Quotulatiousness

June 29, 2018

Justin Trudeau’s emotional thinking style resonates with female voters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

June 17, 2018

Conrad Black – Trump’s not bluffing

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

In the National Post (but linked from his personal website), Conrad Black warns of the danger of assuming that Trump is just blustering on his trade threats:

Justin Trudeau struck just the right Canadian note of our gentle nature but refusal “to be pushed around,” and he predictably will reap the short-term reward for standing up for the country opposite the ideal American bogeyman, the blustering billionaire president who has been a Garry Trudeau caricature of the Ugly American for 25 years. (It is a very incomplete picture, like most caricatures, but it works for Trump and he often cultivates it.) The boycotts of American goods and holidays will be a bonus to Canada economically and the anti-Trump American media will be along within two weeks to lionize doughty Canada like “Gallant little Belgium” in 1914 and “Plucky Israel” in 1947, and it will strengthen Canada’s always fragile self-regard opposite the United States.

On the other hand, Trump isn’t just a blowhard; all his career he has known how to go for the jugular and his reference to 270-per-cent Canadian tariffs on butter is a valid complaint that threatens to tear the scab off this egregious payoff to the comparatively small number of Quebec dairy farmers who mainly profit from it. The same issue was hammered hard by Martha Hall Findlay when she ran for the federal Liberal leadership in 2013 and by Maxime Bernier when he ran narrowly behind Andrew Scheer for the Conservative federal leadership last year. The issue died down after their unsuccessful campaigns, but if Donald Trump is incited to hammer that theme, he will roil the domestic Canadian political waters and English-French relations in the country generally.

Presumably our trade negotiators will not become so intoxicated by the prime minister’s peppy talk and spontaneous popular boycotts of the U.S. that they forget the correlation of forces. An aroused American administration could do serious damage to Canada’s standard of living, and it could be a tempting tactic to expedite more important negotiations with Mexico and the principal Asian and European powers. The United States is now enjoying three times as great a rate of economic growth as Canada (4.8 to 1.5 per cent), has lower tax rates, 11 times as great an economy, and more unfilled jobs than unemployed people.

Behind the peeling façades of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney, the United States is a monster, and not always an amiable monster. If Canadians are blinded by their visceral dislike of Donald Trump, as the antithesis of Canadian criteria for likeable public figures, they will be exposed to the ruthless pursuit of the national interest that in his own career propelled him from technical insolvency to immense wealth and celebrity and then, against all odds, to control of a great political party and to the headship of the most powerful country in the world. If these talks blow up, the U.S. doesn’t have to settle for WTO rules; it can impose outright protectionist measures. Justin Trudeau has been agile, and the country has responded admirably. But Canadian policy-makers must understand that they are playing for almost mortal stakes with potentially dangerous protagonists who have no sense of fair play and no interest in what Canada thinks of them.

June 12, 2018

G7 minus one

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Justin Raimondo on the well-shared image of Angela Merkel and her associates apparently trying to browbeat Donald Trump at the G-7 meeting (this version from Raimondo’s article):

All the Very Serious People are tweeting and retweeting this “iconic” photo of Trump surrounded by the Euro-weenies, with Angela Merkel seeming to lecture the President while the rest of our faithless “allies” look on. It’s “America Alone” – the visual representation of the internationalist worldview: Trump’s policy of “America First” is “isolating” us, and, according to clueless leftists like Michael Moore, Merkel is now the “leader” of the “free world.”

This last is good news indeed, for if Merkel is the new leader of the “free world” then the stationing of 35,000 US troops in Germany – at a cost of billions annually – is no longer required and we can bring them home. This also means Germany, rather than the US, will be sending troops all over the world to fight “terrorism” – a move that is sure to cause consternation in certain regions with a history of German intervention, but hey, somebody has to do it!

The political class is screaming bloody murder over Trump’s performance at the G-7 meeting in Canada, where he reportedly spent most of the time detailing how much the US was paying for the defense of our vaunted “allies,” not to mention the high tariffs imposed on American goods. He then proposed a “free trade zone” in which member countries would drop all tariffs, subsidies, and other barriers to trade: the “allies” didn’t like that much, either. Nor did the alleged advocates of free trade here in the US give him any credit for ostensibly coming around to their point of view. Which reminds me of something Murray Rothbard said about this issue: “If authentic free trade ever looms on the policy horizon, there’ll be one sure way to tell. The government/media/big-business complex will oppose it tooth and nail.”

Of course the Euro-weenies don’t want real free trade: after all, they practically invented protectionism. What they want is a free ride, at Uncle Sam’s expense, and the reason they hate Trump is because they know the freebies are over. However, what really got the Usual Suspects frothing at the mouth was Trump’s insistence that Russia be readmitted to the G-8:

    “I think it would be good for the world, I think it would be good for Russia, I think it would be good for the United States, I think it would be good for all of the countries in the G-7. I think having Russia back in would be a positive thing. We’re looking to have peace in the world. We’re not looking to play games.”

