Quotulatiousness

May 4, 2023

Despite all the evidence, Canada’s official motto doesn’t translate as “we broke it”

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

In The Line, Justin Ling adds more to the towering pile of evidence that “Canada is broken”:

If The Line has an editorial position, it is probably thus: Everything is broken.

This newsletter, of course, comes at the idea more earnestly than, say, the leader of the Conservative party. When my friend Matt Gurney advances that proposition, it is a lament. When Pierre Poilievre does: It’s wishful thinking.

While citizens of this country can’t always agree on what, exactly, is busted in our country, or why, or who is responsible — we can all agree, I hope, that things in this country could use a tune-up, at the very least. Canadians, after all, are imbued with a cloying optimism. An insufferable belief that things can be fixed. It’s a good thing.

Lucky for us, we have plenty of words written about how to fix much of what ails us. Because we, as a country, have a compulsive need to inquire about those problems. Our national pastime isn’t hockey, it’s the royal commission.

And we’ve got a government in office that loves to study the nature of the problem. There’s good work, these days, for the special rapporteurs and retired judges amongst us. And if you’re a Canadian that loves a good public consultation, you must be run ragged.

Yet we also have a government in office that has a pathological inability to take advice. And this problem may help explain why it feels like we’re sliding backwards.

[…]

When the government tapped an expert panel to study the use of solitary confinement in Canada’s prisons — literally torture — Correctional Services Canada blocked them from doing their job, and the public safety minister ignored their cries for help and then let their contracts lapse. Thanks to some scrutiny, the government renewed the study, then ignored it when the numbers showed they were still torturing people. Oops!

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians — a body Trudeau created — warned in 2019 that Ottawa wasn’t taking foreign interference seriously, particularly when it came to China. “In short, government responses were piecemeal, responding to specific instances of foreign interference but leaving unaddressed the many other areas where Canadian institutions and fundamental rights and freedoms continue to be undermined by hostile states.” Prescient!

One of the most absurd examples is the sexual misconduct crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. When Trudeau came into office in 2015, he had an external review on his desk from Marie Deschamps. One good external review deserves another, so the Liberals ordered one from Louise Arbour in 2022. What she found was harrowing: “We have been here before. Little seems to change.” Not only had the government failed to implement the Deschamps report, it was still failing to live up to the recommendations from the 1997 Somalia Inquiry. Fuck!

[…]

At the very centre of this tootsie-pop is, surprise, elitism. This Liberal government, armed with its paper-thin mandate, is convinced that they — and only they — are the verifiers of good ideas. And we should be grateful for whatever decision they deign to make.

If they farm out an idea to the public service, and the idea doesn’t come back in the form they envisioned, no matter: Send out the McKinsey signal. For just a few million dollars, their crack team of subject matter non-experts can prepare a PowerPoint presentation laying out the exact policy the political staff wanted in the first place.

The Liberals take a similar approach to consulting with the unwashed masses. When the government consulted the public on their plan to police “online harms,” they published a “what we heard” report that was broadly supportive of their plan.

Can we see the submissions? Journalists and academics asked. No. Came the reply.

April 14, 2023

From “cash for access” it’s a very short step to “cash for influence”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Campbell shut down his blog some time ago — unfortunately for those of us interested in Canadian military affairs — but he’s still active on Twitter. Here he responds to a tweet from Sam Cooper of Global News:

Andrew Coyne highlights some of the boggling details in this thread:

March 31, 2023

Bill C-11 should properly be called the “Justin Trudeau Internet Censorship Bill”

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

In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya explains why the federal government’s Bill C-11 is a terrible idea:

Canada’s Liberals insist the point of Bill C-11 is simply to update the 1991 Broadcasting Act, which regulates broadcasting of telecommunications in the country. The goal of the bill, according to a Ministry of Canadian Heritage statement, is to bring “online broadcasters under similar rules and regulations as our traditional broadcasters”.

