Quotulatiousness

August 11, 2024

Canada’s long-standing issues with national defence won’t be fixed by merely spending more money

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

In The Line, Greg Quinn explains why meeting the 2% of GDP NATO target for military spending isn’t going to solve Canada’s problems with the military:

Canada isn’t pulling its weight on defence. Is that what Canadians want? Because it isn’t what its allies want. And the allies are more and more willing to say so.

Canada, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, likes to talk about how the country punches above its weight in NATO and global affairs more generally. It’s a cliché many countries have resorted to when put under pressure on one issue or another. (And I’ll confess that this includes my own United Kingdom, which I served as a diplomat for decades before my recent retirement.)

It’s also smoke and mirrors, which in Canada’s case on defence, hides an unhappy truth — Canada doesn’t pay its way.

Trudeau says Canada will meet the target of spending two per cent of GDP on defence in 2032. Some 18 years after NATO committed to it. At the moment Canada spends a paltry 1.37 per cent, or some $33.8 billion a year, on defence, damn near the bottom among the allies, in percentage terms. Ottawa claims this will increase to 1.76 per cent, or $49.5 billion, by 2030. If so, that will move Canada up a whopping two places to 25th.

Mind you, the Parliamentary Budget Office disputes even this, stating that Canada’s defence spending will peak at 1.49 per cent of GDP in 2025-26 before dropping (yes, dropping) to 1.42 per cent in 2029-30. Somebody is being economical with the truth.

[…]

The bottom line is simple — what does Canada (and the Canadian people) want its role in the world to be? Words are easy but they need to be backed by action. One of the most obvious demonstrations of action is spending on a defence force that is capable of deploying and acting on the global stage. More bluntly, of fighting and defeating a near-peer enemy as part of a coalition of allies.

If Canada doesn’t want to do that and prefers a defence force that is essentially a glorified local militia that focuses on domestic issues, well, fine. But let’s not pretend it is anything else. Let’s not talk about how much of a force for good Canada is in the world and let’s not try and fool Canada’s allies. They’re not as stupid as Canadian politicians want them to be.

And let’s not expect those allies to happily accept the situation and continue on as if nothing has changed. Canada already complains about being left out of AUKUS. Is it any wonder? More of that should be expected. If you don’t play the game and don’t pull your weight, then sadly, you don’t get the benefits of being in the grown-ups’ club.

Canadians owe themselves, and frankly owe their allies, an honest discussion about kind of role Canada actually wants to play in the world … and whether they’re willing to actually pay the bills required to play that role. Only after such an honest chat can Canadians, and their allies, calibrate their expectations accordingly.

August 2, 2024

Trudeau won’t – can’t – go voluntarily

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

In The Line, Michael Den Tandt explains why the Biden option isn’t a viable one for Justin Trudeau at this stage of the Canadian electoral cycle:

US President Joe Biden talks to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, March 2023.

It’s a tough time to be a backbench Liberal MP in Canada, yes? The tone, emerging in anonymous leaks to reporters, is grumpy, surly, unhappy. This is unsurprising. We’re in year ten of a ten-year political cycle that feels stretched and road-beaten, by any standard.

Plus, to our south, there’s this shining model now of the transformative power of change. One day President Joe Biden is clinging by his fingernails to his party’s nomination, with the convicted felon Donald Trump seemingly headed for a big win in November. The next, Biden’s out, new hope Kamala Harris is raising tens of millions in campaign donations, and reporters are lasering in on Trump’s highly quotable running mate, J.D. Vance.

All in a week. So, couldn’t something similar happen in Ottawa? Couldn’t Prime Minister Justin Trudeau take a step back, hit the beach or the lecture circuit, make way for fresh blood, and at least give the Liberals a shot at survival in 2025? What’s he waiting for?

Anything is possible. But this scenario is unlikely. That’s because Justin Trudeau isn’t Joe Biden; Chrystia Freeland isn’t Kamala Harris, and Canada isn’t the United States.

Most obviously, the cycle: The cycle is everything. Individuals are all but powerless in its clutches. As it nears a decade it adds lead weights, like those a deep-sea diver might wear, to the feet of Canadian incumbents. Even the most promising of change agents — former prime minister and justice minister Kim Campbell is Exhibit A — will be brought low by its power.

The argument can be made made that the Progressive Conservative party’s obliteration in 1993 (reduced from majority status to two seats) was not just due to late-cycle fatigue, that Campbell herself had run a wobbly campaign. Some will note the deep weariness with the constitutional wrangling that dominated Canadian discourse during the Brian Mulroney years, or the hangover of Mulroney’s, at the time, keen personal unpopularity. Fair points.

But underlying those events was still the implacable cycle — as in 2006, when prime minister Paul Martin, having seen that Liberal government reduced to a minority in 2004 (despite his personal popularity at the time), lost power to a rising Stephen Harper. In the throes of the federal sponsorship scandal (I will spare you the details, but you can find them here if you’re interested in the arcana), Martin was described by gifted wordsmith Scott Reid, then his communications director, as “the wire brush” who would scrape away the stain of sponsorship. It was a bold attempt to rhetorically seize the change wave. But the wave was strong and Martin lost.

July 23, 2024

The next phase of the campaign to replace “Orwellian” with “Trudeaupian”

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

On the Fraser Institute blog, Jake Fuss and Alex Whalen outline the Trudeau government’s latest attempt to drive the word “Orwellian” out of common usage by making “Trudeaupian” the more authoritarian descriptor:

A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 (and it’s been 40 years since the actual year 1984). In the novel, Orwell explains the dangers of totalitarianism by exploring what happens when government exercises extreme levels of control over citizens including censoring and controlling language. While Canada is a relatively free country in 2024, there are aspects of Orwell’s world reflected in government policy today.