The “experts” went crazy when he said this: our “allies” are being insulted, they wailed, while our “enemies” are being “appeased.” It’s sedition! Russia! Russia! Russia!

Eric Boehm says that the White House’s justification for imposing tariffs on national security grounds may have been undermined through Trump’s tweets hitting back after what he clearly felt was Justin Trudeau’s hissy fit (although Trudeau didn’t exactly break new ground or say anything radically different in his comments):

The Trump administration has spent months trying to construct a rather flimsy argument that steel and aluminum imports from Canada and other close American allies constitute a national security threat. More than a handy way to drum up public support for trade barriers, the “national security” claim is a crucial bit of the legal rationale for letting the president impose tariffs on those goods without congressional approval.

Then, as he was departing this past weekend’s G7 summit, Trump took to Twitter to air some grievences with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In doing so, the president may have significantly kneecapped that legal argument.

The last sentence of Trump’s tweet is the one that really matters.

The White House slapped a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum by invoking Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gives the president legal authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval when it’s for the sake of national security. That line of argument, outlined by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a February report, says that America needs aluminum and steel to make weapons of war, and that protecting the domestic steel and aluminum industries is the only way to ensure the country will be able to defend itself if attacked.

That is pretty weak, as I (and others) have written before. But as long as Trump makes that claim — no matter how strained the logic might be — the law seems to be on his side. Invoke “national security” and the president can do what he wants with trade.

Except now Trump seems to have admitted that it’s not about national security at all. His tweet plainly states that “our Tariffs [sic] are in response to his of 270% on dairy!”

Chris Selley points out that up until this eruption, Canadian politicians were still carrying on as if nothing was really at stake (especially Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who re-swore his allegiance to ultra-protectionist supply management at all costs, and damn actual free trade):

So utterly obsessed are Canadian politicians by the small differences between them that federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer recently demanded Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explain what he meant when he suggested Canada might be “flexible” on the issue of supply management in the dairy industry, in the face of new demands from Washington. It’s preposterous: you can’t fit a processed cheese slice between the three major party’s total devotion to the dairy cartel.

Because, as we all know, what unites Canadians from coast-to-coast is our universally shared determination to pay significantly higher prices for dairy products, to ensure that Quebec farmers are not overly bothered by pesky competition from uppity foreigners who don’t even speak Joual…

June 11, 2018

Jay Currie says it’s time to light the Bat Signal for … Brian Mulroney?

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

I find it hard to believe that things have gotten to the point that anyone, let alone Jay Currie, is looking to former PM Brian Mulroney to pull Justin’s chestnuts out of the Trumpian fire:

In Canada, more specifically Ontario, the destruction of the auto industry would be a full scale, all hands on deck, disaster. Realistically, the auto sector is Ontario’s largest private sector employer and the largest manufacturing sector. Being priced out of the US market would kill tens of thousands of well-paid jobs.

Trump has taken the measure of Trudeau and his tiny, annoying, Minister of External Affairs, Chrystia Freeland and concluded they are featherweights. Which means that Canada is potentially screwed because Trump has no faith in our leadership. You don’t call people dishonest publicly if you plan to do business with them.

It is unlikely that Trudeau will be aware of just how badly he has failed for a few days. The Canadian media are heavily invested in a narrative which has Justin standing up to the big, bad, Trump. Trudeau’s tone-deaf advisors are, no doubt, revelling in the fact they got lots of “gender” language into the communique.

It will take a few days for the more sober side of the media to realize what peril Trudeau has put us in. And a few more for the geniuses in the PMO to figure out that Trump is not playing the same game as they are.

When they do figure it out the question will arise, “What the fuck do we do now?”

As I am quite sure Butz and his posse read this blog I have a simple suggestion.

Normally, I would have suggested they get in touch with Simon Reisman who negotiated both the Auto-Pact and NAFTA. Alas, Reisman is dead.

Second best by a long shot? Brian Mulroney. A man I have next to no time for but who a) managed to get Canadians onboard for NAFTA, b) was a quite successful Canadian Prime Minister, c) is wired into both Trump World and broad swaths of corporate America.

If Trudeau could get Mulroney to do it Mulroney would be going into the US with a serious, well thought out, everything on the table, pitch. Likely starting with first principles – no tariffs, no subsidies, no non-tariff barriers. Be prepared to dump dairy and end transhipment of Chinese steel. And pitch it to the Trump people as the template for the deals which could be made with the EU, Japan, India and so on. (China is a whole other thing.)

The key point here is that Canada has to move, and move quickly, away from the finger-wagging politics of gender inclusion and climate change to a hard-nosed business approach to getting the best deal we can with an America which is now willing to put its own interests first.