In other words, streaming services and social media, like traditional television and radio stations, would have to ensure that at least 35 percent of the content they publish is Canadian content — or, in Canadian government speak, “Cancon”.

The bill is inching toward a final vote in the Canadian Senate as soon as next month. It’s expected to pass. If it does, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said in an October blog post, the same creators the government says it wants to help will, in fact, be hurt.

[…]

If you’re confused by all this — if you’re wondering why the Liberal Party and its allies in these quasi-governmental organizations are suddenly so worried about Canada’s national identity — that’s understandable.

In a 2015 interview with The New York Times, Trudeau proudly declared, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Canada, he explained, is “the first postnational state”. The authorized, two-volume biography of Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, is called Citizen of the World. Pablo Rodriguez maintains dual citizenship — in Canada and in Argentina, where he was born.

So why is Trudeau, of all people, championing this legislation? There’s an easy explanation — and it has nothing to do with borders or culture.

“Bill C-11 is a government censorship bill masquerading as a Canadian culture bill,” Jay Goldberg, a director at the conservative Canadian Taxpayers Federation, told me. Referring to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Goldberg said, “The government is intending to give the power to the CRTC to be able to filter what we see in our news feeds, what we see in our streaming feeds, what we see on social media.”

Supporters of Bill C-11 emphasize it would affect only YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, TikTok, and other Big Tech platforms; the Heritage Ministry statement notes “the bill does not apply to individual Canadians”. But the language is so vague that it’s unclear how it would actually be implemented.

For example, it would be up to CRTC regulators to decide what constitutes “Canadian” content. The singer The Weeknd was born in Toronto but now mostly lives in Los Angeles. Does he still count as Canadian? What about rock n’ roller Bryan Adams, who was born in Kingston, Ontario, and spends a great deal of time in Europe?

Canada’s not-so-secret ruling class – the Laurentian elite

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

Yuan Yu Zhu explains why Canada, despite its huge geographical spread, is ruled almost exclusively by people drawn from a very small, very incestuous ruling class:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

Unlike many countries’ socio-political elites, the Laurentians are not readily identifiable on sight. They have long abandoned their differentiated mid-Atlantic drawl; their houses do not have moats.

What distinguishes them above all else is the uniformity in their outlook. Britain is often said to be run by a consensus blob; but its Canadian equivalent make the Westminster blob seem positively anarchical.

As John Ibbitson, the great chronicler of the Laurentian elite, has written:

    Although they often disagree among themselves, they share a common set of assumptions about Canada: that it’s a fragile nation; that the federal government’s job is to bind together a country that would otherwise fall apart; that the biggest challenge is keeping Quebec inside Confederation; that the poorer regions must forever stay poor, propped up by the richer parts of the country; that the national identity — whatever it is — must be protected from the American juggernaut; that Canada is a helpful fixer in the world, a peacekeeper, a joiner of all the best clubs.

Latterly they have added to this list the belief that Canada is a genocidal state built on stolen land, which should atone for its past through part-performative truth and reconciliation – without, however, actually giving any of the stolen land back. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that they are almost all small-l and/or big-L liberals.

This is not to say that their class background (in a country whose official ideology denies the existence of such a thing) is not highly homogenous. They are generally to be found in the two or three large cities of Ontario and Quebec. They tend to be from the upper-middle class families and be secularized.

Many will have been educated in the same private secondary schools; most will have attended a smattering of universities in Ontario and Quebec: the University of Toronto, Queen’s, and McGill (which Johnston headed when Trudeau was a student there).

A large number of them are bilingual, in a country where real bilingualism remains the exception.

Many have post-graduate degrees, often from abroad; something like a quarter of Mr Trudeau’s cabinet ministers have degrees from Oxbridge alone, a shocking figure given how uncommon they are among the population at large.

They then tend to gravitate into the same professional occupations, and they even live in the same few neighbourhoods in the same few cities. Sometimes, like the prime minister and his special rapporteur, they even end up sharing adjoining vacation cottages literally in the Laurentians region.

