Quotulatiousness

March 14, 2021

“You mean Justin Trudeau might have not lived up to his own self-branding and may have even — this is hard to even type — fallen short of the standard he sets for others?!”

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

Over at The Line, they’ve had to double the number of fainting couches available for overwhelmed and emotionally depleted staff members after discovering that the ongoing military leadership scandal goes up to the man at the top, Justin Trudeau himself:

We told you a week ago about the sexual misconduct scandal(s) at the very top of the Canadian Armed Forces. Army General Jonathan Vance recently retired after serving as the chief of the defence staff, the highest post in the military. Shortly after, Global News reported that he had faced two allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct during his career. Then, Vance’s successor was also required to step aside while being investigated for allegations of a sexual nature.

This is embarrassing for the military, but as we noted last week, there’s danger here to the government — Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan was told about the allegations against Vance, and passed that up the chain of command … meaning the PM knew, and did nothing.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You mean Justin Trudeau might have not lived up to his own self-branding and may have even — this is hard to even type — fallen short of the standard he sets for others?!

OK, OK. We had to sit down a minute there and catch our breath. It’s all just so much to take in. The government clearly knows it’s in trouble. Sajjan gave some testy testimony in which he said that it would have been inappropriate for him take an active role in any investigation. This is an awfully god-damned novel interpretation on ministerial responsibility that we’re excited to see become even dumber as this unfolds. The PM, for his part, has adjusted his ass covering; where once he said that he was not aware of the allegations against Gen. Vance, he now admits he was told in 2018, but says he did not know the details.

Think about that for a minute. The prime minister of Canada, the self-styled feminist prime minister of Canada, was told that the country’s top soldier, a man in a position of incredible power and authority, was accused of sexual misconduct, and … that’s it? Like he didn’t ask any questions? Give the old general a buzz and ask what’s up? A government that tried to sink an admiral in a case so flimsy it collapsed once readily available facts came to light couldn’t be bothered to find out if all that smoke around the general may have been from a fire?

This is, remarkably, not even the funny part. Everything above is embarrassing and awful and pathetic, but it actually gets worse.

March 9, 2021

QotD: Canadian culture

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

Everywhere one turns one sees a tendency toward mimesis — we tend to copy rather than invent — qualified by intellectual emptiness. In other words, it may be that the vacancy of the Canadian mind reflects the vacancy of the Canadian landscape. Of course, much of the land is variegated — lakes, rivers, forests, the impressive mountain ranges running down the length of “beautiful British Columbia” — in the same way, metaphorically speaking, that we can boast a number of resonating exceptions to the staple of tepid cultural and intellectual sameness.

One thinks of novelist Mordecai Richler, poet Irving Layton, critical minds Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, musicians Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot. Our founding father, Sir John A. Macdonald, was the ne plus ultra of our political class; there has been none like him since, which may explain why he is now on posthumous trial for war crimes and a hue and cry has gone up to remove his statues and rename eponymous schools.

The constitutive factor, however, exceptions aside, is the “howling emptiness” of a vast landmass that may partially account for the emptiness of our intellectual topography — if, as Jared Diamond had argued in Guns, Germs and Steel, geography governs the development of culture and spirit.

Any nation the preponderance of whose citizens regularly elects left-wing political parties; accepts single-payer healthcare; believes in the efficacy of the welfare state; endorses the hoax of global warming; accommodates swarms of third-world immigrants and refugees who have no love for or understanding of a country becoming an open-to-all multicultural tombola with the highest proportionate rate of immigrants in the Western world; has allowed its educational industry, from pre-school to graduate school, to be corrupted possibly beyond retrieval by lockstep Leftism, “diversity and inclusion,” and “social justice” claptrap; has caved to the feminist and campus-rape fable; dutifully takes CBC Leftist propaganda as gospel; has fallen for the 16th Century meme of the “Noble Savage” in its dealings with the aboriginal peoples; extravagantly celebrates a second-rate rock band like The Tragically Hip and names a street after it; reads (when it does read) tedious scribblers like the acclaimed Joseph Boyden and Ann-Marie MacDonald; and gives a complete ignoramus like Justin Trudeau a majority government on the strength of name and coiffure, cannot be regarded as informed, well-educated or in any way distinguished. Unlike the U.S., there are no cracks, to quote Leonard Cohen, where the light gets in. The Canadian political, cultural and academic spectrum has gone dark from end to end.