June 7, 2018

Trade war with Canada justified because the White House was torched in the War of 1812

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

Maybe it was intended as a joke, but what else was Trump supposed to say when Trudeau actually asked what actual security threat Canada poses to the United States?

During a phone call with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last weekend, President Donald Trump reportedly justified his decision to impose tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum by invoking … the burning of the White House by British troops during the War of 1812.

At least, that’s what CNN is reporting this afternoon. Here’s how they put it, citing information from “sources familiar with the call: “Trudeau pressed Trump on how he could justify the tariffs as a ‘national security’ issue. In response, Trump quipped to Trudeau, ‘Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?'”

That is, presumably, a reference to the War of 1812, during which British troops invaded Washington, D.C., and set fire to the White House. Despite the war’s name, the burning of the White House actually occurred in 1814. And it wasn’t carried out by Canadians because, well, Canada did not become an independent nation until 1867 — or 53 years after the White House burned.

But, sure, whatever. The War of 1812 makes Canada a national security threat in the year 2018, despite our having been allies for the last century, sharing the world’s longest unpatrolled border, and exchanging more than $620 billion in goods last year. The rationales for war with Canada in Canadian Bacon and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut are more grounded in reality.

May 6, 2018

Justin Trudeau may (or may not) delay the legalization date for marijuana

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

It’s just another day in Liberal Ottawa, as the Prime Minister briefly appears to wobble on the one election promise he’s close to fulfilling before the next election cycle begins. Colby Cosh manfully avoids a few drug-related jokes while recounting the latest “goffe” (as Gary Johnson actually said):

The legislative scenes preceding the three-quarters-legalization of marijuana in Canada continue to have an unreal, hallucinatory quality for which I am determined not to use the obvious metaphor. On Tuesday the Senate Aboriginal Peoples Committee presented the government with a demand that its vague summer legalization deadline be delayed by “up to one year” because Indigenous groups were not consulted closely enough on the effects of making it lawful to have a plant.

The prime minister, after some hemming and hawing, reiterated that legalization will happen on time, whatever the particular date happens to end up being. This will certainly come as a relief to the people who have poured zillions of dollars into a new horticultural and retail industry on the premise that it would, y’know, exist. Seeing how many of them are former Conservative politicians, perhaps they can be persuaded to buy a novena or two for a Liberal government that has — despite the unique moral pressure that Indigenous Canadians are capable of exercising, and in arguable defiance of its own history — decided to stick to an electoral promise.

Even as it is, the promise is taking most of the life of a Parliament to fulfill. Perhaps the conscience of Justin Trudeau, the little cartoon angel that perches on his shoulder and whispers progressive maxims in his ear, would have preferred to relent and toe the legalization deadline forward a year. Unfortunately, on the list of Trudeau’s political problems, “not being able to get stuff done in Canada” ranks alarmingly high at the moment.

In an ideal world, going along with the Senate committee and inflicting a wrestler’s piledriver on the economy for the sake of a principle might have been tempting. May 2018 is, alas, not really the time to be asking for that. It is precisely because so many interest groups and subnational governments have had to be negotiated with and appeased that pot legalization has taken so long — long enough that another election is in sight, with other elements of the Liberal program already in smithereens by the wayside.

April 17, 2018

The trap Trudeau carefully laid for himself

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

Andrew Coyne on the interminable “negotiations” for the Kinder Morgan pipeline:

Whatever anyone’s concerns — economic, environmental, Aboriginal or other — that is the process by which those concerns are adjudicated. And that is the process that approved the pipeline: the NEB, the cabinet and the courts, all ruling in its favour (though not every legal appeal has been exhausted: a case is still before the Federal Court of Appeal on behalf of seven First Nations arguing they were not adequately consulted).

Why, then, do so many feel entitled, not merely to disagree, or to protest, as is their democratic right, but to substitute their own authority for that prescribed by law: to defy the courts, to threaten disorder, and to deny federal jurisdiction?

Much of the blame should be attached to the current custodians of lawful authority, the governments of Canada and British Columbia. It was Justin Trudeau who, campaigning for office, gave his imprimatur to the extralegal, anti-democratic doctrine of “social licence,” telling pipeline opponents that “governments might grant permits, but only communities can grant permission.”

It was Trudeau, too, who lent support to the notion that Aboriginal communities have, not merely a constitutional right to be consulted on projects affecting lands to which they have title, as the courts have found they have, but an absolute veto. And it was Trudeau who legitimized those who, because they did not like the NEB’s decision, had dismissed it as biased or negligent, with his promise of a special panel to review the project.

Likewise it was John Horgan who, campaigning for office, famously promised to “use every tool in the toolbox” to stop the pipeline from being built. We know now that his government has known since at least the time it took office that it had no constitutional authority to do so. But if Horgan had hoped to walk back the promise, in the grand tradition of Canadian politics, after he was elected, he finds his way blocked by his partners in power, the Green Party.