March 25, 2023

Canada’s ChiCom influence scandal – “All of the damage has been self-inflicted”

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

The Trudeau government has been expending a lot of time, effort, and political capital trying to avoid an open scandal. So much, so typical. What isn’t typical for the federal Liberals is just how badly they’re going about doing everything all of a sudden:

None of this ought to have been a shock, and none of it needed to put the Prime Minister’s Office in its current state of calcified pickle. After all, rumours and off-the-record chats about this stuff have been going around for literally years.

No, how this crew has chosen to handle these stories at every single step has made the scandal worse for themselves. Every. Single. Step. All of the damage has been self-inflicted.

This government is the epitome of an organization that is tactically smart and strategically dumb. Not only has their damage control mirrored the response of the SNC scandal (that ended so well for them), but every misstep has had the result of slowly backing the prime minister into rhetorical traps he has set for himself. This is a government that knows how to win the daily news cycle by losing the game. One that can’t distinguish between legitimate criticism and bad-faith partisan attack — probably because it is so insular and bunker-bound that it sees the world before it divided between loyalists and blood enemies. It’s symptomatic of leadership that is in its final stages of terminal fatigue, and doesn’t yet realize it. These guys cannot help but win themselves to death.

[…]

Imagine, as more stories hit the wire, the government had skipped all of those unnecessary weeks of obfuscation and deflection and simply appointed a special rapporteur to examine the need for a public inquiry. In this counterfactual, let’s also assume that the person he picked isn’t a long-time personal friend. What if Trudeau took allegations of interference seriously at the outset, and his party avoided stunts like skipping committee meetings and filibustering to prevent the testimony of his chief of staff, Katie Telford?

Where would they be today if they hadn’t squandered every iota of credibility and goodwill with the press, the NDP, and his own intelligence services? To put it more directly, what if they hadn’t spent the past few weeks acting as if they had something to hide?

Would they be better off? Maybe?

As an aside, I notice that many of the Liberal proxies are out in force on social media attacking the media and CSIS in an effort to defend the sitting government. I have to ask: how’s that working for y’all? Are you getting the sense that Global News and Sam Cooper and the Globe and Mail have been successfully cowed? Have their CSIS sources stopped leaking? Has Jagmeet Singh been brought to heel?

I’m going to put something out for consideration: Perhaps the denials, obfuscations and attacks are only making the scandal worse. They’re convincing journalists that there’s a real story here while prompting an already pissy collection of national security sources to leak harder.

March 8, 2023

Perhaps the Prime Minister ran out of glitterbomb distractions?

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney speculates on why the federal government needed to be “punched in the face” for literally weeks before finally taking (some) action:

Let’s acknowledge something right at the top: no one really knows what the hell the prime minister proposed yesterday. Not in any specific policy sense, at any rate. But boy, did we ever learn something about how the Liberals are viewing this politically.

After weeks of bobbing and weaving and throwing out fistfuls of increasingly ridiculous chaff, Justin Trudeau has belatedly agreed to a series of actions to probe Chinese electoral interference in Canada. And maybe other interference? We don’t know. We do know it’ll involve NSICOP, which is an acronym in desperate need of an agreed-upon pronunciation, if Monday’s press conference was any guide. NSICOP is a joint House-Senate committee that reviews various matters relating to Canada’s national security and intelligence (read this on its website and you’ll know more than 99.9 per cent of Canadians do about NSICOP). There’s also going to be a splash of the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA), plus a special rapporteur. The special rapporteur will apparently be given broad powers and, should they recommend a full public inquiry, the PM will accept that.

Hell of an endorsement for someone who hasn’t been selected yet. It’s almost like the PM decided he had to make an announcement before he was ready to actually share many details about that announcement, for some reason. Like the announcement itself was the point. Weird, eh? Wonder what that was about. In any case, all we know is it’ll be an eminent Canadian.

Shoutout to all you eminent Canadians out there, I guess. Brush up those cover letters.