The Human Freedom Index, published annually by the Fraser Institute and Cato Institute, defines freedom as a social concept that recognizes the dignity of individuals by the absence of coercive constraint. In a free society, citizens are free to do, say or think almost anything they want, provided it does not infringe on the right of others to do the same.

Canada currently fares relatively well compared to other countries on the Human Freedom Index, placing 13th out of 165 countries. However, our score has dropped six spots on the index since 2008 when Canada recorded its highest ever rank.

This is not surprising given the Trudeau government’s recent efforts to control and manage the free exchange of ideas. The recent Online Streaming Act imposes various content rules on major streaming services such as Netflix, and requirements to extract funds to be redirected toward favoured groups. The Act seemingly seeks to bring the entire Internet under the regulation of a government body.

In another piece of recent legislation, the Online News Act, the government attempted to force certain social media platforms to pay other legacy news outlets for carrying content. In response, the social media platforms chose simply not to allow content from those news providers on their platforms, resulting in a dramatic reduction of Canadians’ access to news.

Now, a new piece of federal legislation — Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act — seeks to control language and grant government power to punish citizens for what the government deems to be unfavourable speech.

The government has sold Bill C-63 as a way to promote the online safety of Canadians, reduce harms, and ensure the operators of social media services are held accountable. In reality, however, the bill is Orwell’s Big Brother concept brought to life, where government controls information and limits free exchange. The legislation seeks to punish citizens not just for what the governments deems as “hate speech” but also grants the state power to bring Canadians before tribunals on suspicion that they might say something hateful in the future. Not surprisingly, many have raised concerns about the constitutionality of the Bill, which will surely be tested in court.

Trudeau announced new submarines for the RCN … don’t assume he’s really serious

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

At The Hub, J.L. Grantastein explains why Trudeau’s hasty commitment under pressure from our exasperated NATO allies is not likely to be met, and almost certainly not to be met fully:

HMCS Chicoutimi escorts Peoples Liberation Army (Navy) ships visiting Victoria on behalf of the Chinese military, 13 December 2016.
Photo: Cpl Carbe Orellana, MARPAC Imaging Services, ET2016-0468-03 ©2016 DND-MDN CANADA

Canada has no capacity to construct submarines, and the country’s shipyards are struggling to build destroyers, icebreakers, and supply ships. This means that submarines will need to be purchased from European or Asian shipyards with experience in building them. (There will be a certain irony if the RCN, having fought against U-boats in two world wars, ends up with German submarines.)

As of Trudeau’s announcement, let us be clear, no submarine design has been selected, and naval officers are said only to have been engaged in seeking the best models for the RCN. Given Canada’s broken defence procurement system, this is unlikely to be a quick process. The RCN may soon know what it wants but the bean counters will rule as they always do, and orders most likely will not be placed for at least three to five years.

Few expect that the Liberals will be in power in 2027, and if the Conservatives do form the government, it is worth noting that Pierre Poilievre has refused to commit to a date for Canada to meet its 2 percent pledge. New subs may not be an idea the Tories will accept.

If an old or new government does decide to continue with a submarine program, it is certain that a new conventional sub will cost at least $1 billion, many millions more to make it strong enough to operate for long periods in the Arctic, and millions more for its torpedoes, missiles, other weapons, radars, and electronic systems. The costs involved all but guarantee that 12 submarines are a pipedream — the RCN will be lucky to get four to six. Trudeau did not offer a timetable in his remarks, but it is highly unlikely that even a single submarine would be ready to go to sea before the early 2030s and the last by the 2040s.

Then there is the problem of manning a fleet of underwater vessels. The RCN has four Victoria-class boats now. These subs, purchased used from the Royal Navy, have not worked well, are constantly undergoing expensive repairs, and scarcely leave the dock. In other words, the crews have relatively little sea-going experience, the RCN is short of sailors already, and experienced mechanics and skilled technicians are in even shorter supply. Each sub will need more than sixty officers and sailors, and there must be at least three times that number on leave, on courses, or in training to support each crew.

There is little point in acquiring new submarines if there are no crews to sail in them, and with the fifteen new destroyers planned and just beginning construction, the senior service’s personnel needs must be a top priority. That need will not be met until the Canadian Armed Forces’ problems with recruitment are fixed, and that problem has bedevilled the military for decades. (I served on a Department of National Defence Special Committee in 1995 that advanced recommendations to improve recruiting, but nothing changed. Nothing has improved in the three decades since.)

Note that referring to the navy as “the senior service” is only appropriate when talking about Britain’s Royal Navy. The Royal Canadian Navy was established in 1910, long after the Canadian Army came into existence. I’m sure members of the RCN won’t mind if you make that mistake, however.

July 6, 2024

Canada, NATO’s most egregious freeloader

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Eugene Lang and Vincent Rigby explain why our NATO allies are less and less willing to listen to Canadian virtue-signalling and posturing when we continue to refuse to live up to our commitments on the Canadian Armed Forces and contributing our full share toward NATO operations:

Next week’s NATO Summit in Washington marks the 75th anniversary of the trans-Atlantic Alliance. Yet despite being one of the original 12 founding members, Canada’s credibility within the alliance will be at an all-time low.

There is no question Canada has a proud history with NATO. Canadian statesmen — including Lester B. Pearson, Louis St. Laurent, Hume Wrong and Escott Reid — were architects of the alliance in the late 1940s, and helped author Article Two of the North Atlantic Treaty calling for political and economic collaboration among member-states, the so-called “Canadian Article”.