So he has instead opted to stall for time, delaying permits, threatening legislation, and — someday, maybe — referring the whole business to the courts, hoping the project’s sponsor, Kinder Morgan, will give up in frustration. As, at length, it has declared it will do if Horgan’s government is not brought to heel, with spectacular effect: it has spurred the Trudeau government to state, in terms that allow no retreat, that “the pipeline will be built.”

But reasserting lawful authority, after so many years of disuse, will not be as easy as all that. It is not only the Trudeau or Horgan governments, after all, that have played this game: before Horgan, there was Christy Clark and her constitutionally odious “five conditions” for “approving” the Northern Gateway pipeline, and before Trudeau there were decades of federal governments that allowed the provinces to run the jurisdictional table against them, in the name of “co-operative federalism.”

April 10, 2018

There’s a reason most people don’t take Canada seriously on energy issues

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

Paul Wells reports on the most recent twist in the pipeline debate:

Jim Carr stood next to the Centennial Flame in front of Parliament’s Peace Tower and addressed a chilled knot of reporters and news cameras. An hour earlier Kinder Morgan had announced it was halting all non-essential spending on its Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project. If the company can’t find a way to proceed with the project, it will abandon it at the end of May.

Crunch time. Carr is the natural resources minister, generally reckoned as a heavyweight in the Trudeau cabinet. This project is basically the sum and totality of his political credibility packed into one long, narrow and increasingly hypothetical tube. And now it hung by a thread. The tube, I mean. Or his credibility. Or my metaphor. Anyway, he seemed to be taking it well.

“Thank you for coming to chat about pipelines,” Carr said, just as cool as you please. “We seem to spend a fair bit of time on that subject.”

The ennui. It burns. Carr summarized the state of play, more or less as I just did, and then read from prepared notes in French: “We expect the government of British Columbia to cease immediately all attempts to delay this project.” He did not repeat that sentence in English.

Instead he delivered a kind of analysis. “What we’re witnessing is the consequence of uncertainty. And in this case it’s uncertainty that’s generated by the government of British Columbia by threatening court action. Even if it doesn’t frame a question. Even if it doesn’t choose a court in front of which a question would be reviewed. And there are consequences in the threat of delay. Investor confidence is very important. It’s not only important for all of Canada, it’s also important for the province of British Columbia. And for a province that is as rich and has the abundance of natural resources that British Columbia has, the people of B.C. should know that this kind of uncertainty has consequences.”

This long succession of sentences could perhaps best be summarized as “C’mon, guys.”

[…]

This precinct is full of historical parallels, whether you want them or not. About 80 feet from where Carr was standing, on an October morning in 1970, Pierre Elliott Trudeau had run into another CBC reporter, Tim Raife, who wanted to know what he would do about the kidnapping of Quebec’s transport minister and the British trade commissioner. “Just watch me,” the prime minister said, and three days later he invoked the War Measures Act, which we all still argue about sometimes.

But Pierre Trudeau’s “Just watch me” established a precedent, not just for artful vagueness, but for follow-through. It’s a precedent honoured most often in the breach: generations of politicians have used “Just watch me” or its assorted variants, including “All options are on the table,” when what they really meant was “I have no clue” or “I’m crossing my fingers” or “Baby needs a new pair of shoes.”

So the temptation among other actors in a political drama, when a central figure pulls the just-watch-me, is to wait them out and not do their work for them by folding their cards prematurely. And sure enough, the rest of Sunday night played out according to a series of familiar scripts. Jason Kenney was apocalyptic. Rachel Notley was firm, including in her insistence that what she had seen so far from Ottawa wasn’t nearly satisfactory. And John Horgan, B.C.’s premier, was unapologetic. As some of my friends like to say, if nothing changes, nothing changes.

April 3, 2018

Governments are like diapers – they need to be changed regularly and for the same reason

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

Paraphrasing an old joke in the headline, but as Andrew Coyne points out, it’s close enough to observed federal reality to qualify:

Is it inevitable that every government becomes what it once despised — a matter of the realities of power overtaking the dreams of opposition? Or do their broken promises, ethical lapses and abuses of power remain, in the end, choices, for which they can be held to account? Do governments turn to seed, or were they that way before they took office? Or is the problem not of any particular party at any particular time, but of a larger culture of cynicism and deceit, in which all parties share?

I do not know the answers to these questions. I only see the same pattern repeated in every government over the last several decades. The Mulroney government came to power promising to clean up the sodden mess left by the Trudeau Liberals (“you had an option, sir — you could have said no!”), only to indulge in its own orgy of patronage appointments and dubious ethics.