Winston Churchill frequently has this attributed to him: “You can depend upon the Americans to do the right thing. But only after they have exhausted every other possibility.” Our Canadian version might be that you can depend on Prime Minister Trudeau to do something, but only after he’s exhausted all of his glitterbombs on distracting public attention.

The way that the Liberals responded wasn’t shocking. They only have a few plays left in their playbook, and we’ve seen something just like this only a few weeks ago. (Which is why I’m wondering if they actually only have the single play left, come to think of it.) The Liberals have responded to the barrage of news stories over Chinese interference exactly the way they did over their controversial gun-control amendments from the fall. First, deny there’s a problem. Then accuse anyone saying there’s a problem of being Donald Trump 2.0 or somesuch. Then just cut right to the chase and call them racist. When that doesn’t work, wait a few days to see if the problem goes away. When it doesn’t — indeed, when it gets worse — that’s when you finally admit that you can’t just yell “DISINFORMING MAGA BIGOTS!” at people and watch as your problem magically evaporates.

With guns, after everything else failed, they withdrew the amendments (though I imagine they’ll try again, though probably with no better luck). With China interference, it was agreeing to some kind of process. All the unfilled blanks notwithstanding, even the fact that something is being agreed to shows a dawning of political reality in the PMO: ignoring this and hoping the leaks stop if you called enough people racist Trumpers wasn’t going to work. Clearly, sometime in the last few days, the PM and his staff reached the acceptance stage, and concluded that either they had to admit that there was enough here to warrant some kind of serious process, or they could just start randomly talking about abortion in the hopes that people fell for that.

No, no, wait. They tried that anyway.

It would be fascinating to know what specifically led to the mental breakthrough that enabled Monday’s announcement. Weeks of denials, evasions and counterattacks, a day of performatively fretting about abortion, and then, zap!, we’re getting an rapporteur — an eminent one! — and a process. Maybe they looked at some internal polling. Maybe they’re worried about a big scoop that’s yet to land. Or maybe they’re just tired of being on the defensive and figured that the proposals would stand a decent chance of smothering the issue to death with pillows stuffed with bureaucracy and abbreviations.

February 19, 2023

“Enjoy the report”

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

When the Canadian federal government invoked the Emergencies Act in February 2022, it began a legal timer for the government to set up a formal inquiry into the situation that triggered the use of the act which was intended to provide some clarity on whether the government was justified to do so. This inquiry had no legal powers to punish wrongdoing, but was merely supposed to uncover what went on both in public and behind the scenes at this time last year. The head of the commision, Paul Rouleau, was a long-time Liberal who’d once worked for former Liberal Prime Minister John Turner and had been appointed to the judiciary during Jean Chrétien’s premiership. It was perhaps too much to hope that he might return a report that made Trudeau or his government look bad.

Donna Laframboise started the Thank You, Truckers! Substack to record the events of the Freedom Convoy and the reports of participants, supporters, and opponents of the protests. She clearly wasn’t surprised at this outcome from the commission:

“Enjoy the report”. Those were the last words Commissioner Paul Rouleau uttered before rising and leaving the room yesterday. The room in which he cheerfully announced that the Canadian government was justified when it invoked the Emergencies Act against festive, peaceful, working class protesters a year ago.

Which part did he imagine we’d enjoy? The knowledge that there’s absolutely no accountability in our political system? The knowledge that a vast network of supposed checks and balances (funded year in and year out by the sweat of working Canadians) offers us no protection from tyrannical, rogue politicians?

Three months ago I wrote: Let us fervently hope Commissioner Rouleau is a man of integrity. One who understands that this is his moment. History will judge him by what he does here.

[…]

Given the opportunity to help resuscitate the limp, battered carcass of public trust, this gentleman instead extended every benefit of the doubt to the government, to the establishment, to police goons who crossed lines that should never, ever be crossed.

This is very bad news. Because, as Martin Luther King Jr observed 60 years ago, when peaceful protests get shut down some individuals

    will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history.