Over the decades, the Canadian military has made significant contributions to NATO missions in western Europe, the Balkans and Afghanistan. But that was then and this is now, and two years ago, Michel Miraillet, France’s ambassador to Canada, put things bluntly: “You are riding a first-class carriage with a third-class ticket. If you want to remain in the first-class seat, you need to train and expand (the military) and to go somewhere.”

Sentiments like these have been fuelled by Canada’s stubborn refusal to meet NATO’s defence spending target of two per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) — a commitment Ottawa has signed onto twice in the past ten years but is far from achieving. Last year, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg expressed frustration over this recalcitrance: “Canada has not conveyed a precise date but I expect (it) to deliver on the pledge to invest two per cent of GDP on defence, because this is a promise we all made”.

Stoltenberg’s comments evidently had little impact in Ottawa. While Canada’s recent Defence Policy Update (DPU) placed greater emphasis on the Arctic (NATO’s northern flank) and promised new defence investments, its pledge to increase defence spending to 1.76 per cent of GDP by 2030 fell well short of the NATO target. Canada, currently spending 1.37 per cent of its GDP on defence, remains among only a handful of NATO members which have failed to reach the two per cent threshold and have no plan to do so.

The Defence Policy Update’s silence on this issue did not go unnoticed among allies. Criticism of Canada’s NATO posture reached new heights last month when 23 U.S. senators wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, stating “we are concerned and profoundly disappointed that Canada’s most recent projection indicated that it will not reach its two percent commitment this decade”. Canadians can be forgiven for failing to recall the last time nearly a quarter of the U.S. Senate wrote to the Canadian government on anything.

It’s well known that Justin Trudeau has no time for military issues, but it’s surprising that he hasn’t done a few things that wouldn’t increase the actual spending on the CAF, but would be “bookkeeping” changes that would shift some existing government spending into the military category, like militarizing the Canadian Coast Guard. (That is, moving the CCG from the Fisheries and Oceans portfolio into the National Defence portfolio, not actually putting armaments on CCG vessels. Something similar could be done with the RCMP, switching it from Public Safety to National Defence with no other funding or operational changes.) That Trudeau hasn’t chosen to make even these symbolic changes shows that he actively opposes fulfilling the commitment his government has made twice in the last ten years for reasons of his own.

July 2, 2024

Jonathan Kay on real Canadian history

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Education, France, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Canadians have never really been encouraged to learn much about our own history. When I was in school, the history content skewed as far away from anything that might be stirring or exciting as it possibly could (we skipped over all the wars, for example), so that they could emphasize the legislative assemblies, the treaties and conferences, and the mix-and-match bearded and mustachioed “great and the good” of the time. If nothing else, you could catch up on your sleep for an hour. (I exaggerate a bit, but history in the primary grades at least covered the initial discovery and exploration of what would become Canada by French and English fur traders, adventurers, and scoundrels (some were all three). We even got a relatively unbiased (for the time) introduction to some of the First Nations, mostly in Ontario and Quebec.) These days, of course, kids learn that Canada is a genocidal colonialist white supremacist horror show that has no right to exist … hardly the kind of improvement one would hope for.

In the National Post Jonathan Kay suggests the only way to really understand Canadian history is to utterly ignore the politicians (and the bureaucrats) and learn it for yourself:

These guys are important, no question, but you need to go back a long way before them to really understand Canadian history. The nation didn’t burst fully formed from Sir John A.’s forehead, Athena-style.
Libraries and Archives Canada item ID number 3013194.

The surest way to make me treasure something is to take it away. So it was with Canada Day, whose annual appearance I’d once greeted with scarcely more excitement than the Ontario Civic Holiday and Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. Then came 2021, when the high priests of social justice demanded that we cancel Canada’s birthday celebrations, so that we might spend July 1 in morbid contemplation of our original sin. Not being one for rituals of confession and penitence, I instead began to think harder about why I love this country, despite its flaws — even if expressing such sentiments in public was now viewed as hate speech.

“This country was built on genocide”, ran one major-newspaper headline, amid the national meltdown following reports that hundreds of unmarked children’s graves had been found at former residential schools. Calgary dropped its fireworks program on the basis that (among other reasons) such scenes of celebration might hamper “truth and reconciliation”. Justin Trudeau, who’d come into office urging Canadians to “celebrate this amazing place we call home”, now took Canada Day as an occasion to instruct us that “the horrific findings of the remains of hundreds of children at the sites of former residential schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan have rightfully pressed us to reflect on our country’s historical failures”.

The prime minister’s suggestion that children’s corpses were being plucked from the ground en masse turned out to be a reckless falsehood. Even the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Nation, whose chief once claimed that “the remains of 215 children” had been found in Kamloops, now seems to be acknowledging that her original statements were wrong. While Canada has much to answer for when it comes to the legacy of residential schools, no graves or bodies were found at these locations in 2021. And none have been found since.

[…]

The unfortunate truth about Canada’s 19th-century origin story is that our country’s initial contours were sketched out by a group of middle-aged binge drinkers whose focus was less on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than on the mundane task of diffusing the high capital costs associated with rail construction and defending northern rivers and ports from rampaging Americans and Irishmen. (Yes, Irishmen: Visitors to Charlottetown’s Victoria Park will find a trio of ocean-facing nine-pounder guns that were installed in 1865 to guard against the Fenian Brotherhood, whose troops, many residents feared, were set to invade and conquer the island. But faith and begorrah, I do digress.) In this project, the Fathers of Confederation were successful. But the ensuing separation from Britain was a slow, bureaucratic affair that makes for dull reading (and duller television). I wish it were otherwise, fellow patriots. But alas, these are the facts.