The Chretien Liberals were elected to clean up the mess left by the Mulroney Conservatives. Instead they ramped up a massive kickback scheme overseen by a parallel government of party officials and Liberal-friendly advertising executives — to say nothing of their shameless pork-barreling, habitual disdain for Parliament or the prime minister’s personal portfolio of shame.

The Harper government ran and won on a promise to break this pattern, even including the passage of a Federal Accountability Act among their “five priorities.” In power, they invented whole new ways to evade accountability and step on Parliament, while going back on nearly every principle they had ever held or promise they had ever made. Unsurprisingly, compromises on principle ended up begetting compromises on ethics, if only because, in the blur, people forgot which was which.

And now the Trudeau Liberals, again, dynastic succession being the surest sign of the democratic health of a polity. But then, Trudeau fils went to unusual lengths to stress how different he was, not only from his father but from pretty much every leader who went before.

March 11, 2018

Polls begin to reflect public disillusionment with Trudeau after gaffe-filled India trip

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

After all the PR blunders, it’s amazing that the Liberals are still riding as high in public opinion polls as they are:

By now it is clear the federal Liberals are in some difficulty with the public. Much excitement attended that Ipsos poll earlier this week showing them trailing the Conservatives for the first time, and by a not inconsequential margin: 38 to 33. But it’s not just Ipsos.

Forum Research, which gives the Tories a 12-point lead, may be an outlier, but Nanos’s latest four-week rolling poll shows the Liberal lead has shrunk to less than four points from eight points in December; Abacus Data, similarly, now has them just three points ahead, the narrowest margin they have found since the election.

Overall, the CBC’s Poll Tracker website now puts the two parties more or less level, based on a weighted average of the polls, at 36 per cent. Contrast that with the Liberals’ first year in office, when they maintained a lead of as much as 20 points, or even their second, when they led by eight to 10. Something is clearly up.

The reason is not hard to find, nor is it unusual: the prime minister’s personal approval rating has declined markedly. To be sure, he remains the Liberals’ chief asset: Nanos still shows 40 per cent of Canadians put Justin Trudeau as their preferred prime minister. Sixty per cent say he “has the qualities of a good political leader.”

[…]

The immediate explanation for the prime minister’s cratering appeal is the recent official visit to India, conceded on all sides to have been a disaster. There’s no doubt this has taken its toll — Ipsos finds more than twice as many Canadians of the view that the visit was “negative for Canada-India relations” than the contrary.

But if the India visit accelerated the decline, it is also true that the prime minister’s appeal has been fading for some time. The India trip may have crystallized certain perceptions of him, but the ingredients have been evident for a while. People do not form impressions of a leader’s character and abilities instantaneously, but only as the result of an accumulation of incidents and impressions.

The Tories’ pre-election attempts to discredit Trudeau as “just not ready” failed in the light of a long campaign in which he persuaded increasing numbers of Canadians that he was. I don’t imagine many would have said he was much of a deep thinker — his worst moments are almost always when he tries to pretend he is — but people gave him credit for sincerity, personal decency, idealism, and a native political ability that seemed to grow throughout the campaign.

But now? Asked to name the first quality that came to mind, I suspect increasing numbers might be more inclined to mention his cynicism.

March 2, 2018

Canada’s foreign policies, in the wake of recent Prime Ministerial mis-steps

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

Ted Campbell suggests that our current foreign policy goals have been seriously undermined by the — shall we say “disappointing” — outcomes of Prime Minister Trudeau’s Chinese and Indian trips:

[Former senior Canadian diplomat David] Mulroney begins by saying that: “The best that can be said about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s visit to India is that it may prompt a review, if not a complete rethinking of a Canadian foreign policy that appears to be seriously off the rails. We have some hard lessons to learn … [and] … At the very least, the Prime Minister’s debacle in India should encourage smart people in Ottawa to zero in on what isn’t working.” That’s good thinking. At the end of every major campaign, an especially after campaigns in which things go awry, good military commanders convene a board of senior officers to consider “lessons learned,” in the hope that they will not make the same mistakes next time. sadly, especially today, the lessons learned are all too quickly forgotten even if the analysis was rigorous enough in the first place.

“Most worrying,” David Mulroney says, “is a fundamental and puzzling failure at the level of policy implementation, something that appears to be compounded by the Prime Minister’s own impetuosity. Flying to India before the big meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in the bag, much like heading off to Beijing on a free-trade themed visit without any reasonable expectation that a deal was doable, exposes Mr. Trudeau to a degree of prolonged public skepticism that comes to define the visit itself.” In other words: Justin Trudeau goes off “half cocked” as we soldier say … not ready for action. That is, I suspect, in part because his team in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), was brilliant on the campaign trail in 2015 but is really unqualified to advice the leader of the government of the G7 nation; that poor quality of policy advice matters because Justin Trudeau was, and still is, to be sure, “just not ready” for the job he was handed. But his office campaign team wants to get and keep him in the public eye because that’s part of the 2019 campaign strategy … this time it failed because they really didn’t understand the business at hand.