Many Canadians predicted this result. They had few expectations. They said Commissioner Rouleau was hopelessly compromised by long association with the Liberal Party of Canada. They said that, because the Liberal government had sole discretion to select its own judge, real accountability was never on the table.

The cynics were correct.

In the preview to The Line‘s weekly dispatch, the editors take a less pessimistic view of their initial sampling of the report:

Justice Paul Rouleau’s report on the federal government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act was published Friday. It is thousands of pages long. We have not read it all yet. But we have tackled parts of it, with an eye to answering two questions, for ourselves and for our readers. What the hell happened last year — what went wrong? And: do we agree with Justice Rouleau’s decision that that the federal government’s decision to invoke the act was indeed appropriate?

We’ll get to those questions, but let’s say a few things first.

First: if you sat down to read the Rouleau report to find evidence for what you’d already decided, you’ll find it. We believe that Justice Rouleau has written a fair and balanced report. He is clearly struggling, as we were a year ago, to accurately describe and probably even to fully perceive and understand just what “the convoy” was. Line editor Gurney, in reading Rouleau’s efforts to describe how the protest was both a largely peaceful and lawful assembly and also a meeting place for radical extremists, including some dangerous ones, found himself nodding along in recognition of Rouleau’s thought process. This nuance and complexity was precisely what he tried to convey from Ottawa last year.

Second: the same very much applies to political blame. There’s some for everyone here, folks. The federal government comes in for less than some others, but we don’t see in that any bias, but instead a recognition that none of this should have been the federal government’s problem. If the convoy protests had been effectively handled by local and provincial officials, it wouldn’t have been a federal issue at all. This has long been The Line‘s position, but we have also been critical the Trudeau government’s nasty habit of seeing in moments of crisis not a threat to be defused, but instead, a wedge to be eagerly seized upon and exploited. Justice Rouleau is kinder to the Liberals than we are. Perhaps he is simply less cynical. But he did make a point of criticizing Justin Trudeau for inflammatory language, and we were glad of that.

[…]

Third: Justice Rouleau’s finding that the federal government acted appropriately is more conditional and guarded than we think the overall tone of the report, and much of the attendant media coverage, suggests. We’ll get into this in more detail in a minute, but we wanted this front and centre before we start doing the heavy lifting: Rouleau does indeed side with the government, but it’s a pretty nuanced and cautious alignment. A win is a win, and the Liberals got their win here, but Rouleau’s report isn’t an endorsement of how the feds handled anything last year. It would be better for literally all of us if we tried to remember that.

The legacy media’s ability to sway public opinion has waned, but it still has some strength and this was especially so during the lockdowns where people had less opportunity to see for themselves or to talk with others outside the curated gardens of sites like Facebook. If the media had given the Freedom Convoy coverage the same credibility it chose to give to the violent riots, uh, I mean “mostly peacful protests” after the death of George Floyd, the federal government would not have treated the convoy participants and supporters as cavalierly as they did.

Only one federal political party dared to show any significant support for the protest, and the other day PPC leader Maxime Bernier posted a retrospective on the Freedom Convoy to YouTube:

Individual Conservative MPs may have expressed a bit of timid support but were noteworthy by their unwillingness or inability to do anything in Parliament to force the government to at least talk to the protest leaders or give them any benefit of the doubt.

January 22, 2023

It’s not plunder if you wrap it into a “communications contract” with a “consultant”

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

Paul Wells notices an oddity with current federal government ministers’ continued dependence on outside contractors to help them with “communications”:

Immigration minister Ahmed Hussen at the Toronto Caribbean Carnival in 2017.
Photo by Bruce Reeve via Wikimedia Commons.

We’ll circle back to some specifics in a minute, but I’m fascinated by the notion of “communications” embodied here. I have questions.