Which is to say that if we’re looking to develop a compelling, historically accurate and, dare I say, inclusive, understanding of Canada’s national story, the story has to begin earlier. Specifically: the early 1600s — two and a half centuries before John A. Macdonald and his fellow Fathers of Confederation were knocking back the giggle juice in Charlottetown Harbour. As you might imagine, this means giving a starring role to Indigenous peoples — though not as the sacred martyrs and magical forest pixies of modern progressive imagination, but rather as the true-to-life diplomats, traders, craftsmen, hunters and soldiers that the first waves of Europeans knew them to be.

[…]

Toronto-born Greg Koabel spent most of his early academic career studying James I’s England (with a particular focus on the 1641 treason trial of the Earl of Strafford). And so, crucially, he approached the history of Canada laterally, through the prism of English and (primarily) French geopolitics. In telling the story of the first sustained European settlements in North America, he pays Indigenous populations the respect of examining them through this same geopolitical lens.

The resulting narrative, told in his brilliant Nations of Canada podcast, is so fascinating that you’ll have to keep reminding yourself he’s talking about Canada. This past week, Koabel hit a major milestone, releasing his 200th episode. And with his permission, I’ve been adapting his long-form audio chronology to written publication at Quillette. So far, we’ve published more than 100,000 words, and Samuel de Champlain hasn’t even left the stage yet.

I’m not much of a podcast listener, aside from The Rest is History and some Minnesota Vikings-specific sports podcasts, but the Quillette serializations of Koabel’s podcast episodes really are excellent and more than repay the effort to read them.

July 1, 2024

Fifty ways to leave your leader

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

Okay, I exaggerate in the headline … Mitch Heimpel only offers a list of eight factors that matter when it’s time for a political party to take their leader out behind the barn, so to speak:

Caucus revolts have gotten more common in Canadian politics of late.

They’ve always been commonplace in Westminster politics. In recent years, they’ve dethroned three prime ministers in the U.K. They’re almost as common as general elections for removing prime ministers in Australia. They’re a sign of a healthy parliamentary system … sort of. Our system runs on confidence. Prime ministers are supposed to be responsive to pressure from the backbench.

Canada has been something of an exception to this, and not always to our national benefit. Though less so lately. We’ve seen sitting governments in revolt (Jason Kenney in Alberta, 2022) We’ve also seen opposition leaders taken out by frustrated caucus (Erin O’Toole federally in 2022, Patrick Brown as Ontario Progressive Conservative leader, 2018.) The Chrétien-Martin feud was more of a civil war than a revolt.

Still, despite the examples above, these events remain relatively rare in Canada, compared to many of our Westminster peers, because of how centralized power has become in leaders’ offices (especially in the PMO). Our normal, as described in Jeffrey Simpson’s The Friendly Dictatorship, is how our system evolved, not how it was meant to be.

Now, since there are signs (see here and here and here) that at least some Liberals are musing about taking a shot at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it’s perhaps a good time to set some ground rules for caucus revolts. This is what we’ve learned not just from recent Canadian experience, but also from what our British and Australian cousins have learned over the years.

[…]

If things are going so badly that the caucus wants to revolt, you probably do need to make changes. Showing you’re listening, demonstrating accountability at the senior levels and demonstrating change can take the wind out of a caucus revolt before it gets out of hand.

The above are general rules — exceptions can obviously apply. And as noted at the beginning, Canada doesn’t have much experience with these situations. That’s why Australia and the U.K. are so instructive. But things do seem to be changing in Canada, and certainly, things seem to be changing in the Liberal caucus. The above rules are offered free of charge to mutineers and loyalists alike. Good luck!

June 25, 2024

The Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

Paul Wells uncharacteristically posted his initial reaction to the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election after the polls closed, but before the counting was over. He chose … poorly:

[Liberal candidate Leslie] Church’s margin of victory over Conservative candidate Don Stewart bounced around 10 points all Monday night. As I get ready to hit Send on this post, it’s closer to 6 points, and I have no way of knowing whether it will shrink or expand as more results come in. But if it were 10 points, that would be 9.9-ish points more than you need for a victory. I’m especially pleased to report that the result constitutes yet another glorious victory for Wells’s First Rule, which holds that for any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome. In particular, in the last several days, I’ve been telling friends that this would be a particularly solid Wells’s Rule victory if the night ended with Tyler Meredith boasting on X. Et voilà:

If you slice the returns finely enough, pace Tyler, they might yield more omens and portents. Ten points would be the Liberals’ narrowest margin in TSP (as I’ll call the riding for short) since 2011, and the second-lowest in 31 years. In 2008, when the Liberals under Stéphane Dion were reduced to 77 seats out of 308, the Liberal margin of victory was more than twice what it was in Monday’s by-election. A 10-point margin of victory in TSP is what Liberals get when there’s almost no water left in the pool.

But so what. A win’s a win. By-elections are a blunt measuring tool. Paying subscribers will fill this post’s comment board with theories to explain away the night’s results, and for all I know, some of them might even be correct. Besides, for a few weeks I’ve believed that even if the Liberals had managed to lose TSP, there would have been no public or organized effort within the party to remove Justin Trudeau as leader. You can’t teach an elephant to dance, or a Trudeau Liberal to abandon the internal loyalty that has been one of the hallmarks of his leadership.

So if I’m a Liberal MP — humour me, it’s a thought experiment — I now know what the next year looks like. Justin Trudeau has spent his adult life waiting for the rest of us to realize he was right all along, as we saw in a book that was published last month to extravagant praise. The returns from Toronto will comfort the big guy’s belief that the scales have again begun to fall from Canadians’ eyes, and that therefore this is absolutely the worst time to mess with a winning formula.