[…]

But India is not just any country, as Mr Mulroney explains: “India isn’t our friend. It is a rising regional power beset with a range of domestic problems, including serious human rights issues. It takes a prickly approach to global issues that is often at odds with traditional Canadian policies in areas ranging from trade policy to nuclear disarmament … [and, he says] … The Indian diplomats I worked with could be wonderfully pleasant after the official day was done. But, for the most part, they brought a formidably ruthless precision to their pursuit of India’s interests in the world. While they might ultimately agree to grant Canada a concession, this was always a product of hard and often heated negotiations. They never conceded a point because they liked us or because we are home to a large Indo-Canadian community.” Further, he adds that “My experience with Chinese diplomats was entirely similar.” Although never at the same level as Mr Mulroney, I worked in the international arena as a senior officer, especially in one sector (global radio-communications which included arranging for the expansion of mobile communications in the 1990s. My Chinese and Indian colleagues were, indeed, fine men and women but they, just like me, were there ~ Geneva, a lot, but everywhere from Washington, London, Canberra and Tokyo to Beijing ~ defending their interests. “friendship,” even long standing alliances didn’t count for anything. Billions of dollars were at stake, profits and losses would hinge on how we ~ engineers and lawyers and businessmen and soldiers from dozens of countries ~ managed to slice up the radio spectrum to allow these new services to thrive. The Chinese and Indian delegates were just as professional, just as technically qualified, just as hard nosed as the Americans, Brits and Canadians.

“Long before the election of U.S. President Donald Trump,” David Mulroney says, “it should have been clear to us that the world is changing in ways that do not align with traditional Canadian views, interests and values. If we’re smart, the rise of countries like China and India can certainly contribute to our prosperity, and with hard work, we should be able to find common cause on important issues such as global warming … [but, he adds] … the rise of these assertive and ambitious Asian powers will almost certainly challenge global and regional security. Both will also continue to reject traditional Canadian notions about global governance and human rights, and neither will be particularly squeamish about interfering in Canadian affairs.” Sunny ways, feminism and being green don’t count for much; they are very certainly not a sound foundation upon which to build a foreign policy. We have to start thinking about our vital interests in the world ~ about what they are and about how we can and will protect and promote them: that’s the basis of a grand strategy. It was also the kind of thinking that Stephen Harper hated: he wanted to deal with issues incrementally, linking them together, sometimes, into a coherent web but never allowing them to become too important in and of themselves. That was bad enough but I’m persuaded that Justin Trudeau doesn’t think about those “big ideas” at all … because, I fear, they are, simply, quite beyond his comprehension.

February 26, 2018

India’s largest newspaper on Justin Trudeau’s “disaster visit”

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

Paul Wells linked to this story in the world’s largest circulation English language newspaper, The Times of India:

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

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s visit was a disaster that has little parallel in India’s recent diplomatic history. But as the Canadian prime minister returned home on Saturday after almost a week of recurrent diplomatic missteps, ironically, it may have provided the opportunity to reset relations between Canada and India.

On Saturday, Indian government officials were angry at suggestions by Canadian officials that India was responsible for Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal getting a visa to India and used his presence to embarrass Trudeau.

Trudeau, in his meeting with prime minister Narendra Modi, also complained that his visit had been shadowed by a single issue. Atwal got a visa because he was taken off the blacklist some years ago. But he was part of a number of Trudeau’s own events that did not involve the Indian government at all.

A prime ministerial visit to a foreign country for a week with a thin official component is always fraught with danger. In addition, moving the official meetings to the very end of the trip indicated that the government meetings were an after-thought. Most foreign leaders who throw in other events almost always front-load the official meetings, and then go on to business or tourism events.

Here, it was clear from the start that Trudeau came to India to score with his Sikh constituency back home — four out of the six cabinet ministers who travelled with him were Sikh, as were an overwhelming number of MPs who also travelled with him. Until the media barrage in India forced the Canadian side to change tack, Trudeau was not even ready to meet Amarinder Singh, chief minister of Punjab. Even the Canadian high commissioner’s official reception was a celebration of Punjab with the prime minister himself waltzing in on bhangra beats.

February 23, 2018

“…the Trudeaus playing ‘Mr Dressup and Family’ in exotic locations on the taxpayers’ dime isn’t the problem”

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

The press is having a hard time presenting Justin Trudeau’s India trip in a positive light, which clearly pains the teeny-bopper Trudeau fan club that composes a large part of the Canadian media. Ted Campbell sees the trip as a series of wasted opportunities to begin healing the breach between India and Canada:

I’ve taken my time in commenting on the prime minister’s trip to India. To say that I’m very disappointed is to put it mildly … I’m disappointed and a little embarrassed to be a Canadian. But the Trudeaus playing “Mr Dressup and Family” in exotic locations on the taxpayers’ dime isn’t the problem. We have, in fact, a serious problem as far as India is concerned and we, Canada, one of India’s oldest and firmest friends is in danger of being seen as an adversary. That’s a problem and it is, in my mind, a HUGE problem for Canada.

