Quotulatiousness

April 5, 2020

Ontario premier Doug Ford surprises many observers – “Wasn’t this guy supposed to be Canada’s Donald Trump?”

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

Chris Selley on the surprisingly solid performance of Ontario premier Doug Ford during the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic response:

Ontario premier Doug Ford as new Progressive Conservative leader at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Canada.
Photo via Wikimedia.

The premier has attracted much praise for his performance during this crisis, and it is deserved. His last misstep was advising families to head off on March Break as planned, viruses be damned, but that might as well have been 100 years ago. We were all clutching at optimism. Former premier Kathleen Wynne, who clearly understands Ford, graciously said she heard a man “trying to calm the waters … out of the goodness of his heart.”

Since then Ford has struck the right tone: often visibly alarmed, but calm, scripted and plain of speech. He has been gracious to everyone on the right side of the fight, from doctors and nurses to supermarket clerks and frantic, unemployed people stuck at home, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to his fellow premiers of all political stripes, and even to journalists. And he has been galvanizingly withering to those on the wrong side, most notably a few price-gouging businesses who have been helpful enough to offer themselves up as common enemies.

More than a few people have remarked: “Wasn’t this guy supposed to be Canada’s Donald Trump?”

Indeed, once upon a time, those comparisons flew thick and fast. But they were always absurd — a toxic by-product of the Canadian media’s mortifying obsession with all things American. No First World politician is remotely like Donald Trump. I have filed many thousands of words over the past decade on what I view as Doug Ford’s inadequacies as a politician, and it would never have occurred to me to compare him to such a transparently awful president.

Ford, too, has levelled many vastly over-the-top accusations against his opponents. But he has basically set them all aside now. While federal Conservatives continue battling federal Liberals on the carbon tax file, Ford has refused to discuss it and happily applauds the feds’ anti-coronavirus efforts. Where once Ford railed at his media critics, now he praises their efforts covering the crisis and informing Ontarians. His relatively plain talk is noticeably more reassuring than the messaging some other Canadian heads of government, who fancy themselves far more polished, are dishing out — Trudeau in particular.

April 3, 2020

QotD: Canadian senators

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

When I heard that Sen. Tommy Banks had died of leukemia at age 81, I thought maybe the newspaper notices ought to be left to the people who knew him better — and in Edmonton that number comes to thousands upon thousands of people. I interviewed Banks a few times as a young political reporter. I think every such person has learned the procrastinator’s trade secret that if you’re doing an issues story, senators are easier to get hold of on a short deadline than elected MPs, and a lot easier than cabinet ministers, especially if you’re an unknown lightweight.

This, at least, used to be the case. I am not sure whether it applies to the Brave New Senate that now exists after the somewhat cynical appointments of Stephen Harper and the experimental renovations of Justin Trudeau. But if you have ever wondered why political beat writers and old codger columnists often have surprisingly positive sentiments about the Senate, which nine-tenths of the people reading these words despise, this is probably one reason: a senator might call you back soon enough to be of some use.

And there’s another, related reason. In phoning a senator to chat about issues because you can’t get a “real” politician to return your inquiry, you would (or, anyway, I would) sometimes find surprisingly strong evidence that the Senate quietly lives up to its original constitutional promise. Spared the effort of endless electioneering and toilsome constituent service, senators do have time for deep study of projects and problems, and some freedom to develop independent opinions. I do not say that most of them use the time and the freedom, but it was, and I’m sure it still is, fairly easy to avoid the duds.

Colby Cosh, “R.I.P. Senator Tommy Banks, a figure from Edmonton’s pantheon”, National Post, 2018-01-26.

March 6, 2020

“[A] decision of such absolutely mind-boggling stupidity and irresponsibility that it could only have come from Justin Trudeau, himself”

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

Ted Campbell on the Trudeau government’s apparent abject surrender to the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs (“apparent” because we still don’t have any details of the “deal”):

The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs’ agenda seems simple enough to me. They don’t like the notion that the Wet’suwet’en people can elect band councils that might act for the good of the people and < quelle horreur > the people might even disagree with the hereditary chiefs. Some (male) hereditary chiefs seem to have managed to strip some other (female) chiefs of their titles because they, the female chiefs, sided with the elected councils. This is, in 21st century British Columbia, something of a replay of 17th century Europe and the end of the divine right of kings, except that the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs might succeed where Charles I and Louis XVI failed because they have the dimwits in the Trudeau cabinet on their side.

