Need I bring to your attention the utter gall of a leading member of “Canada’s natural governing party” accusing the Bush Republicans of running a one party state. Didn’t the Yanks just have a bruising knock ’em down, electoral race that had all the thrills and spills of Northern Dancer winning the Queen’s Plate.
Checks and balances? Canada? Third parties can’t even participate fully in electoral campaigns here. Checks and balances are very few in this centralized, caucus whipped, PMO-run federal government. Let us pass on quickly lest the good doctor/statesman becomes completely embarrassed by his own rhetoric.
John the Mad, “Lloyd’s Unworthy Letter”, John the Mad, 2005-03-05.
April 11, 2021
QotD: Canada’s “Natural Governing Party”
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February 8, 2021
QotD: The deeply rooted anti-Americanism in Canadian politics
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
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February 7, 2021
Former Liberal MP dishes on Justin Trudeau in her new book
When I moved out of Whitby, the local Member of Parliament was Liberal Celina Caesar-Chavannes. She was, we thought, a high-profile person who’d probably be quickly moved into a junior cabinet position, as Justin Trudeau sets a very high value on being seen to be supportive of women and minorities. As she quickly discovered, however, with Trudeau it’s very much the “being seen” part that matters to him and almost nothing in the way of actually being supportive:
[After a kerfuffle with opposition MP Maxime Bernier] she said she didn’t hear from most of her Liberal colleagues or the prime minister until a #hereforCelina hashtag campaign started weeks later, in response to a column that accused her of “seeing racism everywhere.” When she later confronted Trudeau about the lack of support, she said he told her, “As a strong Black woman, I didn’t think you needed help.” She said Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner was more supportive to her during that period than Trudeau.
The incident is one of many allegations of racism, tokenizing, and microaggressions Caesar-Chavannes wrote about in her new memoir Can You Hear Me Now?, which came out February 2.
[…]
Caesar-Chavannes told VICE World News her experiences of being tokenized, excluded, and undervalued led her to resign from the Liberal caucus and not run again in the 2019 election. Her decision culminated in an explosive conversation with Trudeau in February 2019, during which she alleges he complained to her about being confronted about his privilege. She said he was angry that she wanted to resign on the same day then Minister of Veterans Affairs Jody Wilson-Raybould quit her cabinet role, in the midst of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the biggest crisis the governing Liberals had faced since Trudeau’s election in 2015.
“I was met with an earful that I needed to appreciate him, that everybody talked to him about his privilege, that he’s so tired of everybody talking to him about this stuff, and that I cannot make this announcement right now,” she said. She alleges he told her “he couldn’t have two powerful women of colour leave at the same time.”
After listening to his “rant” for a while, Caesar-Chavannes said she cussed out the prime minister.
“I had to ask him, ‘Motherfucker, who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?'” she said. “I was so angry.”
She said she didn’t make out what Trudeau said after that, but it “sounded like he was crying.” She ended up delaying her resignation announcement until March 2019.
Caesar-Chavannes said the Liberal party’s treatment of Wilson-Raybould — an Indigenous woman and whistleblower — made her feel like many of her colleagues were “fake as fuck” and cemented her desire to sit as an independent.
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January 21, 2021
QotD: The Laurentian Elite and the “new Canada” of the 1960s
Because the Liberals were so successful in creating this new identity, conservatives, especially Western conservatives (understandably) felt alienated in this new Canada. Brimelow gave some intellectual heft and crafted a coherent theory around why conservatives felt this way.
The broader narrative Brimelow, and others, put forward is that Canada’s British heritage was central to our identity and sense of who we are, but that this identity was destroyed by the Liberals who then built a new one in their own image. In the 1960s, Canadian Liberalism became self-consciously post-British, and the 1960s really do represent an approximate decade in which the “old Canada” died and a “new Canada” was born. The 1960s weren’t just a time of social change, they marked the end of the British Empire, the start of the Quiet Revolution, and of course most symbolically saw the replacement of the Red Ensign with the Maple Leaf flag. The battles between Diefenbaker and Pearson (and Pierre Trudeau) work as a stand in for the divide between old British Canada and new Liberal Canada.