David Solway, “The Canadian Mind: A Culture So Open, Its ‘Brains Fall Out'”, PJ Media, 2018-10-10.

February 27, 2021

Profiles in Cowardice — Justin Trudeau

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

Matt Gurney on how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest act of moral cowardice probably won’t hurt him at all in the polls:

Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”

It has been fascinating to watch the reaction to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s profile in non-courage this week, after he and most of his cabinet skipped a vote on a Tory motion seeking to declare China’s brutal campaign against the Uyghur people a genocide. (Marc Garneau, who was probably desperately wishing he was back in low-Earth orbit, showed up to abstain … because that’s a good use of an astronaut.) If there is anything close to a consensus on the matter, it’s that the PM was in a difficult spot and found a way to slither out of it at the cost of some dignity, but no other real loss.

Kaveh Shahrooz, in a piece here at The Line on Thursday, made that case well. He savaged Trudeau for his hypocrisy — “when the chips were down, the [gender-based analysis], the intersectional lens and the feminist foreign policy were tossed aside in favour of appeasing China,” he wrote — but he also noted that the entire affair won’t really hurt the PM. “Sadly, the worst that will happen to Trudeau because of the hypocrisy and incompetence displayed is some angry tweets and a few articles like this one,” said Shahrooz.

Maybe. But maybe not. Shahrooz and others are certainly right that the prime minister won’t pay an electoral price, and probably won’t see his polling waver. But history makes its own judgments. And I suspect this prime minister is more aware of that than most.

It seems a long time ago now, but in his first term, Trudeau made a habit of apologizing. Only rarely for stuff that he was actually himself responsible for — he’s kinda averse to doing that. But formal and public apologies for past failures? He was all over those. In 2018, the BBC even ran a piece noting the PM’s habit, and asked in the headline, “Does Justin Trudeau apologize too much?”

It’s not that there weren’t things worth apologizing for. In 2016, he apologized for Canada turning back the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying mostly Sikhs that was then forced to return to India, where 20 of them were killed in a riot. The next year, he apologized to survivors of residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador, and to LGBT Canadians for discrimination they faced at the hands of the federal government. The next year, Jews and members of the Tsilhqot’in Nation received apologies for historical wrongs inflicted on them. And so on. It was a thing.

A man who so clearly adores taking a stage to shed a few tears while acknowledging wrongs committed by someone else, long ago, probably can’t avoid wondering who, in a hundred years, will be apologizing to Uyghurs for his refusal to clearly state that what is happening to them is a genocide.

February 20, 2021

Confessed genocidal nation refuses to accuse China of genocide

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

Jen Gerson considers the moral smallness of Canadian government wiggling out of labelling China’s treatment of their Uyghur minority as the genocide it certainly is:

This week, the Prime Minister of an admittedly genocidal G7 state refused to condemn China for its treatment of its minority Uyghur population. A treatment that has included family separation, forced sterilization, and warehousing thousands of people in what can only be described as modern concentration camps.

Justin Trudeau failed to condemn China, noting, quite rightly, that genocide is an “extremely loaded” term. One not to be bandied about lightly. It demonstrates some moral cowardice on his part, certainly, but also a degree of pragmatism. Canada’s squeaky and lonely objection would do little good. We’re already in a vulnerable position, what with the ongoing captivity of two Canadians who remain in Chinese detention as an act of retaliation for our arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. A declaration of genocide in this case is probably better handled by a collection of nations. As long as we can live with the shame of the smallness that such an argument implies.

(Although perhaps it was unwise to pin so many of our early hopes of an early vaccine rollout on a doomed collaboration with a Chinese manufacturer with a vaccine backed by China’s Institute of Biotechnology and its Academy of Military Medical Sciences. Who could have predicted we would run into problems with such a notoriously reliable and honourable global partner that occasionally engages in hostage diplomacy? But I digress.)

The real issue with Trudeau’s grovelling little deflection on the question of Chinese genocide is that it made his own position on the subject not two years ago impossible to ignore in comparison. The final report of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry stated that the truths it uncovered in the process of its years-long investigations:

    … tell the story — or, more accurately, thousands of stories — of acts of genocide against First Nations, Inuit and Métis women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. This violence amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples … This genocide has been empowered by colonial structures, evidenced notably by the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, residential schools, and breaches of human and Inuit, Métis and First Nations rights, leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.