To make matters worse, as John Morris of the Canadian Press points out in an article published in the Globe and Mail, the government negotiated with the hereditary chiefs, only ~ with the people who broke the law; and they ignored the elected leaders ~ the people who played by the rules.

How typically Trudeau: he surrenders, cravenly, to the reactionary, anti-democratic lawbreakers and, simultaneously, shuts out the elected representatives of the Wet’suwet’en peoples. Is that the Canada in which we all want to live? Is that the sort of “leadership” for which millions of Canadians voted in 2019? I think not. Justin Trudeau is both a fool and a coward and his party, the Liberal Party of Canada, has a duty to Canada: throw the bum out!

But, not to worry, the Trudeau regime’s propagandists press agents will tell us that it’s all good, we “won,” something or other … didn’t we? And who cares if we lost something nebulous like honour and responsibility? It’s all about reconciliation, isn’t it? What do trivialities like democracy and the national interest matter when really important things, like preserving the power of hereditary chiefs over elected councils, are at stake? But that reactionary system seems to have been strengthened, and so “It was a famous victory.”

February 29, 2020

“And then, somewhat astonishingly, the Ontario Provincial Police actually upheld the law”

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

Chris Selley calls for some answers in the still-not-fully resolved railway disruptions by First Nations and climate activists and the calling-it-spineless-is-a-compliment reactions of various levels of government to widespread contempt for the law:

Screencap from a TV report on Mohawk Warriors attempting to set a freight car on fire along the Canadian National mainline through Tyendinaga near Belleville, Ontario.

When Canada’s ongoing spate of rail blockades finally peters out, this country has some work to do. A parliamentary committee might be up to the job, but even a full-on independent inquiry might not be excessive. A small group of Mohawks in Tyendinaga, Ont., in solidarity with an even smaller group of hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs, managed to blockade the Canadian National Railway for two weeks, not just holding hostage a chunk of the country’s economy, productivity and mobility, but demanding as ransom the cancellation of a liquefied natural gas pipelines that all First Nations affected by it, and it seems a comfortable majority of their residents, support.

It’s not a national disaster or anything. But as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau belatedly realized, it’s simply not an acceptable outcome in a democracy operating under the rule of law. And there is every reason to believe it could happen again — especially because we don’t really know how or why it ended when it did.

Operating at peak obnoxiousness, Trudeau had scolded those who demanded enforcement of a court order against the Tyendinaga blockade as boors, violence-mongers and idiots: “We are not the kind of country where politicians get to tell the police what to do,” he huffed. And then, frustrated by a lack of Sunny Ways among the federal government’s negotiating partners, he suddenly told the police what to do — or at the very least what he thought should happen.

[…]

The relatively undramatic end to the Tyendinaga blockade, after two weeks of dire warnings about Oka and Ipperwash reruns, raises another key question: Is there any reason we should believe it was safer to enforce the injunction on Day 14, as opposed to Day One or Two or Six?

Attempting negotiations was a perfectly sensible approach, even though it was very difficult to discern any room for compromise when one of the blockaders’ demands was so simple, blunt and inconceivable: shutting down the Coastal GasLink pipeline project. But the government is likely to face similarly unbending demands from future blockaders: Shutting down the Trans Mountain pipeline project, for example. Surely we can’t establish “two weeks of futility and then enforcement” as a policy moving forward. (Some might argue it was already established by a 13-day blockade of CN tracks near Sarnia, Ont., in 2013 — but that wasn’t nearly as crippling a blow to the railway’s operations.)

Police in Quebec were perfectly happy to enforce an injunction against a blockade on Montreal’s South Shore, which ended swiftly and without incident. Another on Mohawk territory in Kahnawake remains in place, and Premier François Legault has been excoriated for suggesting police face a heavily armed populace there — but at least it’s an attempt at an explanation. When it comes to the OPP’s inaction, we have none. For that matter, we probably deserve some insight into how protesters were able to set a roaring bonfire next to a moving train in Tyendinaga, wholly unmolested, just a couple of days after the blockade came down.