  1. Four, five and seven years after being elected, who still needs communications help? You tell your voters the world will end if they elect the other team. A reporter calls, you send them bullshit. This isn’t exactly tricky.
  2. In what sense is this “communications”? Look at what Munch More Media did when Global came calling. (1) They erased their website. (2) They scrubbed their IG. (3) They shut down their Twitter account, which Global says had a single follower. (4) They left their Instagram account, whose last post was from 2018, and their LinkedIn account, which lists four followers and names no employees, intact. This is not a company with a proud story to tell. There’s a term for a communications firm that uses no social media. It’s “A firm that had damned well better have a sister in the minister’s office.”
  3. Hussen’s office hopes you’ll believe that a cabinet minister’s constituency office and his ministerial office never talk, but they sure seem to have closely studied the example of Munch More Media when it comes to fielding reporters’ queries. “Hussen’s office — over multiple conversations this week — did not acknowledge any connection between the director of Munch More Media and one of his most senior advisers,” Global reports. Now that’s gold-star communicating.
  4. This approach to communications is having its desired effect. Quick: What on Earth is Ahmed Hussen the minister of? How about Mary Ng? Don’t worry, I’m stumped too. Can you quote anything either person has ever said about anything? Of course not. If Hussen — or, might as well shoot for the moon, Ng — resigned from cabinet today, a resolution I here heartily advocate, you’d have to spare some sympathy for the poor wire-service reporter who’d be expected to come up with some kind of ending for the sentence beginning, “The minister is best known for ____.”
  5. Hussen’s riding has been held by the Liberals (and one apostate Liberal, John Nunziata, after he left the caucus to sit as an Independent) since Hussen was three years old, except for four years after the 2011 election. It’s one of the most reliably Liberal ridings under the eye of God, except for four years after the 2011 election. The only communications material a Liberal in York South-Weston needs is a billboard saying, “Michael Ignatieff Is No Longer the Liberal Leader.”

Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks. Because that’s where the money is, he said. Well, communications contracts are the new banks. There will always be money in communications contracts, and, gloriously, the simple answer — “Answer the question” — is never correct. The goal of communications is not to communicate. It’s to figure out how to communicate as little as possible.

January 20, 2023

QotD: Michael Ignatieff

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

… the Wilson government wasn’t an aberration, for political history is littered with examples of people being found out, often in the most embarrassing possible circumstances. Now that he’s remembered as a byword for complacent failure, it’s easy to forget that David Cameron was a straight-A student who won an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford and was described by his tutor, Professor Vernon Bogdanor, as “one of the ablest” students he’d ever taught. (By now you should have spotted a theme.) An even more glaring example, however, comes from across the Atlantic.

Google “Michael Ignatieff” and you wonder if it was really legal for one man to have enjoyed so many blessings. Everything the Canadian intellectual touched turned to gold. At boarding school in Toronto in the Sixties he was captain of the soccer team and editor of the yearbook. He taught at Oxford and the London School of Economics. He presented The Late Show for the BBC and wrote columns for the Observer. His documentaries won awards; his biography of Isaiah Berlin was shortlisted for some of the world’s most prestigious non-fiction prizes; his novel was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded a professorial chair at Harvard, then another at Toronto. And when his friends in the Canadian Liberal Party invited him to make a bid for the leadership, further glory seemed inevitable.

What happened next, however, makes Kwarteng’s stewardship of the Treasury look like a triumph. In 2011 Ignatieff led the Liberals to the worst defeat in their history, finishing third with just 34 seats. What was worse, he even lost his own seat in Etobicoke–Lakeshore, the first Canadian opposition leader to do so since 1900. His staff were in tears, the world was watching, and all those book prizes must have seemed an awfully long way away. In the cruellest twist imaginable, the man who always came top in exams had failed the most public exam of all.

Dominic Sandbrook, “Kwasi Kwarteng was the wrong sort of clever”, UnHerd, 2022-10-17.