Several pundits at the time noted at the time that this stretched the definition of “genocide” beyond ordinary recognition. “Genocide” is not the result of a set of compounding government failures over time: it’s a word that we reserve to describe a discreet set of acts motivated by the deliberate intent to decimate or totally exterminate an ethnic population. But after a day or so of hemming and hawing on the issue after the report was released, our prime minister noted: “The issue that we have is that people are getting wrapped up in debates over a very important and powerful term … We accept the finding that this was genocide, and we will move forward to end this ongoing national tragedy.”

There was some careful phrasing in this response. Note, Trudeau agreed that this was genocide, not that it is genocide. The prime minister dodged the implication that Canada is engaged in deliberate ethnic cleansing. But it’s worth peeling back the skin of the onion, past the obvious and easy allegation of hypocrisy, and instead ask ourselves why?

Why can we get away with calling ourselves a genocidal state, but not China?

February 11, 2021

“… the entire Canadian constitution boiled down to the government saying, essentially, ‘trust us'”

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

Andrew Potter on the interesting and almost certainly unCanadian notion that the Prime Minister actually accept responsibility for things that happen on his watch:

Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien speaking at the “No to the war in Iraq: 10 years later” colloquium, 15 March 2013.
Detail of a photo by Gopmtl1 via Wikimedia Commons.

The late UBC law professor Wesley Pue once remarked that the entire Canadian constitution boiled down to the government saying, essentially, “trust us.” He was speaking in the wake of the release of the Hughes Report into the APEC affair.

A refresher: In 1997 it was Canada’s turn to host the annual APEC summit, a free trade and cooperation gabfest for countries in the Pacific Rim. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien decided to hold the meeting on the campus of UBC. Given that it is probably one of the most gorgeous pieces of real estate in the country, Chrétien probably thought he was being a good host. But some UBC students objected to the presence of Indonesian dictator Suharto at their school, and so they marched, held up signs, blocked campus roads and exits, chanted slogans, the usual student protest stuff.

Chrétien was clearly embarrassed, and orders went out from the PMO to clear the roads. The Mounties started telling students their campus was now a “Charter-free zone,” arresting a bunch of them. In a notorious incident captured by CBC cameras, RCMP Staff Sgt. Hugh Stewart walked amongst the students hosing them down with pepper spray. (Asked about the incident at a press conference, Chrétien made a joke.)

The only proper investigation into the affair was led by commissioner Ted Hughes, who issued his report in the summer of 2001. Hughes found that the RCMP had behaved by turns incompetently and unprofessionally and that they had systematically violated the Charter rights of the students. Further, Hughes found that they had done so under direction from the PMO — in particular at the behest of its director of operations, Jean Carle. While Chrétien himself escaped direct censure (Hughes could find no evidence that Carle had acted on Chrétien’s explicit orders), Pue pointed out that the fundamental principle of responsible government requires that the prime minister accept responsibility for what happened. Yet Chrétien did not. He neither accepted personal responsibility, nor did he throw Carle under the bus. Instead, what happened was typically Canadian: the matter simply went away.

The APEC affair serves as a useful reminder of a fundamental truth about our system of government. As Pue noted, there are virtually no effective parliamentary or legal checks on a prime minister’s authority, and as a result it is pretty much impossible to hold our executive branch to account. We need to just trust them.

[…]

It’s worth rehearsing all of this because we are going through a rather extended “just trust us” phase in Ottawa. After shuttering parliament last spring, ostensibly to focus their energies on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals spent the summer dreaming of “building back better” while fighting a ferocious rearguard action to keep MPs from finding out the truth about payments to Trudeau’s family by a charity. Trudeau has since spent the better part of the last six months governing by press conference from the front steps of his cottage, but even as the extreme levels of federal spending continue, and even as scandals and reports of gross mismanagement pile up, the Liberals have been brazenly testing the waters for a spring election.

February 7, 2021

Former Liberal MP dishes on Justin Trudeau in her new book

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

When I moved out of Whitby, the local Member of Parliament was Liberal Celina Caesar-Chavannes. She was, we thought, a high-profile person who’d probably be quickly moved into a junior cabinet position, as Justin Trudeau sets a very high value on being seen to be supportive of women and minorities. As she quickly discovered, however, with Trudeau it’s very much the “being seen” part that matters to him and almost nothing in the way of actually being supportive:

[After a kerfuffle with opposition MP Maxime Bernier] she said she didn’t hear from most of her Liberal colleagues or the prime minister until a #hereforCelina hashtag campaign started weeks later, in response to a column that accused her of “seeing racism everywhere.” When she later confronted Trudeau about the lack of support, she said he told her, “As a strong Black woman, I didn’t think you needed help.” She said Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner was more supportive to her during that period than Trudeau.