As Vishnu Prakash, former Indian envoy to Canada, told Indian news site The Print on Monday, ““Over the years, the Canadian political establishment, across the spectrum (whether it is the NDP, Conservatives or Liberals) has been mollycoddling Khalistani elements. Under the Trudeau government, this has increased. He had himself appeared on a Khalistani platform in Toronto in April last year.” It, the “mollycoddling Khalistani elements,” has been going on since at least the 1980s, back when Indira Ghandi’s government cracked down (1984) and nearly provoked a civil war and even in 1985 when Air India flight 182 was bombed, almost certainly an attack organized by Canadians, in Canada, as retaliation. Then the governments of the day spent 20 years and over $100 million on an investigation that retired Supreme Court Justice John Major described as a “cascading series of errors” by the government, writ large, including, especially, the RCMP and CSIS. India was not impressed.

India was less impressed when Canadian political parties began to actively court the Canadian the entire Indo-Canadian community but failed to condemn Sikh separatism. Canadians, including Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau have “explained,” correctly, that people are allowed to support unpopular causes here in Canada, so long as they don’t break our laws, but India, not unreasonably, given Canada’s own history of separatist violence, would like something more. But the Sikh vote is active and “efficient” and all parties want it and that seems, to India, anyway, to mean turning a blind eye to the (disputed) fact assertion that the Khalistan independence movement is centred in and funded from Canada … Prime Minister Trudeau made thing worse, according to The Hindu, when “On April 30, [2017] Mr. Trudeau addressed a parade for ‘Khalsa Day’, which included floats glorifying Sikh militant leaders Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Amreek Singh and former General Shahbeg Singh who were killed in the siege of the Golden Temple and Operation Bluestar in June 1984.” That act appears to have crossed a line, leading to what the whole world is now interpreting as a major diplomatic snub […]

The big issue is not the rather gentlemanly snub of Justin Trudeau by India’s highest officials; our prime minister appears more interested in having an all expenses paid vacation with his family than in doing the nation’s business in any event; the real issue is the Canadian political actions that made it politically necessary for Prime Minister Modi to administer that snub at all.

What Canada needs to do now is repair relations with India, and that may require Prime Minister Trudeau to look very, very closely at any ties any of his ministers may have with the Khalistan independence movement, he says there are none, and either making them sever all ties with separatists or severing them from the Liberal cabinet, caucus and even the Party. Andrew Scheer needs to do the same with the Conservatives and Jagmeet Singh needs to speak out for national unity ~ if it’s good for Canada then it’s good for India, too. On this issue, at least, politics should indeed, stop at the water’s edge.

Of course, when you allow things like this to happen, diplomacy becomes a much trickier profession than normal:

In Britain, the Daily Mail published the comments from a lot of Indians who have been offended by Trudeau’s choices of clothing on the visit so far:

Justin Trudeau has been ridiculed on social media by Indians for his ‘tacky’ and over the top outfit choices while on his first visit to their nation as Prime Minister.

While many praised his clothing during the first two days of his trip, patience was wearing thin by the time he attended a Bollywood gala on Tuesday night, before the tide turned against him on Wednesday.

Ministers, authors, journalists and ordinary Indians lined up to mock him on Wednesday, saying his wardrobe was ‘fake and annoying’.

Perhaps taking note of the criticism, the Canadian leader donned a suit on Thursday as he visited Jama Masjid, one of India’s largest mosques.

Leading the criticism was Omar Abdullah, former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who tweeted on Wednesday saying Trudeau’s preening was ‘all just a bit much.’

‘We Indians do not dress like this every day sir, not even in Bollywood.’

Bhaavna Arora, a bestselling Indian author, also chimed in, accusing Trudeau of wearing ‘fancy dress’ and saying she found it ‘fake and annoying’.

Shekhar Gupta, founder of Indian newspaper The Print also mocked the Canadian Prime Minister, accusing him of ‘running a week-long “election campaign” in India in fancy dress.’

January 5, 2018

Justin Trudeau’s PR team fumbles badly with Boyle photo-op

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

Late last year, the Boyle family were “rescued” from the Taliban and the Prime Minister not only met with them, but allowed some photos to be taken that quickly made their way out onto social media. Now that Joshua Boyle has been arrested for a long list of offenses, the PM is looking very bad indeed, as Chris Selley points out:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Boyle family in Ottawa, 18 December.

The supposed geniuses surrounding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are capable of some very strange decisions. Arranging a meeting with Joshua Boyle and his family after their release from Taliban captivity, and agreeing to the Boyles photographing the smiling encounter — Joshua later tweeted out some snaps — is certainly one of them.