He’ll stay. Katie will stay, Ben will stay, Chrystia will stay, Mélanie and Seamus and Max and Clow and all the cats will stay, and the Trudeau team will show new spring in its step as it prepares to get, once more, off the ropes and back into the fray.

To be fair, he did add an update overnight indicating that Stewart had pulled ahead but the counting was still ongoing, and a link to the Elections Canada preliminary results, which I screencapped here just after 9am:

This morning, Mr. Wells posted a follow-up to yesterday’s ever-so-slightly misleading article:

Well, of course I saw it coming all along. What kind of fool could have imagined the Liberal in Toronto — St. Paul’s had any chance?

Hang on. I’m just getting word that I didn’t see it coming. In fact, as recently as Monday night I wrote a post I’ll be hearing about until the cows come home. Sorry about that!

Here are the actual final results, barring any recounts, which may not happen because Conservative Don Stewart’s margin of victory, while slim, is too large to trigger an automatic recount.

Congratulations, Don Stewart! I never doubted you’d win. Hang on. I’m just getting word that I doubted you’d win as recently as last night.

Things will now start to happen quickly. Expect Liberals to work their way through four of the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief before lunch. Denial will come easily, benefiting as it does from long practice. Acceptance may take longer.

In part this is because on paper there isn’t that much to accept. The day’s news is not earth-shaking and, in isolation, should not be taken as definitive. It’s true that by-elections are strange events, though if you add them together they do have some predictive power. It’s true that Leslie Church’s long service as Chrystia Freeland’s chief of staff turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help, a data point whose implications the Deputy Prime Minister won’t want to think much about today. It’s true the Liberals didn’t even try all that hard, if by “didn’t try all that hard” you mean “they tried as hard as they possibly could, my God they tried so hard, my God.”

But a single off-season defeat in a riding the Liberals have, in fact, previously lost during the Paleozoic era is not a larger thing to accept than, say, a punishing loss to Ireland and Norway in a Security Council vote at the UN. Or the loss of two senior cabinet ministers in a controversy in which the ministers who quit were radiantly, obviously in the right. Don’t take my word on that, incidentally: ask David Lametti, who agreed with Jody Wilson-Raybould but managed to keep his job anyway. For a while.

I imagine there’ll be a lot of interesting commentary from other Canadian sources as the day rolls on and the immediate horror starts to recede…

June 24, 2024

Justin Trudeau’s Ominous Online Harms Act: Minority Report Comes to Canada: Conor Friedersdorf

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

Quillette
Published Jun 19, 2024

Jonathan Kay talks to Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf about a censorious government bill that would allow officials to investigate Canadians for things they haven’t done yet.

https://quillette.com/2024/06/19/just…

——

Quillette is an Australian-based online magazine that focuses on long-form analysis and cultural commentary. It is politically non-partisan, but relies on reason, science, and humanism as its guiding values.

Quillette was founded in 2015 by Australian writer Claire Lehmann. It is a platform for free thought and a space for open discussion and debate on a wide range of topics, including politics, culture, science, and technology.

Quillette has gained attention for publishing articles and essays that challenge modern heterodoxy on a variety of topics, including gender and sexuality, race and identity politics, and free speech and censorship.
(more…)

June 17, 2024

For want of a security clearance, the (potential) traitors escaped scot-free

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

In the free-to-cheapskates section of this week’s Dispatch from The Line, we get a summary of the state of brain-freeze in Parliament over the NSICOP (National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians) report, that in a functioning state would have triggered much more action than it has in the dysfunctional Dominion:

The cover of the NSICOP special report on foreign interference (PDF – https://nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf )

The lead story this week, clearly, was the continuing fallout from the NSICOP report last week. Because of this report, even though there is much that we do not know, there are absolutely some things that are clearly established. Let’s run through some of the key points that are uncontested and draw some very modest and safe conclusions from them.

Here are facts.

  • There are multiple parliamentarians, meaning members of the House of Commons and the Senate, who have been deemed by eight of their colleagues to be engaged in activities with hostile foreign powers on either a witting or semi-witting basis.
  • The prime minister and the PMO have been aware of who these individuals are for at least a month, if not longer. That is when NSICOP filed its unredacted report to them for review, as required.

The above facts are unchallenged. Now let’s draw a few conclusions.

The phrasing of the NSICOP report, as well as both Elizabeth May’s and Jagmeet Singh’s press conferences this week, led us to believe some of these individuals are still sitting in both the House of Commons and the Senate. We acknowledge that Elizabeth May and Jagmeet Singh differ considerably on the severity of what these individuals are alleged to have done, but both seem to agree that the relevant parties, in at least some cases, remain in Parliament.

The prime minister, as the person responsible for the administrative and legal apparatus of government, could call the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Director of CSIS, the minister of public safety and others as necessary into his office today, and inform them that he would be making the names public, and that it would be the responsibility of those individuals to figure out how that could be accomplished while protecting intelligence sources and methods. At this time, there is no indication that he has done so, or has any interest in doing so.

So we got the grotesque theatre that was the House of Commons this week. The government has spent the last week and change challenging various opposition leaders to obtain security clearances so that they could view information that the prime minister has had for at least a month, and perhaps longer, even though both the Security of Information Act and the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act (depending on the auspices under which their security clearances were issued) prevents them from disclosing what they read.

And, therefore, doing anything about it. Because to remove a caucus member would be to reveal it, and if a leader has no caucus members that are implicated, there is no urgency to their reading the report.