February 25, 2020

“Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking”

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

David Solway outlines some of the serious issues Canada needs to tackle … but many of which are issues that the current federal government is striving to avoid tackling:

Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.

Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc — and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a weak swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here. A wock pupper politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.

Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity — although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations,” based on two founding peoples, the French and the English, which novelist Hugh MacLennan famously described as “two solitudes” in his book of that title. But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.

Quebec separatists don’t need to do much more than sit back, put their feet up, crack a few beers, and watch Justin Trudeau drive the country toward dissolution. Their job is so much easier now…

It is often noted that America is a nation evenly divided between progressivist and conservative populations, a civil dilemma not easily resolved. But Canada is divided approximately 65-35 by these constituencies, and if one considers that the federal Conservative Party in its present manifestation can fairly be described as Liberal Lite, the breakdown is more like 95-5. This means there is no chance of reconciliation between our political disparities, such as they are, and Canada is doomed to plummet down the esker of every failed socialist experiment that preceded it and, indeed, that is presently on display in various foundering nations around the globe — North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and counting.

Trudeau père invoked the War Measures Act in 1970 to quell the Quebec separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), after a series of bombings and murders. It is obvious that the son has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble. And there we find the proof that, whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

February 24, 2020

Bidding farewell to the rule of law in Canada?

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

John Carpay on the importance of the rule of law in civil society and why we’re at risk of losing it here in Canada:

The rule of law is one of the most important legal principles on which Canada is based. Along with the supremacy of God, it is mentioned in the very first words of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”

The rule of law means that we are ruled by laws, not by the whims of a King, or the clamouring of a mob. The rule of law also means that the law applies to everyone, even the King; there can be no exemptions for the King or his favourites.

Countries which practice and uphold the rule of law tend to thrive economically, socially, politically and culturally. Countries which uphold the rule of law become wealthy because people can work, buy, sell and trade in the knowledge that their property and their person are protected by law. Economies thrive when people know that the law will be enforced, and that the law will be applied to everyone, even to the King and his favourites. The rule of law provides investors, foreign and domestic, with confidence to invest their money in business projects.

Conversely, when a country condones law-breaking, investors will put their money elsewhere, and quickly. The world’s poorest and most violent countries are those where politicians are above the law, and the law is not applied equally to all.

The decisions of Canada’s politicians and police to condone – for three weeks or longer – the blockading of railway lines by aggrieved protesters violate the rule of law in at least two ways.

First, our politicians are effectively stating that individuals with strongly held political opinions are entitled to engage in illegal activities, in this case shutting down railway lines. Second, law-breaking is permitted because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other politicians sympathize with the protesters’ ideology and demands: the law does not apply to the King’s favourites.

February 23, 2020

Justin’s hidden victory – “… in the fight against global warming, this has to have been Canada’s best two weeks EVER”

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

As Rex Murphy points out, the nattering nabobs of negativity (okay, he didn’t call ’em that) miss the key benefits of Justin Trudeau’s tour de force of ingenious diplomacy and inaction:

It was at the very heart of Justin Trudeau’s triumph in his first election, that having vanquished the Mordor orcs of Harperland, that the country was going to be served by new thinking and fresh approaches, that anger and conflict would be no more. In an era marked by respectful thinking, exquisitely careful language, above all by the ability to listen, protests would be no more. Concord would reign, all would be sweetness and light.

What few and feeble disputes that might emerge would be defused with a waving of the diversity wand, and a choir drawn from the Liberal backbenches intoning solemnly “this is not who we are as Canadians” before the Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill.

As an ultimate fillip every month a kitten and a ball of wool would be sent to every Canadian household (and Lo, a zen-like tranquillity would settle over the land). To be clear, these would be very progressive kittens, and the wood fair-trade down to the last twisted fibre.

[…]

Looked at in the cool light of reason, in the fight against global warming, this has to have been Canada’s best two weeks EVER. Keep it up and Canada, the whole wide, cold country, can soon declare itself one half-a-continent carbon-emission-free zone. Apocalypse deferred.

How do you spell Hallelujah? Greta Thunberg — Canada has heard you. Find a bamboo raft and come visit us again.