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
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January 10, 2021
Has the United States reached the same tipping point Canada reached in 1982?
David Warren considers the 1982 tipping point in Canada to have been the implementation of Pierre Trudeau’s Constitution:
Queen Elizabeth II signs Canada’s constitutional proclamation in Ottawa on April 17, 1982 as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau looks on.
There are two principal political parties in modern America (in which I include up here). In the Natted States, the population is divided roughly equally between those of “progressive” and “regressive” habits of mind; in the Canadas, the former have come to dominate.
The tipping point was reached much earlier up here, and the new “metapower” (Foucault’s term) was seized, politically, from within the Liberal Party. The strategy was to disenfranchise the “conservative” half of the electorate, by undermining all national institutions, and hosing down Canada’s previous identity. I’d count, say, 1982, as the point of no return. That identity was replaced, definitively, under a revised Trudeau constitution, with a new “multicultural” identity, in which citizens were themselves redefined, from free persons whose rights were inalienable, to interchangeable clients of an omnipotent State, which could dispense rights whenever it was in the mood — and withdraw them whenever the mood changed; however frequently.
This is the Democrat strategy in the larger, and still less amenable, country next door. As Andrew Breitbart and Antonio Gramsci might agree, this is an essentially cultural process. Politics are visible at the tip of the iceberg, but “progress” requires a more thorough “cleansing,” of old cultural norms. The cancer metastasized more from Hollywood, than from Washington DC. The takeover of the Democratic Party as the vanguard “agent of change” was only part of the institutional takeover of America. As important was the takeover of the mass media, and even corporate boardrooms. Those who weren’t “progressive” would now be “cancelled”: must cease to be.
All cultural change has a religious dimension. The Democrat representatives of the “powers and principalities” mentioned by Saint Paul, are characteristically godless, themselves. But they depend on a massive, core constituency of low-information, low-intelligence, easily manipulated urban voters.
Those who can still see the stars at night tend to remain in the ancient, God-fearing default. In the cities, where the masses may not grasp that milk comes from cows, let alone that someone must milk them, the belief that the economy is based on government cheques is more common. That is the god of the populous cities, and for most city-dwellers, not voting for their “godless god” of progress, seems a kind of heresy.
The idea that such heretics should be deprived of their freedom, starting with freedom of speech, does not appeal to the “rural” voter, including people like me — a “country hick” type who paradoxically lives in the city. The idea that laws and constitutions should be flexible, to accommodate the latest schemes of a progressive technocratic élite, doesn’t flourish among us country bumpkins. But to the efficiency experts in the city, what is our problem?
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December 6, 2020
“As ever, our Liberal friends prefer to be judged by their pure intentions rather than their rather tattered record”
The good folks at The Line suggest that we monsters in the peanut gallery stop hurting poor Little Potato’s feeeeeeeeeelings:
Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”
What we can say is that supporters of our current government continue to insist that the prime minister and his cabinet be granted a level of benefit of the doubt that they simply have not earned. Declarations that the Liberals have botched the vaccine rollout are premature, but they are not preposterous. As ever, our Liberal friends prefer to be judged by their pure intentions rather than their rather tattered record. We at The Line have known enough true Grits in our time to believe that this isn’t an act. Liberals really do believe that so long as they mean well, they should be forgiven their failures. Indeed, the failures should be forgiven and forgotten.
And boy, can they get testy when someone declines to do them the courtesy of treating this five of a government like a nine. They’ll shriek about Harper and Ford and Kenney and American-style whatever, they’ll argue in bad faith, they’ll demand an audit of Andrew Scheer’s household expenses, they’ll shut parliament down in the middle of a national emergency to spare the boss from embarrassing questions about his latest ethical flub. In short, they’ll do anything to avoid admitting that this Liberal government has blown more than enough high-profile issues to have forfeited any right to be bummed out when someone dares wonder if they’ll do any better on vaccines.
Over the last five years, the Liberals have failed to hit their own targets on balancing the budget and cleaning up Indigenous water supplies. They failed to hit Harper’s targets on carbon reduction, failed to win a UN seat, failed to deliver promised military procurements, failed on electoral reform, failed to improve our decrepit transparency system, and failed to notice any number of outrageous policies and proposals so long as they were proffered en français, in which case they couldn’t avert their eyes fast enough.