Protecting the national security of Canada, and the democratic institution of parliament itself, is the prime minister’s job before it is anyone else’s. And the prime minister has had this information for at least a month.

It’s worth repeating that because we want you to envision something. Imagine there are three U.S. Senators accused of aiding and abetting a foreign power, and Joe Biden knew about it for a month.

When do you think impeachment proceedings would start?

Boris Johnson was unceremoniously dumped by his party for lying about throwing a party during COVID lockdowns (and we have no problem with that). Our prime minister has known that there are people currently sitting in parliament that have turned themselves into intelligence assets for hostile foreign powers for a month, and …

… the government would like you to know that it thinks Pierre Poilievre should get a security clearance so that he can read the documents.

We think Poilievre should, too. Because here’s the thing. The Security of Information Act says right there in Section 24 “No prosecution shall be commenced for an offence against this Act without the consent of the Attorney General”.

That reads to us like so: Pierre Poilievre can read those documents, release the names, and then dare Justin Trudeau to prosecute him. Indeed, anyone with the names could.

Your Line editors have raised this before on the podcast, but it bears repeating. Canada’s international reputation has taken a lot of hits lately. So imagine if you would, gentle reader, a situation where Justin Trudeau’s Attorney General signs off on having his political opponent arrested for revealing that hostile foreign powers have coerced sitting MPs into becoming intelligence assets … especially if one or more of those MPs is revealed to be a Liberal.

That’s a front page international news story. We’d look like a banana republic. Our international reputation would take decades to recover.

Spoiler: we already do look like a banana republic and our international reputation is lower than it has ever been. Trudeau isn’t a dummy: he figures that our reputation literally can’t get much worse no matter what he does, so he’s choosing to protect … someone … and what’s Poilievre going to do? He proved during the lockdowns that he’s not willing to get arrested on a matter of principle (unlike Maxime Bernier), so he’s likely to just posture endlessly until something new pops up in the silly season news rotation.

June 16, 2024

“What the hell is going on in Canada?”

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

If you’re not Canadian or have any Canadian friends, you may not understand just how badly broken the country is — and the federal government is still desperately pretending that we’re all onboard with the Net Zero/Carbon Tax/”you’ll own nothing” bullshit and piling on the long-term debt:

One of Canada’s intelligence agencies, a couple of months ago, sent a memo to the Liberal federal government informing them that, in the near-future years to come, they are worried about revolutionary activity. I believe Canada is a good case study because it seems the country has been a sociological testing ground for the powers that be to see what happens. Canada is a surreal twilight zone where it feels like every psyop known to man is hurled its way. Canada unquestionably has the worst demographic and immigration issues, the worst housing issues, the worst social stability, and upwards mobility issues, all adjusted and proportional to its population and size, of course. For our purposes, I believe Canada serves as the worst-case scenario of how bad the dating market can be, and how bad it will continue to get.

Canada has some of the lowest upward social mobility among developed nations, especially for young people, particularly within the OECD and G8. This means that young people in Canada find it relatively difficult to move up the economic ladder compared to their parents.

In 2022, Canada’s population growth was significantly driven by immigration. According to Statistics Canada, approximately 95% of the population growth in that year was attributed to immigration. This includes both permanent and temporary residents, with a notable influx of international students, temporary workers, and permanent residents. Only a meagre 5% of Canada’s population growth, including recent immigrants, was from organic growth and childbirth. Below are the national origins of immigrants over the last twenty-four years. The combined total number of people entering Canada per year, including international students, temporary foreign workers, legal immigrants, and refugee claimants, is approximately 1,133,770 individuals officially. In reality, the government over the last four years has lost count.

As of April 2024, the average home price in Canada is approximately CAD $703,446. This is €477,121.93 and USD $511,466.93. Would you like to see what $703k CAD can get you in France? Hint: a lot more than in Canada.

This has been noticed so much by Canadians that it is now a meme, with Conservative Party and opposition leader Pierre Poilievre pointing it out in the House of Commons. You can compare the price of homes and the cost of living with Canadian wages. You can also compare how far those meagre wages would go in other first-world countries like France, Germany, or Sweden. The answer is much farther. Much, much farther. There is currently no hope, short of radical action by the government unheard of in Canadian history, for this situation to be rectified. The only other option is best left unsaid.

“Educated” Women Lead

In Canada, among ethnic Canadians, a significant portion of the female population is more educated and makes more money than Canadian men. Canadian men make, on average, CAD $48,500, while women make CAD $42,000. However, only 56% of men have post-secondary education, while 68% of women do. Men have completed higher levels of high school, and women have completed higher levels of college or university. This has led to a massive gap in socioeconomic status between men and women. It gets worse when you include non-ethnic Canadians. Completed levels of post-secondary education for men remain at 56%, while women’s rise to 73%.

We know that in our post-industrial world, resources translate to money. Money and completed levels of education translate to status. Women are 50% more likely to divorce men when they make more money. When women are already the initiators of divorce 70% of the time, it starts looking pretty ugly, fast.

June 10, 2024

Elite contempt for democracy is fuelling anti-immigration “far right” sentiment in the west

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Even for people who are generally happy with robust immigration, the numbers being recorded (or, more likely, under-recorded) in Canada, the United States and Europe are far too high to pretend that the new arrivals will quickly integrate into their new countries, and they are generally not being encouraged to do so anyway. Complaints to the people who have enabled these massive inflows — at best — are waved off or ignored, but often are seized upon as examples of hateful far-right xenophobia to be punished and suppressed:

Not so long ago, as many of us reeled from the political earthquakes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed sensible for responsible mainstream political parties to adopt tighter immigration control to keep the populist right at bay. Mass migration in Europe had led to a far-right resurgence; in the US and UK, Trump and the Johnson-era Tories seemed to grasp this and moved to co-opt the anti-immigrant fervor. Democracy was working to accommodate a shift in the public mood.