February 21, 2020

Justin Trudeau, Prime Empathizer of Canada

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

The Prime Minstrel channels his inner Bill Clinton, although he just manages to avoid saying that he “feels our pain”:

A strange thing happened Tuesday morning. That strange thing was … an important and interesting exchange on the floor of the House of Commons. It happened during routine proceedings, and not in the Punch-and-Judy exchange of question period. The leaders of the various parties in the House stood and outlined positions on the rail blockades being conducted around the country in support of Wet’suwet’en opponents of B.C.’s Coastal GasLink pipeline.

First came the prime minister. “People are troubled by what they have been witnessing this past week,” he said. Our empathizer-in-chief, the emotional mascot of Confederation, was about to go to work. “Young, old, Indigenous and newcomers are asking themselves what is happening in the country … On all sides, people are upset and frustrated.”

The next three words out of his mouth were: “I get it.” Huh. Is that the sort of thing you say when you’ve actually gotten it? If a friend called you up in a shattered emotional state because he had just lost his job, as people are starting to lose jobs to the Wet’suwet’en solidarity protests, would you say “I get it”?

Beyond this tin-eared reassurance, Trudeau did not have much specific to say, and what there was seemed to contradict itself. “Our government’s priority is to resolve this situation peacefully, but also to protect the rule of law in our country,” he promised. “That is a principle we will always stand up for.” One would have thought the role of a prime minister was to apply the law rather than to “stand up for” it. He gave his usual spiel about the myriad of ways in which the federal government has failed First Nations, again speaking as though someone else were in charge. Certainly very little of it is his own fault: the government he leads has “invested more than any other … to right historic wrongs.”

Trudeau worried aloud that Canada might become “a country where people think they can tamper with rail lines and endanger lives,” but he seemingly renounced the use of force (it’s not “helpful”) against protesters who openly discuss sabotage. What the prime minister means when he talks of the “rule” of something called “law” has been left imperfectly clear.

Chris Selley suggests the government’s fecklessness will continue to prevent any solutions being implemented:

The stupefying weightlessness of Justin Trudeau’s government has never been more evident than in recent days, as it tries to arrange an end to the Mohawk blockade of CN’s main line near Belleville, Ont. At times it seems as if it might just float away, like an improperly tethered bouncy castle in a thunderstorm.

This week has been particularly windy.

[…]

The situation is ludicrous: Because Ontario’s independent provincial police won’t enforce a court injunction, the federal public safety minister seems to be in discussions with B.C.’s solicitor general about whether B.C.’s independent provincial police might back off enforcing a different injunction.

And the worst part of this absurdist theatre festival is how difficult it is to imagine a better alternative. Conservatives continue to call on Trudeau to somehow fix the problem, but the way Canada is set up, it’s really not a federal issue. The RCMP might have some jurisdiction over the railway as federally regulated infrastructure, said University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach, but that hasn’t happened in past cases. It wouldn’t even be up to Trudeau to send in troops: under the Emergencies Act, Roach said, a provincial solicitor-general has to request it.

These are structural issues that any PM will face. Indeed, the biggest difference between the Liberals’ approach to this blockade and the Conservatives’ approach to the 2013 Idle No More protests, which included a 13-day blockade of a CN line in southwestern Ontario, has been one of rhetoric and engagement. The Conservatives talked tougher, but Aboriginal Affairs rebuffed CN’s request to intervene. (Those protesters eventually obeyed a court injunction and left.) The Liberals needlessly tie themselves in knots and insult our intelligence — they know no other way — but they clearly believe it’s their job to broker some kind of resolution.

It’s tough to say which approach is likelier to work. At this point odds seem to favour “neither.” If you have a better, workable idea to get the trains moving, for God’s sake get on the horn to Ottawa.

February 17, 2020

Justin Trudeau and the UN Security Council

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

Although I’m much less a fan of the United Nations than Ted Campbell is, I agree that Prime Minister Trudeau’s grip-and-grin-and-bribe world tour in support of Canada’s bid for a temporary seat on the UN Security Council is probably doomed to failure:

The United Nations Security Council Chamber in New York, also known as the Norwegian Room.
Photo by Patrick Gruban via Wikimedia Commons.

