, while Trudeau turned away world leaders looking to Canada to help solve an energy crisis resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Now, as Carney prepares to launch another massive spending spree to deal with the effects of U.S. tariffs, he’s pledging hundreds of millions of dollars for unnecessary programs, including permanent funding for the Sexual and Reproductive Health Fund to make it easier to abort babies, and $400 million for IVF treatments to create new ones in a test tube.

Needless to say that if there were some libertarians around the cabinet table during the crises of the past 10 years, we likely wouldn’t be facing a major economic upheaval with a $40-billion budget deficit, which Carney wants to increase to $62 billion, and a national debt approaching $1.26 trillion.

Spending always appeals to the voters at election time, and the Liberals have been past masters of using that to get into power. But even though there may be a lot of ruin in a nation, even the biggest of nations eventually runs out of money. According to a report from Policy Horizons Canada, an in-house government think tank, we’re well on the way to reaching that ruin and nobody will like what that looks like:

The report warns that by 2040, housing affordability is essentially limited to the wealthy or those with family help; most new homeowners get help from family, some depend on intergenerational mortgages and have several generations of family living together, and others enter “alternative” household mortgages with friends, with a growing percentage of homeowners also owning rental properties.

“Inequality between those who rent and those who own has become a key driver of social, economic, and political conflict,” reads the report.

Moreover, the report highlights a growing dependence on intergenerational wealth, noting that by 2040, inheritance is widely seen as the only reliable path to prosperity. “Society increasingly resembles an aristocracy,” it states, as family background — particularly property ownership — becomes the defining factor in determining one’s opportunities.

Canadians in this future rarely mix with others of different socio-economic status, and there is a clear disconnect between the aspirations of the country’s youth and economic realities, which leaves most with limited expectations of success.

And finally, the rapid propagation of artificial intelligence has dramatically reshaped the labour market. By 2040, the rise of artificial intelligence will have significantly diminished the availability of jobs in creative and knowledge-based professions, once seen as stable paths to upward mobility.

[…]

As a result of the six factors, Canada’s economy could shrink or become less predictable, with the consumer economy shrinking in size, and a higher proportion of very wealthy, older people holding the capital capacity for investment in new businesses. Labour unions could also grow in power and size from a frustrated population. The mental health of Canadians could suffer from living cost challenges.

With these upward mobility issues, Canada may become a less attractive destination for immigrants, and there could be an exodus of young workers, which would exacerbate the issues with supporting the public and social services that support the country’s growing cohort of seniors. This could also result in a labour shortage in industries where artificial intelligence is most difficult.

Perhaps most dystopian is a partial reversion of Canadian society to a trade-and-barter and neo-hunter-gatherer society by 2040, in response to declining trust in formal systems and reduced access to traditional economic opportunities.

[…]

The report’s vision of a future Canada — where trust in institutions collapses, effort no longer yields reward, and people yearn for systemic change — carries echoes of that dangerous historical crossroads, where ideological extremes once flourished in the face of prolonged despair.

With all that said, how likely is this precarious scenario of Canadian society in just 15 years from 2025?

According to Policy Horizons Canada, its “research suggests that it is plausible and would create challenges across a range of policy areas.”

April 21, 2025

Bonus QotD: Pierre Poilievre

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

… Canada’s governing class is not popular. For years now, all across the country Canadians have defiantly hoisted the black flag of Fuck Trudeau as precursor to their intent to start slitting political throats the next time they’re allowed to vote. Such vulgarity is unheard of in Canadian politics. It takes a great deal for Canadians to be impolite.

However, this widespread dissatisfaction has so far failed to coalesce into any meaningful populist insurgency opposing the Laurentian elite. Until recently, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, was coasting towards an easy electoral landslide on the back of this simmering popular anger, with his primary and indeed only selling point being that he is not Justin Trudeau. That is not to say that he is terribly different from Justin Trudeau. For American readers, Poilievre can be best described as vaguely reminiscent of Pete Buttigieg, with politics a hair to the right of the left of the right of Buttigieg’s left.

On a policy level the Conservatives are practically identical to the liberals; indeed, on immigration, after the LPC was forced by overwhelming weight of public opinion to slightly reduce the rate at which they lavished student visas and temporary foreign worker visas on their clients, Poilievre’s Conservatives essentially allowed the Liberals to outflank them to the right on the immigration issue, despite mass deportations being a very clear electoral winner.

Only very recently did Poilievre finally pledge to reduce immigration to “only” a quarter of a million a year … still a far cry from the clear necessity to reverse the flood that Trudeau and the rest of his World Economic Forum Young Global Leader alumni unleashed on the country.

John Carter, “Maple Maidan”, Postcards From Barsoom, 2025-02-15.

April 19, 2025

Notes on the English debate

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

In the National Post, Chris Selley explains the apparent utility of having Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet included in the English-language leaders’ debate:

Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet, 8 November, 2023.
Screencapture from a TVA Nouvelles video via Wikimedia Commons.