Or so it seemed. Nearly a decade later, something else has happened: an immigration explosion. In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations.

The recent figures from the US, UK and Canada are mind-blowing. The graphs all look like a hockey stick, with a massive spike in the last three years alone. Under Trump, the average number of illegal crossings a year was around 500,000; under Biden, that has quadrupled to two million a year — from a much more diverse group, from Africa, China and India. To add insult to injury, Biden has also all but shut down immigration enforcement in the interior; and abused his parole power to usher in nearly 1.3 million illegal migrants in 2023 alone. The number of undetained illegal migrants living in the US has thereby ballooned under Biden: from 3.7 million in 2021 to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ICE. If a fraction of those millions turns up for asylum hearings, I’ll be gob-smacked.

Canada has seen something similar. For much of the 21st century, Canada had around 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants a year; but in the last two years, this has nearly doubled. In Britain, the same story. In 2015, the year before Brexit, net migration (the numbers of people immigrating minus the number emigrating) was 329,000; in the last two years, it has more than doubled to over 700,000. And whereas most immigration before Brexit was from the EU, today, immigrants from the developing world outnumber European immigrants by almost 10 to 1. For those Brits who voted for Brexit to lower the number of foreigners in the country, it’s been surreal.

If you want to understand why Biden keeps trailing in the swing states, why the Tories are about to be wiped out in a historic collapse, and why Trudeau is at all-time low in approval at 28 percent, this seems to me to be key. As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa, and Washington chose to massively accelerate it. It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: well now, how can we really get it to take off?

This week, CNN ran a poll on Biden and immigration. Here’s what they found: in May 2020, only one percent of Americans put immigration as their top concern — in 15th place among issues; in May 2024, 18 percent put it first. In 2020, Biden edged Trump by one percent on who was best to tackle the border crisis; four years later, Trump is ahead on the issue by 27 points. As a coup de grâce, CNN also found that foreign-born Americans preferred Trump to Biden on immigration by 47 to 44 percent. Turns out that this immigrant’s worries are widely shared by my fellow new Americans.

Biden, of course, is now desperately scrambling to salvage something from this disaster. This week, he contradicted himself by saying he has the unilateral capacity as president to shut down the border, and attempted to blame the GOP for the problem. Yes, the GOP was unhelpful and cynically political earlier this year — but that won’t muddy the waters for most voters who have been conscious for the past three years. But I am grateful nonetheless to hear the president echo what the Dish has been saying for years now, and for which I was routinely called a racist:

    To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now. The simple truth is there is a worldwide migrant crisis, and if the United States doesn’t secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who may try to come here, because there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America.

Now that didn’t hurt, did it? But why did he keep telling us there was no crisis for the last three and a half years? And why would anyone trust a re-elected Biden to enact this if he had a Congressional majority? I sure don’t.

Even under Biden’s “crackdown”, he is still prepared to admit at least 1.75 million illegal immigrants a year! Last week, Chuck Schumer declared that the ultimate goal was to legalize every single illegal immigrant — because Americans are not having enough children. Without open borders, of course, our economy wouldn’t look so good: in the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers gained 600,000 new jobs, while native-born Americans lost 300,000. But don’t you dare mention the “Great Replacement Theory“!

June 8, 2024

Eco-terrorism – it’s all over Canada

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

Elizabeth Nickson on the strong likelihood of any given wildfire in Canada being not just man-made but deliberately set for political reasons:

“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

A Google Earth satellite video is making the rounds on twitter. it shows the moment an arc of fires began in northern Quebec, the smoke rising. It looks like people calculated the prevailing winds so that the smoke would blow south. Then connected via sat phone, they lit them. It’s another psy-op from our gracious overlords. We aren’t afraid enough, despite every nasty limiting idiotic play they have visited upon us in the last four years. Monkey Pox failed, more plague warnings were greeted by a shrug. But this one, the world bursting into flame? Be very very afraid.

Justin Trudeau lost no time in announcing that the fires were from “climate change” and the carbon tax, which is impoverishing everyone not in government or on lush pensions, is just the beginning of the restrictions he must institute or we are all gonna die.

The stupidity and cruelty of this is almost unimaginable. But fires have worked over and over again to terrify people into quiescence. The rumours that they were deliberate were the stuff of fantasy until people started getting arrested. Alberta shows that almost 60 percent of fires in that province are human caused. And in Canada, as of today, we have arrested dozens. They will be released, their bails paid by a high-priced lawyer because most of them act as agents of the hyper-rich, paid through a cascade of environmental NGOs. The richest people among us are burning the forests in order to force compliance.

When I moved back to the country 20 years ago, the movement adopted me because I was writing for the Globe and Mail and Harper’s Magazine. I interviewed hundreds of local activists, the ones who, with the inspiration of RFK, Jr. had shut down the biggest industrial forest in the world in an action called “The War of the Woods“. They were mostly ordinary people, socialists and scientists of one stripe or another and deeply profoundly committed to saving the earth. The fact that they had eliminated the principal source of funding for health care and education — forestry — their own in fact, went right over their heads. It didn’t matter. “Climate Change” was an existential threat and those trees must stand to suck up “carbon”, or CO2, as it used to be known.