The incident is one of many allegations of racism, tokenizing, and microaggressions Caesar-Chavannes wrote about in her new memoir Can You Hear Me Now?, which came out February 2.

[…]

Caesar-Chavannes told VICE World News her experiences of being tokenized, excluded, and undervalued led her to resign from the Liberal caucus and not run again in the 2019 election. Her decision culminated in an explosive conversation with Trudeau in February 2019, during which she alleges he complained to her about being confronted about his privilege. She said he was angry that she wanted to resign on the same day then Minister of Veterans Affairs Jody Wilson-Raybould quit her cabinet role, in the midst of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the biggest crisis the governing Liberals had faced since Trudeau’s election in 2015.

“I was met with an earful that I needed to appreciate him, that everybody talked to him about his privilege, that he’s so tired of everybody talking to him about this stuff, and that I cannot make this announcement right now,” she said. She alleges he told her “he couldn’t have two powerful women of colour leave at the same time.”

After listening to his “rant” for a while, Caesar-Chavannes said she cussed out the prime minister.

“I had to ask him, ‘Motherfucker, who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?'” she said. “I was so angry.”

She said she didn’t make out what Trudeau said after that, but it “sounded like he was crying.” She ended up delaying her resignation announcement until March 2019.

Caesar-Chavannes said the Liberal party’s treatment of Wilson-Raybould — an Indigenous woman and whistleblower — made her feel like many of her colleagues were “fake as fuck” and cemented her desire to sit as an independent.

January 22, 2021

Canada’s Governor General resigns, avoiding dragging the Queen into another Canadian political drama

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

Colby Cosh notes in Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter:

The Right Honourable Julie Payette, 29th Governor General of Canada (October 2, 2017 – January 21, 2021).

When NP Platformed saw Robert Fife’s Globe and Mail report this morning, our thought was that leaking the news of the report’s completion was an obvious political manoeuvre. (You know how a fife works: put some wind in it, and it will play a tune for you.)

Even a prime minister as callow as the current one would not want to try firing a governor general, which would require the personal intervention of the Queen. This would be a failure in itself, a blot on Canada’s copybook, even if the PM had the support of other parliamentary parties.

As hours passed, the thought naturally occurred to us: why should Payette be making anyone wait for some written report anyway? We know she has sometimes balked at most of the easily identifiable parts of her job, including travel to ceremonies and (for heaven’s sake) giving royal assent to legislation. Hired to be a dynamic female STEM mascot (for a Liberal government, sort of), she somehow degenerated, with unseemly speed, into an immured princess from a fairy tale, evidently driven half-mad by some faerie spell.

The main job, the essence of the governor general gig, is to be above suspicion, like Caesar’s wife in the proverb. The mere whisper of abusiveness or of clownish behaviour involving public funds ought to have been enough to settle things, possibly with a convenient health excuse. (If she offers one now, it can only provoke snide laughter.) The vicereine is, in our system of government, the passage through which national honours flow from the sovereign. The mention of “honour” in connection with this Governor General was becoming mighty awkward. She should have our thanks for doing the right thing today.

December 6, 2020

“As ever, our Liberal friends prefer to be judged by their pure intentions rather than their rather tattered record”

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

The good folks at The Line suggest that we monsters in the peanut gallery stop hurting poor Little Potato’s feeeeeeeeeelings:

Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”

What we can say is that supporters of our current government continue to insist that the prime minister and his cabinet be granted a level of benefit of the doubt that they simply have not earned. Declarations that the Liberals have botched the vaccine rollout are premature, but they are not preposterous. As ever, our Liberal friends prefer to be judged by their pure intentions rather than their rather tattered record. We at The Line have known enough true Grits in our time to believe that this isn’t an act. Liberals really do believe that so long as they mean well, they should be forgiven their failures. Indeed, the failures should be forgiven and forgotten.

And boy, can they get testy when someone declines to do them the courtesy of treating this five of a government like a nine. They’ll shriek about Harper and Ford and Kenney and American-style whatever, they’ll argue in bad faith, they’ll demand an audit of Andrew Scheer’s household expenses, they’ll shut parliament down in the middle of a national emergency to spare the boss from embarrassing questions about his latest ethical flub. In short, they’ll do anything to avoid admitting that this Liberal government has blown more than enough high-profile issues to have forfeited any right to be bummed out when someone dares wonder if they’ll do any better on vaccines.