We could go on, but the point is made. And they’ve done it all after daring to talk in their opening days of deliverology, a term that’s now a political punchline thanks to how badly Trudeau and the Gang failed to live up to the hype of their own managerial jargon.
The problem with all this failure is far bigger than the sum of its various sad parts. A government that routinely writes cheques its competence can’t cash may be in a hurry to forgive itself, but not all Canadians are as fond of Justin Trudeau as Justin Trudeau clearly is. A proven track record of failure by the state erodes public confidence in the state, and the sneering contempt Liberals have for anyone who notices the failure doesn’t help. We find it absolutely amazing how many Liberals (rightly!) decry the rise of populism without ever seeming to ponder for a New York minute what role their own manifest mediocrity has played in fuelling it. So we’ll kindly hear no more from the Liberals about the know-nothing idiocy of the woke left and the destructive buffoonery of the nationalist right until they stop doing such a shabby job with the goddamned centre.
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November 26, 2020
“… the Liberals’ oft-stated commitment to listen to the experts and the frontline workers fizzles when said experts and workers disagree with a preferred policy”
In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why the Liberals are so in love with a set of proposed rule changes that will do almost nothing to reduce gun crime in Canada and might even end up creating criminals of previously law-abiding Canadians … but it polls well in Liberal ridings:
Restricted and prohibited weapons seized by Toronto police in a 2012 operation. None of the people from whom these weapons were taken was legally allowed to possess them.
Screen capture from a CTV News report.
Talking about gun policy in Canada is tricky, because the debate is highly technical. The regulation of firearms in this country, at least in theory, depends on the specifications of the firearm in question. Mode-of-operation, magazine capacity, ammunition calibre or barrel-bore width, barrel length, muzzle energy — these are all the criteria upon which a firearm is classified into one of three categories under Canadian law: prohibited, restricted or non-restricted. Any Canadian who wishes to own or borrow a firearm, or purchase ammunition, must be licenced, a process which includes mandatory safety training and daily automatic background checks.
Prohibited firearms are essentially banned in Canada; a relatively small number are held by private citizens who already possessed them when the current regulatory regime was brought in in the 1990s. The government of the day didn’t want to get into the thorny issue of confiscation, so it let existing owners keep them under strict conditions. The vast majority of guns in Canada, and all new guns sold for decades, therefore fall into the other two categories. Restricted guns are generally pistols and revolvers, but also some rifles and shotguns. Non-restricted guns are run-of-the-mill hunting rifles and shotguns, though some sports-shooting rifles (used for target practice) are also included.
The above is all somewhat theoretical, as the regulations are twisted and pulled in a variety of ways to suit political ends, leaving a system that’s tortured and confusing even for those of us who study it. But it gives you at least an idea of how the system is designed. If you know guns, of course, you knew all this already. If you don’t, I wouldn’t blame you if your eyes glazed over a bit while reading the above. Without a basic working familiarity with all the terminology and technical specs and regulations, it’s damn hard to follow the debates over gun control. This is why I have to ask you non-aficionados to take my word for it: the Liberal proposal is really bad.
Well, actually, you don’t have to take just my word for it. You can read the NPF’s position paper, which makes at least some of the case. It notes, correctly, that “military style assault weapons” aren’t actually a thing that’s defined under Canadian law; it can therefore mean whatever the government of the day wants it to mean. True military style battle weapons — fully automatic weapons with high-capacity magazines and full-sized ammunition — are already effectively banned in Canada and have been for decades. Further, the NPF notes, firearms are used in a minority of homicides in Canada, a majority of those homicides are committed with handguns, and a majority of those killings are directly linked to organized crime or gang activity.
You’re probably starting to see the problem: Going after the guns that aren’t being used in the crimes, and taking them from the people who aren’t committing them, isn’t a public-safety policy. It’s a political gift to the Liberals’ urban base, where the proposal is popular and gun literacy low (those two latter points are not unrelated).