January 13, 2023

In a surprising bit of news, Canadian defence companies still don’t know what the government plans to acquire

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

On the CBC News website, Murray Brewster explains why Canadian defence industries haven’t gone to anything like a “war footing” because the federal government hasn’t told them what they plan to purchase or when, despite pleas that they “get with the program”:

The association representing Canada’s defence contractors says it’s going to take a lot more than talk to put the industry on a so-called “war footing.”

In a bluntly-worded opinion piece published online Wednesday, Christyn Cianfarani, executive director of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries, said that Canada — unlike its allies — has not put in place a framework to ramp up production to meet the demand triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Instead, Cianfarani wrote, the industry has heard “vague pleas” from the Liberal government “for companies to get with the program,” without any clear sense of which items of equipment are needed and what the long-term expectations might be.

“Canadian defence companies can and would step up if they knew exactly what, and how much, to step up with,” she wrote.

In an interview with CBC News last summer, Defence Minister Anita Anand described the enlistment of weapons manufacturers in the struggle to save Ukraine as a “moral imperative.” Gen. Wayne Eyre, the country’s top military commander, also publicly urged the defence industry to get on a “war footing” in response to the crisis.

“No one in industry has a clue what government will require from companies to achieve that end, or even what ‘wartime footing’ means to government in the modern context,” wrote Cianfarani, adding that the last time the country’s defence industry was on a war footing was during the Second World War.

“No firm will take vague exhortations to ‘increase their production lines’ seriously without meaningful and systematic commitment from the government. No respectable CEO is going to take the risk of ordering tens of millions of dollars worth of parts to then see them sitting on a shelf awaiting integration, while simultaneously telling investors to trust them that a buyer will materialize in this highly managed protectionist market.”

December 19, 2022

“[T]he major promoter of the ‘Canada is broken’ thesis over the past few years has been … Justin Trudeau”

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

In the free-to-cheapskates exerpt from this week’s Dispatch from The Line, they set up the possible lines of attack for the next federal election:

What was more interesting to us this week were the comments made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to thousands of Liberals at a large in-person Christmas party. As one does at any good Christmas party, the PM took the chance to, uh, savage his rivals. To wit: “Canada is not broken … Mr. Poilievre might choose to undermine our democracy by amplifying conspiracy theories. He might decide to run away from journalists when they ask him tough questions. That’s how he brands himself. That’s his choice. But, when he says that Canada is broken, that’s where we draw the line.” (Full video of the speech is available via CTV News).

The PM was responding, of course, to a recent line of attack favoured by the Conservatives: that Canada is broken, and we need the Conservatives to fix it.

There are three comments we’ll make in response to this.

The first is strictly an analysis: Trudeau is staking out some interesting rhetorical ground. We aren’t sure this will be the ground on which the next campaign is fought over — God only knows what’ll happen between now and whenever we are next headed to the polls. But if this is the subject of our next “ballot question”, well, that’s just fascinating. “Sunny Ways” vs. “Everything Is Broken and It’s Your Fault.”

How fun! Both men would be able to make an honest pitch for their case. As we’ve written before, the Liberals seem exhausted and spent. They’ve accumulated baggage since their first smiley-faced win back in 2015, and the country has been thoroughly battered by events since then. That suggests that Poilievre, who is at his best when on the attack, could mop the floor with Trudeau.

That said, we don’t take that outcome as a given. First, Trudeau is a damned good politician, better than the Conservatives still give him credit for, and though we are starting to wonder if Trudeau is past the point of no return, we will never count him out. We also think that if the Conservatives make “Things are terrible” the centrepiece of their next campaign, may find that Canadians recoil. Canadian pride is a fragile, brittle thing, and while many of us may feel like things are bad, it’s not clear to us that Poilievre saying so won’t rub a lot of voters the wrong way.

But we honestly don’t know. That’s why it’s fascinating.