I met Denis Hayes too, the founder of Earth Day, head of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, founded by the heiresses to Weyerhaeuser. He excitedly told me how he created the storm of protest that led to Bill Clinton shutting down the western forests of the U.S., during the same period that Clinton was giving away American manufacturing to China. The result was devastation in forested communities from northern California to the Canadian border. Hayes, a tall, attractive Ivy Leaguer married to a woman whose father won a Nobel in chemistry, slithers through every institution. When I hung out with him, his target was Bill Gates’ climate initiatives and clearly, he has succeeded.

His “work” turned the forests into a tinderbox. Today, the 9th of June, 2023, a full thirty years too late, the Wall Street Journal editorial board finally acknowledges that sustainable forestry management may be the principal cause of the forests burning down. Holly Fretwell, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and professor at Montana State, gives, in this book, a thoroughgoing analysis of how wrong-headed and destructive “green” has been in the forests. Also this book by me, and a follow-up policy paper, also by me. These were not popular opinions, but they were, in fact, right. It is not “climate change” burning down the forests, it is government in the hands of brutal greens, in pursuit of an impossible goal.

June 7, 2024

Since 2015, the Trudeau Liberals have done a fantastic job of suppressing the Canadian economy

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

If Canadians elected Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party to make major changes from what had gone on under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, then they got their wish in so many different ways, but especially economically:

Reports of Canada’s dismal economic outcomes seem never to end. Why should they? For years Canadians have had the same federal government delivering the same deleterious economic policies and the same expansion in regulatory initiatives and spending that have invariably depressed economies and reduced standards of living whenever and wherever they are imposed. Therefore, until the federal government or its policies change, we should not expect the miserable results to materially improve.

The latest negative report is the release of Canada’s 2024-Q1 GDP numbers on Friday, which again showed sluggish growth relative to population, resulting in yet another quarterly decline in real GDP per capita. Relative to 2015-Q3, the last full quarter before the Trudeau government took office, cumulative real GDP per capita is up only about 0.7 per cent. A recent RBC Economics analysis showed from around 1991 to 2015, cumulative real GDP per capita growth in Canada approximately tracked with the U.S., but not since Justin Trudeau took office. Compared to 0.7 per cent growth in Canada from 2015-Q3 to 2024-Q1, real GDP per capita is up 15.7 per cent in the U.S. in the same time period.

Where the 0.7 per cent comes from matters, too. In real per capita terms, some components of GDP — mainly government — expanded while others contracted. Alarmingly, business investment, which drives productivity and standards of living, is down 13.9 per cent. This includes real per capita reductions of 15.2 per cent in residential structures, 18.4 per cent in machinery and equipment, and 19.3 per cent in non-residential structures, with an increase in intellectual property investment not nearly enough to offset the reductions in other categories.

To understand why business investment and economic performance in Canada are so poor under the Trudeau government, let us consider the following representative example of its economic strategy.

The government believes many families struggle with the cost of caring for young children, which is a legitimate concern. A reasonable solution, which the Harper government implemented in 2006, is to send money to families with young children and let parents buy for their children what they need. After the Liberals expanded that program, they could have left it at that, but what have they done instead? The government initiated a national takeover of child care, effectively expropriating child care entrepreneurs’ businesses by flooding their sector with public money and then controlling private companies’ revenues and operations. The result is child care entrepreneurs’ investments have been wiped out or severely reduced, control of their business operations have been wrestled away by government, and they are unable to properly serve their customers (the families), as evidenced by the drastic reduction in parental options and widespread shortages.

June 3, 2024

The “mass graves” moral panic at three

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

In the National Post, Father Raymond J. de Souza notes the almost un-noticed third anniversary of the dramatic announcement and ensuing moral panic over claims that hundreds of unmarked graves had been discovered at the site of a former Residential School in Kamloops, BC:

This past week marked the third anniversary of the dramatic announcement that 215 “unmarked graves” had been discovered near a former residential school in Kamloops. It was a global news story which had a significant impact in Canada. It was also a great media malpractice.

Many things were reported then that were not only not true, but had not even been claimed to be true by anyone. Recall the monstrously misleading headlines about mass murder and mass graves? For example, from the Toronto Star on 28 May 2021: “The Remains of 215 Children Have Been Found”.

Not true. No one ever claimed that remains had been found. Many people assumed that the “unmarked graves” held children, but the ground-penetrating radar employed cannot reveal if a body is in the soil, let alone whether it is a child or adult.

Tales of mass murder and mass graves produced a massive moral panic. Marches were held, symbolic children’s shoes were assembled, churches were burned and vandalized, hundreds of millions were committed to investigating further mass graves, the prime minister ordered flags at every embassy abroad and federal building at home to be lowered for nearly six months, a new federal holiday was instituted, the Catholic Church issued (another) apology and Pope Francis came to visit.

How can it now be that the anniversary of something so globally momentous passed so quietly this week?

It’s because the great media malpractice has been answered by journalists, a broader category in the digital world, who provided the effective response. It’s an inspiring David and Goliath tale of how courageous, good journalism beat out conforming, bad journalism.

We can take some pride here at the National Post, for on the first anniversary we published the remarkable reporting of Terry Glavin, who demonstrated exactly how media malpractice had produced a moral panic.

But aside from that, the work was carried out by writers — academics, reporters, amateur researchers and dogged citizens — outside of the legacy media. The story unfolded in C2C Journal, Dorchester Review, True North, Western Standard, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and Quillette.

Last December, a single volume collecting much of this work was published: Grave Error: How the media misled us (and the truth about residential schools), edited by Christian Champion, founder and publisher of the Dorchester Review, and the well known academic and political player, Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary.

Those outlets which had perpetrated the original malpractice took a pass. The legacy media ignored the book, and Canada’s major book retailers did not sell it.

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