Over the last five years, the Liberals have failed to hit their own targets on balancing the budget and cleaning up Indigenous water supplies. They failed to hit Harper’s targets on carbon reduction, failed to win a UN seat, failed to deliver promised military procurements, failed on electoral reform, failed to improve our decrepit transparency system, and failed to notice any number of outrageous policies and proposals so long as they were proffered en français, in which case they couldn’t avert their eyes fast enough.

We could go on, but the point is made. And they’ve done it all after daring to talk in their opening days of deliverology, a term that’s now a political punchline thanks to how badly Trudeau and the Gang failed to live up to the hype of their own managerial jargon.

The problem with all this failure is far bigger than the sum of its various sad parts. A government that routinely writes cheques its competence can’t cash may be in a hurry to forgive itself, but not all Canadians are as fond of Justin Trudeau as Justin Trudeau clearly is. A proven track record of failure by the state erodes public confidence in the state, and the sneering contempt Liberals have for anyone who notices the failure doesn’t help. We find it absolutely amazing how many Liberals (rightly!) decry the rise of populism without ever seeming to ponder for a New York minute what role their own manifest mediocrity has played in fuelling it. So we’ll kindly hear no more from the Liberals about the know-nothing idiocy of the woke left and the destructive buffoonery of the nationalist right until they stop doing such a shabby job with the goddamned centre.

November 27, 2020

Is clean water too much to ask for in a first world nation?

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

Ted Campbell explains how he would resolve the TWENTY-FIVE YEAR OLD PROBLEM in the Neskantaga First Nation in northern Ontario, which is one of the many First Nation public health issues the federal government has been promising to address for years:

A few weeks ago I was horrified to read about the 25 year long water problems that continue to plague the Neskantaga First Nation in North-Western Ontario ~ yes you read that right: it’s been 25 years since these Canadians have had clean, potable water! I begged the government to Do Something! and I offered one concrete idea based upon by near certain knowledge of what the Canadian Armed Forces can and have done for people overseas. One of my readers, a retired colonel in our Military Engineering branch confirmed that what I suggested was doable.

Now I read, in a report by Campbell Clark in the Globe and Mail, that the main problems are a combination of political over-promising and bureaucratic ineptitude. I am going to blame Justin Trudeau for pretty much all of the political over-promising: he made it a centrepiece of his 2015 election campaign and then totally failed to follow through. He has to wear at least a large part of the bureaucratic ineptitude, too, because he’s been prime minister of Canada for over five years. He’s failed, again.
OK, I can hear you saying: if you’re so smart how would you fix things?

For a start I would stick with the outlines of my earlier proposal: I would ask the Army to help, right now, using existing technology. We would declare this a disaster ~ and if Canadians going without clean water for 25 years doesn’t qualify as a disaster then I don’t know what does ~ and send the Canadian Armed Forces’ Disaster Assistance Response Team (the DART) to the Neskantaga First Nation and tell them to fix whatever needs fixing ~ using the Indigenous Services department’s budget. When they finished there we would buy them a new water purification system and send them the next First Nation that has a water disaster on its hands. People overseas will have to wait or we’ll have to build a second DART.

Next I would ask the Army and the Canadian manufacturers of water purification systems to work together with First Nations corporations, like Matawa First Nations Management, to develop (at the Indigenous Services department’s expense) concrete, workable plans to install, operate and maintain, over their complete life-cycle, water purification and waste disposal systems and the electrical power and the power and water distribution systems necessary to support them.

After this long, it may not be that the government can’t deliver these services, it might be that the government has deliberately chosen not to deliver.

November 18, 2020

Trudeau’s internet policy — cash grab or power grab? Embrace the healing power of “and” (TM Instapundit)

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian government is taking advantage of the ongoing economic and social disruption of the Wuhan Coronavirus to widen their existing regulation of both broadcasting and internet entertainment. It’s not just a bit of maple-flavoured cultural imperialism, but it’s also a blatant cash grab:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

I see, in the Globe and Mail, that Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault want to further regulate the broadcasting services in Canada. Their goals seem to be, in part, a cash grab ~ online streaming services, like Netflix, are offering Canadians, for a price, what they want, while the CBC offers Canadians, thanks to a $1+ Billion annual subsidy from taxpayers like you and me, what we, pretty clearly, do not want to watch and the Liberals want a share of that money ~ and also an appeal to those who play identity politics.