While the ban is almost entirely a political sop, it’s probably a good political sop, alas. I’m sure the proposal will be very well received in ridings the Liberals would like to hold or flip. But it’s still a stupid policy, even if it’s popular. The Liberals are proposing to spend tons of money on this. They estimate hundreds of millions, but recall that the long-gun registry came in about 1,500 times overbudget. And all to “ban” some of the rifles used by a segment of the population — licenced and screened gun owners — that’s been found to be the several times less likely to commit murder than those without licences.
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October 25, 2020
Canada’s broken [REDACTED] to [REDACTED] [REDACTED]
In The Line, a look at the failings of the federal government’s promises to fix the badly broken Access to Information system:
Sometimes, Line readers, though we always strive to be fair, we cannot deny that certain politicians are just fun to skewer. Because some of them are just terrible, terrible people, and while we polite Canadians don’t normally report too much on the personal lives of our elected leaders, well, what can we say? When you can, within responsible journalistic bounds, give a dirtbag a hard time for falling down on the job, hey. Life is good!
Patty Hajdu, the federal minister of health, is actually … perfectly pleasant. This isn’t unheard of in our politicians, but it’s rare enough to mention here, all to make very clear that we take no particular pleasure in reporting on her pathetic performance this week. But report it we must. And pathetic it surely was.
Under sharp questioning by Tory MP Michelle Rempel Garner, Hajdu very carefully and deliberately aimed a soon-to-be-banned .44 Magnum revolver at her foot, waited a dramatic second for effect, and then figuratively blew her poor extremity to smithereens. Rempel Garner had been asking about the abysmally broken state of the federal access-to-information systems, and Hajdu, with all-too-Liberal scorn, stood up and declared:
Mr. Speaker, I have spoken to hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadians since the pandemic was first announced, when COVID-19 arrived on our shores. In fact, not once has a Canadian asked me to put more resources into freedom of information officers. What they have asked me for is to ensure that all the resources of Canada are devoted to one thing, and that is the health, safety and economic prosperity of our country. We are going to continue to make sure that Canada has the most robust response possible.
There are two gigantic problems with Hajdu’s answer there.
The first is that Canada’s access-to-information regime is notoriously dysfunctional, and her government has long admitted that. Indeed, fixing this disgrace was a major plank in the party’s 2015 platform.
In the years since, the government has effectively accomplished the square root of zero.
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October 21, 2020
“Canadian conservatism often suffers from a unique form of self-loathing”
In his latest essay for The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden reviews an old book by Peter Brimelow and how it influenced the Canadian conservative scene at the time and why the book’s insights mattered so much to Stephen Harper:
Published in 1986, The Patriot Game captures the ideas and sentiment of an entire generation of Canadian conservatism. One quick note on Brimelow. He’s a controversial figure and has been called a “leader within the alt-right.” He’s also the founder of VDARE, an American anti-immigration website. I’m not getting into a back and forth with anyone about how best to describe his views, I’ll just say that none of this means his older work like The Patriot Game should be discounted or ignored, especially given the influence it’s had.
The game Brimelow is describing is the manufacturing of a new national identity that was undertaken by what he terms “Canada’s New Class.” This is a term he borrows from Irving Kristol. It refers to Canada’s politicians, civil servants, academics, business elites, writers, and journalists, who have a disproportionate influence shaping public discourse and national consciousness.
The manufacturing of a new national identity by this class, centred on the Liberal Party, was one that both rejected our heritage and replaced it with a self-serving and contradictory ideology that serves the interests of this New Class. The strategy of the Canadian New Class throughout Canada’s history has been “to concentrate rents from a resource-based economy in Central Canadian hands.”
The nationalism they manufactured to do this was an entirely artificial one, built around multiculturalism, bilingualism, anti-Americanism and heavy federal government involvement in the economy. At its core Brimelow’s argument is that 20th-century Canada is the creation of the Liberal party, but ultimately that it is fake and built to serve the interests of the New Class. This was done especially by placating Quebec at the expense of the West, and attempting to construct a new national identity that could unite English and French Canada.
This game played by Canada’s elite to enrich them and their bases of support in places like Quebec not only took money from the West and transferred it elsewhere, it dragged down the Canadian economy by crippling it in overbearing and burdensome regulation and the heavy hand of government involvement.