Boyle was arrested Tuesday and charged with a raft of offences including sexual assault and unlawful confinement, concerning events beginning immediately after the family’s return to Canada in early October. Trudeau met the Boyles on Dec. 18. Now photos of Trudeau beaming with the accused are all over the news. If PMO procedures somehow didn’t flag the investigation, that’s a serious concern. If they did and the meeting happened anyway, it’s horrendous political risk management at the very least.

Indeed, these were hardly the first red flags. The PMO argues it would agree to such a meeting with any released hostages — a very stupid policy if it exists, because the Boyles aren’t quite any released hostages. When the Taliban nabbed Joshua and five-months-pregnant Caitlin Coleman in 2012, they were ostensibly “backpacking in Afghanistan.” The phrase dances off the tongue a bit like “scuba diving in Yemen” or “gastronomic tour of Somalia”: not inconceivable, but the Boyles will not have been surprised to learn that some in the U.S. intelligence community were suspicious. They reportedly refused an American military flight home over fears — perfectly reasonable ones, surely — that they might wind up stuck at Bagram Airfield.

But what the heck, let’s think the best of the Boyles. Sunny ways, etc. The best still involves the unpleasant matter of Joshua’s short-lived marriage to none other than Zaynab Khadr — daughter of the late Ahmed Khadr, the Egyptian-Canadian al-Qaida financier for whom Jean Chrétien famously went to bat when he was detained in Pakistan.

[…]

Unseriousness is a serious charge against Trudeau: big hat, staff photographer, few cattle. Another non-official photo released this week shows Trudeau and his Castro-worshiping brother Sacha in matching sweaters depicting the Last Supper attended by emojis, with the words Happy Birthday strung over top. In a rather over-the-top tweet, Conservative MP Candice Bergen accused the PM of “intolerance” and of “mocking Christianity” — and no question, many Canadians might expect the prime minister to eschew such a garment lest it cause offence. (It was in private, of course, but it’s public now.) But many Canadians also might expect the prime minister to eschew such a garment because he’s the leader of a G7 country, a serious person with a serious job that he’s taking seriously.

This touchy-feely cool-dad happy-go-lucky shtick has taken Trudeau a long, long way. I very much doubt it can take him any further. And I think the backlash, when it comes, could be legendary.

December 9, 2017

The Trudeau sideshow in China

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

Colby Cosh on figuring out why Justin Trudeau’s trip to China didn’t end in the glory he and his handlers were clearly anticipating:

My favourite part of the fair has always been the sideshow. And when it comes to Justin Trudeau’s official visit to China, the sideshow definitely turned out to be the most interesting part of the proceedings. Interpreting the outcome of the visit involves a certain amount of old-fashioned Kremlinology, applied to both sides, but it seems fairly clear that Trudeau was gulled into providing Chinese leadership with some celebrity glamour in exchange for a big pile of nothing on Chinese-Canadian trade.

He came to China with hopes for progress on a future trade deal that would involve China accepting new labour, gender, and environment standards. But he collided with the newly aggressive Xi Jinping doctrine — a change in the official Chinese mood that insists on the country’s superpower status. China-watchers know that over the past year, in a process that culminated at the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress in October, China has become more explicit, and more chauvinist, in claiming to pursue an independent, indigenous alternative model of economic and social progress.

[…]

Western commentators on China have, for a long time, had an implicit vision of a re-emerging bipolar world, with China in the old place of Russia as an ideological challenger to Western democracies. Xi is taking them at their word. China’s aspirations are no longer to follow or imitate the West, but to out-compete it on its own terms, without any of the untidy, politically dis-unifying elements of Western life — independent universities, newspapers that aren’t trash, multiple political parties, and the like.

Given this background, Trudeau arguably arrived in China at exactly the wrong moment. Formal talks on a China-Canada free trade agreement would have been the first ever between China and a G7 country. It turned out that there was more value for Xi in slapping the hand of friendship. The Global Times, an organ of the party’s People’s Daily newspaper network, published a cranky English-language editorial in the midst of Trudeau’s visit.

The editorial attacked the “superiority and narcissism” of Canadian newspapers, as an alternative to jabbing the prime ministerial guest in the eye personally. But it is easy enough to read between the lines. “Trade between China and Canada is mutually beneficial, more significant than the ideology upon which the latter’s media has been focusing,” wrote the tabloid’s editor, Hu Xijin. “When Canada imports a pair of shoes from China, will Canada ask how much democracy and human rights are reflected in those shoes?”

If Trudeau had been hoping to wipe away memories of his embarrassing stunt at the TPP negotiations by a Pierre-Trudeau-like Chinese breakthrough, the Chinese government clearly saw him coming a few thousand miles away and ensured that no such PR coup would be allowed.

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