He has seemed oblivious to the fact that he’s bragging about Canada’s “human rights” and “equality” to politicians who are happy to have laws that criminalize homosexual behaviour and that he’s willing to enter a “partnership” in Africa’s oils and gas sectors even as his cabinet tries to shut down Western Canada’s energy industries and as his own country is in a political and economic crisis over pipelines. And then he bowed and scraped to the foreign minister of the mass-murdering Iranian regime, only a month after it shot down a civilian airliner, killing 57 Canadians.

This is all in pursuit of the ambitions of a few Laurential Elite insiders who are still campaigning against Stephen Harper. They remember that Prime Minister Harper’s government’s bid for a UNSC seat was rejected (2010) largely because Canada was perceived to be too close to Israel and because Prime Minister Harper was perceived to be too different from superstar US President Barack Obama, and not serious enough about climate change. Team Trudeau is hell-bent on proving that it is “better” than Team Harper by winning that seat (the other contestants are Ireland and Norway).

My guess is that Canada will fail again because the few hundred million dollars in bribes aid it has promised to spread around Africa is not going to make much of a dent in the anti-Canada campaign that I suspect China is waging to continue to punish us for the Meng affair, amongst other things. China is, I believe, using Canada as a bit of a whipping boy to send a message to the rest of the world about the benefits and costs of dealing with China … on its terms.

In fact, I rather hope Canada loses. Not because I enjoy seeing my country rejected. Not even because I would enjoy seeing Justin Trudeau humiliated, but I admit that would be nice. I think that losing the bid for the worthless, second class Security Councils seat might persuade our diplomats that we need to rethink our role in the UN.

The United Nations is a marvellous idea and it’s an important institution. But it is also a deeply troubled organization. It is corrupt. It is badly managed. It is poorly led. It is badly organized. It is in dire need of reform.

The bad leadership and poor organization begin at the Security Council.

“The rails to hell are laid with good intentions”

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

In the National Post, Jonathan Kay explains how Canadian governments find themselves in the situation where the basic laws of the land can be flouted at will by a small extremist faction and the police are unwilling to do more than bare peacekeeping duties:

“Vancouver Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en” by jencastrotakespictures is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

If you find yourself astounded by the current situation in Canada, whereby protesters have been allowed to shut down a rail network that remains a backbone of passenger travel and industrial transport (and whose coast-to-coast completion in 1885 became a symbol of national unity), it’s useful to revisit the accumulation of symbolic gestures that have steadily destroyed the moral authority of our governments to push back at any assertion of Indigenous rights and grievances. For years, our leaders offered reflexive acquiescence to increasingly expansive claims that Canada remains a white supremacist dystopia, culminating in last year’s campaign to convince us not only that modern Canada is a “genocide” state, but that even the act of expressing disagreement with this description makes you a sort of metaphorical train conductor on the rails to Canadian Dachau. Having publicly tattooed their guilty settler souls with every imaginable hashtag, our leaders now apparently find themselves stopped from restoring the rule of law.

The rails to hell are laid with good intentions. And there is nothing that now signals goodness in Canadian public life more than the land acknowledgment. Certainly, no one can argue with the historical truth that Indigenous peoples populated Canada for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. But words have meaning. And the well-understood meaning of these acknowledgments is that Indigenous peoples exercise a sort of broad, vaguely defined moral sovereignty over lands “owned” by Canadian governments, corporations and private citizens — including the lands on which we have constructed roads, rails, ports and legislatures. And since this sovereignty apparently now may be asserted at any time, for pretty much any reason, we have effectively lost the ability to enforce the systematic organization of property rights on which every functional society, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, depends.

The push to recognize Indigenous sovereignty over ancestral lands stretches back generations, an effort rooted in very real constitutional and treaty rights. But what I am describing here is not this formally bounded legal campaign, but rather the more general insistence that the entire country remains stained by original sin, and so must be purified by an open-ended, quasi-spiritual process of “decolonization.” This project began in earnest in 2017 as a counter-reaction to the perceived jingoism of the Canada 150 celebrations. Within the rarified corners of the literary and arts milieus (in which I found myself embedded at the time), decolonization quickly became a sort of state religion, complete with decolonization-themed sensitivity training and confession rituals.