I think we need to look at the “products” of broadcasting ~ information (news and “public affairs” and documentary programmes) and entertainment, including sports, as “consumable products,” rather like food and, say, soft drinks.

We do allow, even demand that governments exercise some important regulatory functions in regard to food and soft drinks: we want to make sure that they are safe to consume and Canadians want to know what is in the food we consume.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was, originally, conceived to solve a fairly simple problem: allocating broadcast licences. Government engineers calculated how many radio channels could be used in any given place but they didn’t want to have to decide who should get to use them. Politicians didn’t want to do it, either, because while the successful applicant was (usually) happy the more numerous unsuccessful ones were disappointed and politicians hate to disappoint people. Thus they created an arms length agency to make the tough decisions for them. Licence allocation is still an important job for the CRTC. But the CRTC’s mandate was expanded with the birth of cable TV. Companies, like Rogers, built cable systems ~ and they received both direct and indirect government support to reach more and more Canadians ~ and then “sold” access to consumers. In the normal course of events one might have thought that the government would attach some business conditions to its loans, grants and tax deductions, but there was an ever-growing demand, from the Canadian cultural community ~ based almost entirely in Montreal and Toronto ~ to regulate the fledgling cable and “pay TV” market to ensure that Canadian programmes were not shut out but, in fact, could have privileged positions in the cable lineup, which led to the government, in the 1960s, telling the CRTC to regulate how companies like Famous Players, Maclean Hunter and Rogers configured the private product they sold to individual consumers.

The initial government argument was “we regulate all kinds of things for the common good: that’s why we all drive on the right, for example, and the delivery of broadcasting by cable is like that.” “No it’s not,” the cable operators replied, “you build and maintain the roads, using taxpayers’ dollars, so you’re allowed to regulate how they’re used, plus it’s a safety issue. Cable service and ‘pay TV’ are private, commercial transactions between us, the companies who built and operate the systems, and the individual consumer who wants to subscribe to what we offer. You don’t presume to regulate, beyond the laws against libel and pornography, what people can read in MacLean’s magazine or the Globe and Mail, why is ‘pay TV’ and cable different?” It’s still a good question. But the cable operators surrendered gracefully and the CRTC has been, broadly, for the last half-century, protective of the rights of incumbents in the infotainment markets. In return the cable and internet operators have agreed to “tiers” of programming which means that if you want to watch, say, BBC World Service or Deutsche Welle or Fox News, you must also pay for CBC News Network and CTV News Channel and, no matter who you are and what your individual preferences might be, when you subscribe to a cable/internet service you must also support a number of French stations/channels; it’s the law. And now Minister Guilbault wants to ensure that you pay for the output of indigenous producers, writers, actors and so on, on both indigenous networks ~ to which you must already subscribe if you have a “basic” Canadian cable or satellite TV package ~ and, it appears to me, in programmes produced by Canadians and even by Netflix.

November 13, 2020

Oddly, the Canadian media evince no interest whatsoever in the Trudeau government’s malign plans for the Internet

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

In The Line, Peter Menzies shows how little the mainstream media outlets in Canada care about the power grab the feds are attempting with their proposed “get money from web giants” shakedown:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.

In order to understand where media and public attention has been the past couple of weeks, all you had to do was listen in on Monday morning’s Ottawa news conference.

Six days after Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault had introduced ground-breaking legislation to regulate content online, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced more cash to bring better Internet to rural and remote communities. There were also some COVID-19 updates and something about help for agriculture.

And, of course, the questions asked by the media were about the U.S. election. What else could possibly be of interest?

Eventually there were a few inquiries about Telesat and low-Earth-orbit satellites, but you get the point: things that matter to people’s daily lives such as cable bills, data plans, Netflix, cellular service, crappy WiFi and slow Internet connections haven’t been of much interest to Canadian media lately.

So there has been a dearth of chatter about Guilbeault’s controversial plan to (my words, not his): restrict consumer choice, tax Netflix to finance certified Canadian content (Cancon) and bring to an end the greatest period of prosperity in the history of the Canadian film and television industry. Did I mention stifling innovation, increasing streaming subscription costs and scaring away investment? No? My bad. Those too.