Wednesday evening’s French-language leaders’ debate kicked off with a video montage that mentioned President Donald Trump roughly 175 times. (I exaggerate somewhat.) Thursday evening’s English-language leaders’ debate was much less focused specifically on Trump, to an almost bizarre extent. When moderator Steve Paikin offered each leader a chance to ask a question of an opponent, Liberal Leader Mark Carney chose to ask Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre about the security-clearance drama.

Carney’s campaign clearly believes Poilievre’s Achilles’ heel is Trump. One has to wonder how many Canadians even know the basics of the security-clearance issue. It was a baffling decision.

Ultimately, though, leaving Trump aside was a benefit. One of Carney or Poilievre will be prime minister in a month, and they essentially agree that Trump is too unpredictable to strategize against with any confidence from our current position as a semi-deadbeat country. (Again, I paraphrase.)

The only thing we can really do is focus on our own affairs in ways that would make us more prosperous, safe, happy and independent in every sense. In the long term: diversify our trade partners in every sector, including natural resources; improve border security, not to satisfy Trump’s fentanyl obsession but to prevent the northbound flow of illegal firearms (and because borders are supposed to be secure by definition); rebuild the military, not because Trump demands it but out of respect to our existing commitment to NATO and our self-styled reputation as An Important Country; fix health care; make housing affordable; get a handle on our own opioid crisis; fix our broken justice system. All that jazz.

You might think in a debate on those big national issues Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet would be extraneous on the stage. I saw plenty of people reacting in real time in that vein: Why is this man here? But in fact Blanchet served a very useful purpose: He was the voice of comfy Canadian inertia; the voice of Quebec continuing to plod along in its own way under Canada’s protective umbrella (ludicrous sovereignty-referendum threats notwithstanding).

Blanchet embodied how Canada might very plausibly abandon the opportunity that Trump’s kick in our rear end, however unjustified, offered us to live up to the greatness Canadian politicians always ascribe — often dubiously — to this country.

“The building of (new) pipelines will take at least 10 to 14 years. Mr. Trump will be 90 years old, not president … and somebody of course less terrible will be there before you can even dream of having oil through (a new) pipeline,” Blanchet said, kiboshing (as ever) the notion of any new pipeline running through Quebec.

At Rigid Thinking, Damian Penny tries to explain Jagmeet Singh’s performance as the designated interrupter:

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

I didn’t see the entire English-language, federal leaders debate on Thursday night, but from what I did see each of the leaders accomplished exactly what they set out to do:

  • Pierre Poilievre went on offence against the liberals and tried to show that, despite their new leader, it’s the same bunch that have been running the country for the past decade.
  • Mark Carney portrayed himself as much more measured and serious than either his main opponent or his predecessor.
  • The Bloc guy showed that his only concern is Quebec and by the way everything comes down to immigration.
  • And the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh did everything he had to do to lock down that cushy patronage appointment he’ll receive should Carney be elected Prime Minister on April 28.

    There was far more cross talk and interruptions during Thursday’s English debate compared to the French parlay the night before. Singh in particular seemed prone to interrupt his opponents.

    Poilievre was the main target of Singh’s interjections — so much so that at one point Carney told the NDP leader to let his Conservative rival finish his point.

    When Poilievre criticized the industrial carbon tax, Singh jumped in and accused the Conservatives of wanting to let everyone pollute. Poilievre spoke about border issues and Singh accused the former Conservative government of cutting border officers.

    Poilievre at one point tried to make an appeal to voters: “The question that Canadians have to ask…”

    “Why vote for Conservatives?” Singh jumped in before Poilievre could finish.

As of this writing, the venerable NDP is polling about as well in Canada as Marjorie Taylor Greene, and their only real shot at even maintaining major party status is to peel off voters from the Liberals, since no one even considering voting Conservative will vote for Singh’s party.

The Line‘s election Bullshit Bulletin overflowed with bullshit from the debates, including some Mark Carney blarney about pipelines:

Mark Carney had quite a few howlers during Thursday’s debate, one of which was aptly called out by Blanchet (hey, we like the guy, we just don’t think he should be in the debate). Carney wants to portray himself as strongly pro-pipeline, while still respecting Quebec’s ability to effectively veto national projects. That’s bullshit — and Carney should stop pretending otherwise.

Carney has been out of the country in recent years, so he may be unaware of how things are actually working. To sum up the last 10 years of internecine battles on this point: Pipelines absolutely fall under federal jurisdiction to approve or disapprove. However, provinces can hold up or significantly delay certain aspects of the process, either through legal challenges, or through sandbagging local permitting processes. The big lesson of the last 10 years is that absolute jackshit can actually get built when provincial governments try to encroach on federal authority to stall projects that fall under the national interest. Duties for First Nations consultation add another complicating step. Lastly, this country couldn’t build a goddamn supermarket (and Singh might try to stop it, even if we could) if conditions veer into the quasi-spiritual realm of “social license” — because nobody really knows what that means, or how the bar for “social license” can be cleared when any project at all is even remotely contested or controversial.