[…]

The people doing the protesting are led by dissidents within one of the affected Indigenous communities, amplified by a critical mass of white environmentalists who are perfectly happy to cherry-pick Indigenous causes based on how well they line up with their own Anti-Racism/Critical Studies term-project requirements. Indeed, there is a certain type of very self-satisfied white Canadian leftist who sees himself as a real-life Lorax. Drawing on antiquated noble-savage stereotypes from the past, these decolonization super-allies cast Indigenous people as their little bar-ba-loot bears. And it just ruins their day when Indigenous leaders refuse to grab their tummies, moan for the CBC cameras, or read their bar-ba-loot scripts.

There is a larger hypocrisy at play here, too. Justin Trudeau and his entourage — currently on world tour, hoping to convince African and Caribbean leaders to hand him the shiny trophy of a UN Security Council seat — don’t take the train much. They fly. So, too, do the provincial politicians passing the buck in equal measure, not to mention the national broadcast journalists offering maudlin profiles of the demonstrators. Forcing ordinary travellers to bear the burden of upholding officially sanctioned upper-middle-class social-justice pieties isn’t “progressive.” It’s reactionary, snobbish elitism with a progressive façade.

February 5, 2020

“On this issue, Canada’s two solitudes could hardly be more starkly apparent”

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

Chris Selley on the vastly different reaction from Quebec media to the Trudeau government’s notion to turn the country’s news organizations into a modern version of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda apparatus, pumping out approved-by-the-Liberals story lines:

On Sunday, when CTV’s Evan Solomon pushed Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault on the issue of issuing journalism licences to foreign media outlets, Guilbeault eventually just shrugged: “I’m not sure I see what the big deal is.”

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

The minister tried to walk it back on Monday, but the fact is many of his fellow Quebecers will also struggle to discern a big deal. There is simply much more tolerance of this sort of cultural gatekeeping among francophone Quebecers than in the Rest of Canada, and the tolerance extends well into the realm of journalism.

“In reading the (report’s) 260 pages and 97 recommendations, one word comes to mind” Sunday’s editorial in La Presse gushed: “Finally!”

Opposition to government regulation of journalism is firmly entrenched not just in anglophone Canada, but across the anglosphere. When the 2011 Leveson Inquiry proposed the British government create a powerful new press regulator, nearly every major outlet rejected the idea. Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, famously vowed the magazine “will not attend its meetings, pay its fines nor heed its menaces.”

The same year, Laval University professor Dominique Payette’s report into Quebec’s struggling news media recommended the government legislate a “professional journalist” designation. The province’s largest journalists’ trade organization and the Quebec Press Council happily sat down with the government to bash out a power-sharing agreement on deciding who’s a proper journalist and who isn’t.

The English-language Montreal Gazette was dead-set against the idea, but Le Devoir called it a “logical outcome.” (The power-sharing discussions eventually fell apart, and the idea died a merciful death.)

February 4, 2020

“Who could oppose such an obviously sound idea?”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

A few pithy comments from Twitter on the Trudeau government’s apparent surprise that a few Canadians don’t think their regulate-the-internet plan is brilliant:

Fellow Rush fan Matt Gurney finds the perfect lyrics for the occasion:

Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons

CRTC regulating the internet – “Nobody elsewhere is proposing anything like it, and for good reason: because it’s insane”

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

Ted Campbell suggests that the Canadian government most recent brainfart is a “Tea Party moment” for Canadians:

One commentator on social media dubbed this […] the moment when Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault said that the Trudeau regime plans to license news websites as a “Boston Tea Pary moment.”

N. Currier. Destruction of tea at Boston Harbor, 1846. [New York: N. Currier]
Retrieved from the Library of Congress – https://www.loc.gov/item/91795889/

She was referring to the protest, in December of 1773, when angry American colonists (many dressed as Native Americans to try and hide their true identities) dumped several hundred chests of tea, imported by the East India Company, into Boston harbour to protest the taxes, on almost everything, that had been imposed, by Westminster to pay for the Seven Years War. Westminster felt it was only fair to tax the colonists equally, along with the people of the British Isles, because much of the war, called the French-Indian War, now, by Americans, was fought to protect them and their vital commercial interests. The American colonists disagreed, many on the principle that they should not be taxed without being represented in parliament. We know where it all ended.