Guilbeault has decided that the agency dedicated to defining the nation’s TV and radio diet — the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) — is now going to be in charge of what you are allowed to dine on online as well. No longer will you be able to manage your preferences. No more popcorn and candy for you. Going forward, Cancon spinach and broccoli will be on your plate every evening. Breathtakingly, Guilbeault has “modernized” communications legislation by giving authority over the Internet to something called a “radio-television” commission by using something still called the “broadcasting” act.

October 29, 2020

QotD: The art of the politician

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

Politics, it has been said (by me, I think), is the art of the hardly possible. One demands, or promises, things that cannot be delivered in this world, and that no one could want if they thought through the consequences. The successful politician does not lie, except when cornered. Rather, he fantasizes, “dreams,” and seeks a constituency that will dream with him. To my mind, Barack Obama was near to the perfect politician, and while lacking his class and cunning, Canada’s child prime minister, “Justine” (see the 4,000-page novel by the Marquis de Sade), has attempted to offer the same billboard attractions. It is what all modern capitalism has aspired to: nothing, in a very spiffy package; a triumph of pure advertising.

The perfect politician, as the perfect salesman, sells this “vision” — dwarfing any specific programme with its stated assumptions and checkable facts. Details, details; to the uninitiated, these are always boring, and the voting masses will never be initiated. The people, especially in this Age of Netflix, want entertainment, and what they call “leadership.” A leader is a person who does your thinking for you. In politics, he has a rôle like that of film director, in a movie where he will be the principal star. We must go through the movie emotionally on his side; grieve his little setbacks, feel that we participate when he wins. Black hats, white hats: his opponents are clearly marked and can be seen at every moment to be deplorable.

David Warren, “Now playing”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-07-13.

October 18, 2020

The diplomatic spat with China is “forcing the prime minister to bring out the biggest guns in his arsenal: his really serious socks”

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

The Line shows just how seriously Justin Trudeau is taking China’s most recent not-so-veiled threats against Canadians in Hong Kong:

The warm glow of a good feed faded quickly in Ottawa, alas, where our nice little vacation from history continues its unravelling apace. China’s ambassador to Canada is issuing increasingly dire threats to the safety of our citizens, specifically the hundreds of thousands of Canadians living in Hong Kong, forcing the prime minister to bring out the biggest guns in his arsenal: his really serious socks, a very frowny photograph by Adam Scotti, and, we expect, the imminent announcement that on top of all her current duties, Chrystia Freeland will be appointed Progressive Minister In Charge Of Figuring Out What The Hell We Should Do About China But Not In A Way That Offends Anyone The Middle Class Build Back Green Error Error Program Alarm—

Whoa! Sorry! The Freeland Job Generator glitched again. No surprise, considering the miles Trudeau has put on it in only five years. Let’s hope it doesn’t give out entirely — we’d need 47 years to procure another one.

Anyway, as to the matter at hand, your Line editors are pragmatic folk. Canada can’t punch at the same level as China; under Mr. Trudeau, indeed, despite all our for-Liberal-egos-only preening about Canada being back, we can’t even punch at the same level as Ireland and Norway. But it’s time Canadians face facts: we can either continue pretending that China’s increasingly aggressive and threatening behaviour is a problem that will go away if we ignore it long enough, or we can at least pretend that we have balls and take what actions we can. Obviously we’re not going to send a fleet to parade up and down their coast, but there are things we can realistically do, and we aren’t. Australia, for instance, also in Beijing’s sights, has rolled out a series of measures to curtail China’s substantial influence there. Canada ought to be doing the same. And we could start by immediately banning Huawei, and encouraging every other country that would listen — which doesn’t seem to be many — that they should too.

Do we expect the Liberal government to do this? No. Making money shilling for the Chinese regime is the best thing to happen to post-politics Liberals since Ontario’s air ambulance service. But they should do this. And the delay is only gonna make it hurt more when events eventually force us to accept that China is not our friend, never has been, and never will be under the current political leadership.

September 19, 2020

QotD: Dictatorship of the Cancel Culture proletariat

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

This sort of thing is, to put it mildly, not good. There are at least three major problems with cancel culture. First, almost anyone could be cancelled, on the basis of the (claimed) standards prevalent on the modern “social justice” left. Secondly, cancellation tends in practice to be a non-random process targeted at political and ideological opponents, rather than a genuine attempt at a new moral standard. Finally, and most importantly, the declaration by wokesters that many conversations are now simply off-limits prevents the communication of important information that would make it possible for citizens better to judge the arguments of movements like Black Lives Matter.