The most interesting, and clarifying part of the book to me is Brimelow’s description of the identity and nationalism that he thinks the Liberals consciously destroyed and then replaced with their own. Brimelow thinks that the New Class are consciously and actively anti-British, not just anti-American, and that this new identity was built as both a rejection of British heritage and the cultural affinities English Canada has with “North American identity.”
According to Brimelow “All of Anglophone Canada is essentially part of a greater English-speaking North American nation … Canada is a sectional variation within this super nation.” Our British heritage is at the core of who we are along with our common Anglo affinities with Americans, and this new national project is doomed to failure. Brimelow suggests that “Canada’s fundamental contradictions cannot be resolved in the present Confederation” and while English Canada is currently in a strange period of identity agnosticism, it will eventually recover and “assert its North American identity.” This process will only be accelerated by regional tensions within Canada that expose the futility of this new Liberal national identity. Modern Canada, in short, is a fraud and doomed to failure.
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July 30, 2020
Membership in the Laurentian Elite isn’t about intelligence, it’s about power and status
In The Line, Andrew Potter wonders why Canadian political elites tend to be so … dumb:
Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”
Recent events in Canadian federal politics have raised anew the familiar conundrum: why are high status people so stupid?
Anyone who has had much interaction with high status individuals is familiar with the phenomenon. It isn’t the shallow ignorance of the merely uneducated, or the malevolent brainlessness of the criminal class. It’s not even your bog-standard lack of intelligence. No, high class stupidity is of a very special type: A sort of studied lack of interest in facts, an offhand relationship with norms, an outright animosity to new ideas.
But it is important to specify just what we mean by “high status,” because status means different things to different people. (Indeed, how you define “status” is one of the key markers of class differences in Canada.) For some people status is defined by money or wealth, for others it is a function of education, while for still others it is a matter of taste. And even if you are sure it comes down to money, there are clear status differences based on how you got rich. Everyone instinctively understands the difference between the guy who got rich off a chain of used car dealerships and the one who made his bundle selling his dotcom startup, and there’s a reason why “nouveau riche” is a derogatory term.
And so the high-status individuals we are talking about here are the highest of high, the upperest of upper, the ones whose wealth is inherited, whose lives are defined by their privilege, and for whom the question of which rung of the status ladder they stand upon never arises, because there is no one above them.
Which brings us to the Liberal government, and in particular to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Minister of Finance Bill Morneau and the scandal over the sole-sourced contract (sorry, “contribution agreement”) with a branch of the Kielburger-led WE conglomerate. First, Canadaland broke the story two weeks ago that Trudeau’s mother and brother had received almost a quarter of a million dollars in speakers’ fees from the WE organization.
[…]
Trudeau and Morneau are both very wealthy men, and if they were going to get into the business of selling their offices it wouldn’t be to a children’s charity for penny ante sums. No, as a number of columnists have pointed out, what is at work here is not corruption, it is privilege: It probably never occurred to either Trudeau or Morneau that this sort of thing was wrong. And it didn’t occur to them, because they are the sort of people who have spent their lives not worrying about the comings and goings of money and how it may affect their lives.
That is why the defining feature of the WE scandal is not the corruption, but the almost deliberate stupidity that is on display — in particular the lack of interest in basic material facts or in following the rules that govern the lives of most people. Which brings us back to the question we started with.
Update: Corrected the attribution for this … Andrew Potter’s article appeared in The Line, not The Dominion. Apologies for the brain fart…
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July 23, 2020
Justin Trudeau and the Overton Window
Ted Campbell explains how Canada’s mainstream media work so hard to move the Overton Window to benefit Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party:
… this explanation from Politico might help:
The concept of the “Overton window,” the range of ideas outside which lie political exile or pariahdom, was first batted around in a series of conversations by the late free-market advocate Joseph Overton in the 1990s. After Overton’s untimely death in a plane crash in 2003, his friend and colleague at the libertarian Mackinac Center, Joseph Lehman, formalized and named the idea in a presentation meant to educate fellow think-tank warriors on the power of consistent advocacy. Ring the bell loudly for your idea, no matter how unpopular, and back it up with plenty of research and evidence, so the thinking went. Today’s fringe theory can become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom by the shifting of the finely tuned gears that move popular opinion; to Overton and Lehman the role of the think tank was to at least familiarize voters with these ideas, giving them an institutional home when public opinion finally moved their way.