It’s a good question. Most commentators seem to agree with me that the Trudeau regime has seriously overreached in supporting the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel’s recommendations that, somehow, the distribution of “news” should be regulated by the government. That is a far, far greater intrusion into the liberty of free Canadian citizens than a tax on staples was to Americans in 1773.

Andrew Coyne, writing in the Globe and Mail, opines that “The whole thing is just breathtaking – a regulatory power grab without precedent, either in Canada or the democratic world. Nobody elsewhere is proposing anything like it, and for good reason: because it’s insane. This kind of bureaucratic micromanagement, with its obsession with ‘cultural sovereignty’ and ‘telling ourselves our own stories,’ would have been hopelessly outdated in 1990. In 2020, it’s just embarrassing.” He’s right to use the word “insane,” ~ the proposal is quite possibly unconstitutional, just for a start, it is, certainly based on a deeply mistaken idea of what the internet actually is ~ and he’s equally right to say that every Canadian who doesn’t, actively, protest against this must be embarrassed because each is, for no good reason at all that I can see, supporting a proposal that makes Canada less, far less, of a liberal democracy and more like Ethiopia and Senegal (both with scores below 6.0, the threshold for a Flawed Democracy in the well regarded Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest democracy index) where he will visit this week … perhaps to learn from the leaders of authoritarian regimes what his next steps should be to embarrass Canada further.

Michael Geist on the jaw-dropping performance of Trudeau’s Canadian Heritage Minister last weekend:

In June 2017, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage committee recommended implementing tax on Internet services in a report on media. Within minutes, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the proposal at a press conference in Montreal. Trudeau’s answer – which literally came as committee chair Hedy Fry was holding a press conference on the report – was unequivocal: No. The government was not going to raise costs of Internet services with an ISP tax. The committee recommendation was minutes old and the government wasted absolutely no time in killing the proposal.

Last week, the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel proposed a far broader regulatory vision for the Internet. Indeed, it is difficult to give the full breadth of this plan its due. I will be posting this week on some of the most harmful aspects of the plan, including regulating media organizations around the world with penalties in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for failing to obtain licences, regulating streaming companies despite their massive investment in Canada, regulating everything from app stores to operating systems, creating liability for harmful content that violates Canada’s commitments in the USMCA, undermining net neutrality, and increasing the costs of Internet-based services for Canadian consumers.

Over the weekend, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault was asked about the proposal. In particular, he was asked about the proposal to licence foreign news sites (the example used was Breitbart but it could just as easily have been the New York Times, BBC, CNN, Fox or MSNBC). The answer should have been easy: no.

Instead of “no”, Minister Guilbeault’s response was that it was “no big deal.”

On Monday morning, the minister appears to have reconsidered being quite so blatant in indulging his inner authoritarian control freak:

Guilbeault walked back the comments on Monday, stating that the government had “no intention to impose licensing requirements on news organizations,” nor will the government “regulate news content.”

“… Our focus will be and always has been that Canadians have diversity to high-quality news sources,” said Guilbeault to reporters in Ottawa.

This announcement comes after deep criticism of a previous announcement by the Liberal government, where they said they would force news organizations to apply for a licence.

Guilbeault’s announcement faced intense scrutiny from across the political spectrum with some commentators suggesting that it would be a dangerous attack on the freedom of the press.

February 1, 2020

Trudeau government’s unwillingness to define what they mean by “middle class”

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

The phrase has taken on almost an Alice in Wonderland quality for Justin Trudeau and his recently created “Minister of Middle Class Prosperity”:

    “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

It could be addressed, says Chris Selley … and really should be:

In the meantime, the Liberals have another problem. It is far less important than Iran or China, but it’s also far more embarrassing than either, because it is entirely of their own making and so easily fixed. It is as follows: Trudeau has given Ottawa MP Mona Fortier the new cabinet title of “Minister of Middle Class Prosperity,” but no one in the government has yet bothered to define “middle class.” And everyone is laughing at them.

Mona Fortier, Minister of Middle Class Prosperity and Associate Minister of Finance.
© HOC-CDC. Photo by Christian Diotte, House of Commons Photo Services, November 2019.