Add Bill C-69 to the mix, and what we’re facing is a regulatory quagmire in which the Liberals have made the approvals process practically impossible, and pissed everybody off while doing it. It’s worse than that almost nothing is getting built; the situation is now such a disaster that major projects are no longer even being seriously proposed. Even CEOs of Canadian companies know that their best return on investment is energy projects outside of Canada (see The Line Podcast episode from a week ago and our dispatch last Sunday for discussion of this).

In short, Blanchet is correct, here. A pipeline filled with Alberta oil is not getting through Quebec if Quebec gets a veto. Either we’re in a Confederation in which a federal government has the final say over these things, or Quebec has already separated, and that’s the end of it.

There was also an excellent dissection of the Liberal Party’s endless games with Canadian firearm laws, but it was too long to sensibly excerpt, but if you have any interest or curiosity about why so many Canadian gun owners are pissed off with the feds, it’s worth reading in full.

April 18, 2025

Notes on the French debate

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

Paul Wells jotted down some notes in his Substack Chat after the leaders’ debate last night:

A few notes on last night’s post-election scrum fiasco, when reporters from Rebel News and Juno News got most of the questions. Some of the commentary this morning about this, from people who think it was a disaster (I think it’s unfortunate but not quite a disaster), is alarmingly superficial.

So here are some thoughts, threaded.

1. The debate commission didn’t just take it into their fool heads to invite these alt-right news organizations. They tried hard to block them in 2021, got hauled into court, and lost big. Remembering this very recent news event should, it seems to me, be a basic requirement for your pundit’s license. https://globalnews.ca/news/8174634/rebel-news-election-debates-court-challenge/

My first thought was that it’s apparently ok for Mr. Singh to refuse to engage with certain media, but if Mr. Poilievre remarks on CBC bias, he’s the enemy.

2. I’m not fond of Ezra, but in declaring that Rebel News had five divisions, he was engaging in not entirely unfunny satire about the way the CBC shows up with French and English radio and TV to every event. You may not like the joke! But it was clearly, to some extent, obvious satire about an obvious target.

3. I remain astonished that any political leader shows up for scrums after any debate. They just talked for two hours! The only possible newsworthy outcome from a scrum afterwards is, you walk all over the message you prepped for weeks to deliver. We had scrums after our 2015 Maclean’s debate. Stephen Harper just didn’t show up for them. That’s an option! Carney has worked hard since January to control and limit access to his regal person, and then he wanders into a scrum after what would be, for any anglophone, an exhausting two hours in French, as though somebody told him it was where he could get a sandwich? People are weird.

Once upon a time — at least in theory — one of the functions of the mainstream media was to help keep our political leaders under observation for the voters. That fantasy has long since vanished in Canada, as almost all the surviving mainstream media outfits are slavering propagandists, lickspittles, and fart-catchers for the Liberal Party and especially for its leader-of-the-moment. In The Line, a media outlet that isn’t directly funded by the federal government, Andrew MacDougall offers a parable about the Canadian media:

My eldest daughter is nine. Her little sister is five. The little one adores her big sister and believes everything she says.

I, on the other hand, am 49. My eldest often tries to convince me of things. But I am a skeptic when it comes to the things my children tell me, as any good parent should be. And because I push back on the eldest’s arguments, she often comes back moments later with much sharper ones. Sometimes I even change my mind.

Yes, this is a parable about the media and its role in public life, including during this federal election. And yes, we can debate the mechanics of media — who gets access, how many questions, and so on — but this is to both bury the lede and miss the story. There is much more at stake than whether the Toronto Star or the Globe gets a question at a tightly-managed press event.

What’s at stake is whether anyone in power will ever again have a parent to satisfy. Or whether those in power will be nine-year-olds, forever seeking the smoke blown up their asses by the five-year-olds in their life.

The ability to act like a nine-year-old in power is an entirely new phenomenon. In the Before Times, when a politician (or corporate leader) used to have to exchange credible arguments with a member of the media in return for access to the distribution network of their publication or broadcast, serious conversations were par for the course. It wasn’t perfect, no, but it was an adult time. There was no point rocking up to the microphone with a wild ad hominem attack, or armed with a list of faulty facts, because it wouldn’t have passed muster. There was no rolling 24/7 coverage, and easily discredited arguments wouldn’t have made the cut in what was then limited news real estate. Now, thanks to social media, there is an infinite and constantly updating canvas. You don’t even need a credit card, let alone an argument, in order to access and speak to your audience — and then tell them any damn thing you want, no matter its level of adherence to the truth.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In their pre-algorithmic infancy, the major social media platforms promised access and connection. In this more gentle, less attention-hogging iteration, the major benefit of the social media platforms and other owned channels was that they allowed you to go — unfiltered — to your intended audiences. A clean message, straight to the target voter. What politician wouldn’t want that? How could that be a bad thing? Well, other than the fact that politicians and other people in positions of power have been known to lie and try to cover up bad things.

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