Or, and even more brief visual explanation is:
Anyway, I believe that the Liberal Party of Canada and its allies in e.g. the CBC, The Star, and amongst the others who speak for the Laurentian Elites are working very hard, right now, to move the Overton Window frame of one idea from “Unthinkable” to at least barely “Acceptable.” That idea is that Justin Trudeau’s personal corruption (I believe that’s the right word) is acceptable because the alternative is a Conservative government that is, by Liberal/Laurentian Elite definition, authoritarian (fascist), homophobic, militaristic, racist, and sexist.
That’s right, the Liberal/Laurentian Elites admit that Justin Trudeau is dishonest, that he, unthinkingly, breaks the rules, over and over again ~ because, you see, he’s a really nice person but, sadly, he’s just not very smart. I have even made that case for them. I suggested, almost a year ago, that Justin Trudeau is an intellectual lightweight who is in no way qualified to hold high office … but he has the “second hand” celebrity of a famous name and he’s photogenic, too, and so, in 21st-century Canada he’s electable.
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July 19, 2020
In some mature countries, politicians resign when caught in ethics violations … but this is Canada (by definition, an immature country)
Chris Selley lists some of the ethical mire the Trudeau Liberals are wading through, and points out that other countries wouldn’t put up with corrupt sh!t like Canadians do:
Other countries’ prime ministers occasionally have to work at keeping their jobs. Not so much Canada’s. We look down our noses at Australia’s “leadership spills” as unconscionably chaotic, though they have ushered in a new prime minister a grand total of three times in 30 years. If only we had such chaos, PMs might at least be reminded occasionally they aren’t elected emperor in non-negotiable four-year chunks. Instead many of us blanch even at the idea of minority governance. So unstable!
Other countries’ ministers sometimes stand on points of principle, too, and not just over epochal events like the Iraq War or Brexit. Sajid Javid resigned as Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer last year after Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted on appointing Javid’s senior staff. “No self-respecting minister would accept those terms,” he said. Every Trudeau minister accepts those terms.
There is simply no culture of accountability in Ottawa — not for big stuff and not for small. When Trudeau headed off to Harrington Lake while advising everyone else to hide under the bed, it was considered gauche to complain. The National Post reported this week that Health Minister Patty Hajdu took four round trips in a government jet between Ottawa and Thunder Bay during the lockdown, and Treasury Board President Jean-Yves Duclos was chauffeured six times to and from Quebec City. Ho hum. Another nothingburger.
OK, many conclude, so let’s at least give the Conflict of Interest Act some teeth! Some legislative dentures might be worth a try — though they’re by no means universally appreciated. When the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee reviewed the Conflict of Interest Act in 2014, some witnesses argued for doing away with financial penalties altogether, on the theory “the strongest sanctions the Commissioner has at her disposal are her moral authority and the power of condemnation.” The current maximum fine of $500 may well be the worst of both worlds: Not only does it offer no deterrent, it brings the law itself into disrepute.
[…]
On Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said she was “really sorry” about the WE debacle. But she expressed her “full confidence” in the prime minister. In other countries, it might be seen as ominous that she felt it necessary. Here, however, it’s safe to take it at face value. None of us expect much of our politicians, and that’s exactly what we get.
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July 17, 2020
Justin Trudeau IS the Liberal Party and he’s not planning to go away
The government is doing what it can to ride out the storm of yet another ethics investigation into the Trudeau family entanglements with WE, and no rational person expects Justin Trudeau to be even a bit chastened by the experience — he genuinely has no idea what the fuss is all about, and he has no inclination to step aside from his patrimony. Even if he did … the Liberals have nobody who could credibly step up:
Some, however, are wondering whether it’s time for the Liberals to start thinking about life after Justin Trudeau. It would be understandable if his leadership were in jeopardy. The ethics commissioner is commencing his office’s third official investigation into events that could have been avoided had the prime minister simply not done unnecessary things: vacationed on the Aga Khan’s island; inserted himself in the prosecutorial chain of command to “save” 9,000 jobs at SNC-Lavalin that were not in jeopardy; sole-sourced a giant jobs program to his buddies Craig and Marc. This theory holds that Chrystia Freeland is ready and willing and able to take over. And then everything would be, somehow, better.