Fortier has tried to explain herself. “We have to make sure we represent the realities in a rural, remote or even urban setting, (and) regional differences,” she told CTV upon her appointment. “The income required to attain a middle-class lifestyle can vary greatly based on Canadians’ specific situation,” she told the same network this week.

She’s right! Pack up your middle-class lifestyle in Small Town A, and you might well not recognize it when you unpack in Big City B. The thing is, though, statisticians — including scores of them in the federal government’s employ — are across this. They know very well that a Canadian dollar does not purchase the same quantity of goods and services in every part of the country, and they have all sorts of ingenious ways to compensate.

If it were true that “middle class” can’t be defined because it connotes different things in different places, then the same would go for “poverty.” But Canada has never had any problem defining poverty on a relative basis. And in 2018, this very Liberal government adopted an absolute measure of poverty as well: the Market Basket Measure, which estimates the cost of “a modest standard of living” in any given place, and calculates how many of us can’t afford it.

So the “poverty line” in Small Town A is not the same as it is in Big City B, and … sorry, this very simple concept doesn’t need to be explained to National Post readers any further. The point is, defining poverty was a good thing. Defining the middle class obviously doesn’t matter as much, but since this government seems utterly obsessed with it — and with evidence-based policy! — there is no good reason for it not to do likewise.

January 26, 2020

Trudeau’s illogical gun ban will do nothing to reduce violent crime

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

It will, on the other hand, infringe the rights of law-abiding Canadians and encourage otherwise law-abiding people to disobey the law. It won’t take a single lethal weapon out of the hands of criminals — because they’re already violating the laws that are in force today and won’t be deterred by yet another token rule they won’t obey. At the Post Millennial, D.J. Sumanik explains why the proposed ban is wrong:

Restricted and prohibited weapons seized by Toronto police in a 2012 operation. None of the people from whom these weapons were taken was legally allowed to possess them.
Screen capture from a CTV News report.

I chose the AR-15 for that video because it is the singular most demonized firearm on the planet. The rifle is used to scare uninformed citizens daily. Yet the same rifle has never been used for murder by a legal gun owner in Canada.

In fact, it’s only been used for murder one time in our country over the last 50 years by a gang. A far cry from the narrative that “assault weapons” are lurking in every corner of Canadian society waiting to murder our children.

Justin Trudeau is claiming this firearm and others like it are so deadly, so dangerous, and so extreme that they must be confiscated from every licensed Canadian gun owner across the country. But with only one murder in 50 years, and the gun almost certainly still being the murderer’s hand regardless if there was a ban, the numbers simply don’t add up. In fact they barely register. Semi-auto rifles are extremely rare for use in Canadian gun homicide […] handguns are the firearm of choice for most shootings. Semi-autos only make up a small percentage of rifles and shotguns in our country. So how does this add up to a federal ban costing $600 million in taxpayer money?

Short answer: It doesn’t.

Canada has roughly 2.2 million licensed gun owners who are monitored DAILY by RCMP for red flags. Most people don’t know that. It’s called continuous eligibility screening. If you step out of the line with the law, the cops show up and take your guns.

Some further thoughts.

If only 5 percent of Canadian gun owners were out there shooting up the streets, we’d have 110,000 deaths on our hands annually. According to StatsCan, 2018 left Canada with 249 tragic gun murders. The vast majority were by gangs fighting over drugs in urban centers. Even if you were to incorrectly assume every one of those shootings was a legal gun owner and not a gang member (yeah right) it means 99.9998868% of us pose no threat to society. Can you think of another demographic with that kind of track record? I certainly can’t.

Now, the lives lost in those incidents are valuable. 249 Canadian families are feeling daily pain. Something needs to change. Gang warfare can’t go unchecked. But to punish millions of innocent Canadians who hold such an excellent track record will not help. There’s a very simple truth in all of this: Taking my firearms away in the Yukon will not prevent gang homicide in Toronto.

Furthermore, we as Canadians don’t discriminate against entire groups of people based on the actions of a few bad eggs. For instance, we don’t blame all Muslims in Canada for the actions of 9/11. How is it acceptable for Justin Trudeau to punish gun owners across Canada for gang violence?

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