While not the most important, the first of these points is the most relevant on a day-to-day basis. Without endorsing these behaviours, the plain fact is that the huge majority of people have probably at some point told an ethnic or regional joke, sent a pornographic or un-PC snap, had sex while intoxicated, used a slur tied to sexual orientation / race / gender online or in the lockerroom, worn a St Paddy’s Day or Cinco de Mayo outfit they would really prefer a mulligan on, or committed other Cardinal Sins against Wokeness. As a result of this, many young people are intently aware that Twitter and Facebook wars involving the unearthing of old content generally end with egg on the face of everyone involved. Caucasian NBA point guard Donte DeVincenzo was humiliated in late 2018 by the revelation that – at age 14 – he had described his hoops handle as “ballin’ on these nig*as like I’m Derrick Rose”. He ended up deleting his entire social-media presence. The point of monitoring this sort of thing, for the many people and organisations that do so, is not punishing the tiny minority of real racists and abusers out there so much as keeping normal citizens too terrified by the potential unearthing of past indiscretions to comment lustily on the issues of the day.

The fact that virtually anyone could in fact “legitimately” be cancelled leads into extreme partisan hypocrisy. While anyone who attended church as a lad might correctly suspect that the hard right is capable of similar behaviour, cancellers today are overwhelmingly concentrated on the “social justice” left – and they are, at least occasionally, reluctant to eat their own. This often results in remarkable and hilarious double standards. In February 2018, for example, liberal Virginia governor Ralph Northam – nicknamed “Coonman” – escaped any serious censure after he was revealed to have apparently appeared in a mid-1980s high-school yearbook photo wearing shoe-polish blackface.

To be fully fair to Northam, the same photo included a student dressed in full white robes as a Ku Klux Klansman, and CNN has noted that Northam has never actually said “whether he was wearing the Ku Klux Klan outfit or [the] blackface”. Oh, fair enough. At any rate, he serves as governor of Virginia today. Not to be outdone by any of his neighbors to the south, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was revealed that same year to have worn black- and brown-face several times, and as late as 2001, once apparently painting his entire body to appear in costume as Aladdin at an Arabian Nights revue! He, too, remains solidly entrenched in office today.

Wilfred Reilly, “They can’t cancel all of us”, Spiked, 2020-06-17.

September 13, 2020

Are the Kielburgers fleeing before the real story breaks?

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

Ted Campbell listened to an Evan Solomon radio report recently and spells out the key points:

The Kielburgers, he notes are neither newcomers nor naifs. Mark Kielburger is a Rhodes Scholar and Craig Kielburger has, he say, “been rubbing shoulders with politicians since he was 12 years old.” They have, Mr Solomon says, been selling the “halo effect” to politicians and other celebrities, a list which he tells us includes Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Erin O’Toole and the “halo effect” says, in effect, if you come out and make us look good then we, being a famous, big-league charity will make you look good, too. It’s all part of an astute marketing plan.

But then Evan Solomon gets to the real question: if Tylenol, he says, can survive a scandal in which people died then why are the Kielburgers reacting so dramatically to what is, really, on the surface, a minor league scandal? So the Kielburgers paid Margaret Trudeau a few hundred thousand dollars to make a few charity appearances, is that such a big deal? I mean the Trudeaus are wealthy, aren’t they? They can’t be bought, can they? Well, most if us don’t have million dollar plus trust funds and most of us didn’t earn $450,000 in speaking fees in a year, but the Trudeau family is unlikely to have just forgotten about $250,000 in speaking fees paid to Margaret Trudeau. Bill Morneau may have forgotten about owning a villa in France, but unlike the Trudeaus, Mr Morneau is rich … really rich. So are the Kielburgers. The commercial property part of their WE empire, alone, is worth $50 Million. Could a few thousands dollars per appearance (she made 28 over four years, about one every couple of months) paid to Margaret Trudeau really threaten the entire WE empire?

[…]

My guess, and that’s all it is, is that there is real fear in the WE boardrooms and in WE’s legal department that Prime Minister Trudeau might be guilty of something more than just conflict of interest. Someone like Pierre Poilievre or the Lobbying Commissioner, for example, might think that further, deeper investigations are needed and those questions might lead investigators to look more deeply into why and how Justin Trudeau and the Kielburger brothers, themselves, cooked up the idea of WE Charity running a multi-hundred-million-dollar government programme and then trying to cover-up the whole thing.

Might those questions be enough to bring Justin Trudeau down?

Might those questions be enough to threaten the Kielburgers’ fortunes, even their freedom?

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