There doesn’t seem to be much to hang it on. Exactly one MP, Toronto backbencher Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, appears willing to put his name to complaints about the Trudeau Gang’s latest easily-avoided snafu, and he’s not being impolite about it. Polling shows little sign that the scandal is leaving a mark on Liberal voting intentions: Canadians seem very grateful for the federal government’s terrible-to-middling performance during the pandemic. “Snap election, Trudeau super-majority” remains a competing Ottawa narrative.
But it’s an intriguing thought: The Justin Trudeau Liberals, without Justin Trudeau — intriguing because it’s basically a black hole. Way back in the Michael Ignatieff era there was this idea that the Liberals would assemble the best minds of various generations and turn themselves into a party that believed in things and behaved as such in government. There was to be a conference in Montreal, modelled on Lester Pearson’s 1960 think-fest in Kingston, Ont., which spawned various useful ideas including the Canada Pension Plan.
No one remembers much about the 2010 think-fest, which was, coincidentally enough, titled “Canada 150,” because all this “ideas” mumbo jumbo soon became a moot point. Justin finally agreed to run for leader, and he might as well have been unopposed, and it turned out he was really good at doing what Liberals have always believed in: winning.
Get rid of the Trudeau brand, warts and all, and what do you have? Freeland is an impressive person, though she’s also deputy prime minister and was presumably in the cabinet room as this WE disaster was conceived and implemented. You have a couple of very useful and competent veteran ministers in Carolyn Bennett and Marc Garneau. You have some greener ministers who might shine in a less top-down power structure. But mostly you have a flaky centre-left operation that doesn’t know how to do anything better than spend money and broadcast its own self-styled virtue.
Trudeau is damn good at that. Everything suggests he would walk away with an election held next week. Surely it’s unlikely he’s going anywhere he doesn’t want to.
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December 31, 2019
QotD: Canadian journalism
… a Canadian Journalist’s main job is to smooth over any rough spots and shush away worries as the Liberal government plunders the public purse to pay for technocratic solutions to problems we didn’t know we had while adopting a laissez-faire attitude to the problems we do have. If the Opposition has a point, it falls to a Canadian Journalist to correct the record and say that, well, actually, no they don’t.
Josh Lieblein, “Hack or Flack: Aaron Wherry Edition”, Raving Canuck, 2017-11-29.
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November 3, 2019
Alberta and the Liberals
Andrew Coyne summarizes the deep-seated anger in Alberta toward the federal Liberals … and the rest of Canada:
The point sometimes arrives in politics when a complex of different issues coalesce into one; when people stop listening to the arguments in favour of or against each, and instead allow their emotions to dictate a single response to the lot. We are at such a point in Alberta.
Pipelines, carbon taxes, equalization, the Canada Pension Plan — to which familiar litany we can now add the departure of Encana’s headquarters from Calgary — have become, not so much issues in themselves, but arguments in another, grander meta-controversy. All of the questions raised by each (is there a problem? if so, how is it to be solved? who pays? etc) have been pureed into a single narrative: of a Liberal government that is at best indifferent and at worst hostile to Alberta, whose re-election confirms the rest of Canada is as well.
There is, it should be said, some truth in this. Whether the Liberals have failed to win more than a handful of seats in Alberta in over a half a century because of their historic disdain for the province, or whether the causation runs the other way, the chicken is as malignant as the egg. There’s no doubt some people in some parts of the country would cheerfully shut down the oilsands tomorrow, nor is it impossible to detect a strain of anti-Albertanism in some of the rhetoric on the subject.
Albertans, for their part, are not just in a fight to defend their major industry today, but have been for decades. It is inconceivable, to take the most obvious example, that the National Energy Program, that vast attempt to expropriate Alberta’s oil wealth for the benefit of central-Canadian oil consumers, would have been visited upon either Ontario or Quebec, were the situations reversed.
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