The second point is a bit of a reminder: It is worth noting that the major promoter of the “Canada is broken” thesis over the past few years has been … Justin Trudeau. We don’t think we — your Line editors, the media, Canadians in general — should let him take such casual re-occupation of the “Sunny Ways” position, since he’s spent the last five years absolutely dumping on Canada, its history (genocide), its symbols (the flag), and its institutions (the military, amongst others). No one has done more to proclaim Canada broken than Justin Trudeau. Is he now claiming that he’s fixed all the problems he’s spent the last half decade making political hay over?

We mean … the guy won’t even fix his house.

The third point is our own view: of course Canada is broken. And Trudeau has done nothing to fix it.

Now, we have to define our terms here. “Broken” isn’t “destroyed”. We don’t think we’re descending into some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland. It remains undeniably true that Canada is, in global terms, a nice place to live. Safe. Lots of food. No one is firing missiles at us. Sweet! But, like, gosh, folks. Look around. If the PM really wants to assert that Canada isn’t broken, we’ll agree insofar as it’s not so broken that the average person fears starvation and violent death. Sure. But that average person also probably can’t get a passport, or a family doctor, or timely care in an emergency room, or a house in a big city where the jobs are clustering, or Tylenol for their kids.

December 17, 2022

Canada’s consciously anemic foreign and military policies

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why Canada consistently fails to “punch above their weight” in foreign and military matters and that it’s not at all accidental:

Canadian politicians have an inputs problem. Maybe that’s actually the wrong way to describe it — the problem is with the outputs. But it’s the inputs they love talking about.

If that all sounds a little vague, maybe this sounds familiar: “Hey there, citizen. Alarmed about Troubling Issue X? Well, don’t worry. We’re pledging $300 million over the next six years to Troubling Issue X. Oh, and Annoying Irritant Y? We’re announcing a task force to report back on that.”

Does Troubling Issue X get solved? Does Annoying Irritant Y get less annoying and irritating? Eh. We probably don’t collect enough stats to even know. The purpose of the announcement isn’t to solve the problem. It’s to announce something and hope people stop paying attention.

Canadian politicians — especially the current federal government — are notorious for announcing the same “new thing” in as many ways and in as many different contexts as they can. They get several hundred dollars of positive press coverage for every actual dollar spent on whatever the announced spending is supposed to be devoted toward. If they can recycle announcements from months past into a new set of announcements, you’re pretty much guaranteed they’ll do it. Announcing spending is, one must assume, what gets people to cast their votes for the party announcing the spending.

A lot of what looks like policy failure in Canadian foreign and military affairs only looks like a failure when you forget that accomplishing something wasn’t the point. Being photographed and videotaped saying you’ll accomplish something was the point. And the announcement itself accomplishes that!

This was true even before the Trudeau government started handing out bushel baskets of money to various Canadian newspapers, TV networks, magazines, and other legacy media entities. What was once merely praise is now bought sychophancy from the (literally) paid media.

On the military side of things, the Canadian Armed Forces are an organization the government grudgingly funds, but only enough to look good for the self-same media:

It’s not that Canada accomplishes nothing on the world stage. We accomplish things. Sometimes we even play an outsized role — Canada did, for instance, perform well and above expectations in Kandahar. The odd exception aside, though, when it comes to foreign policy generally and especially with defence policy, successive Canadian governments have set a very clear target: we will do, technically, more than nothing. We won’t often do much more than that. But we’ll do enough to not get kicked out of the club of allied nations.

Why do we want to be in the club? Not because we feel any sense of duty or obligation to lead and take on any real burden. But because being in the club makes us safer, and it would, after all, be embarrassing to get kicked out.

It’s important to remember that Canada is, by any standard, a rich country. We could be an actual force for good and stability on the world stage if we wanted to. We could build a bigger fleet and patrol more places, more often — we’d be welcome! We could have a bigger army and lead more peacekeeping missions, or contribute more to NATO. A bigger air force, likewise, could contribute more to our allies, especially in Europe in these unsettled times. In a parallel universe where we did these things, we’d then be able to say with a straight face that the purpose of Canada’s navy was contributing to the safety and security of the seas, the purpose of our army was to assist allies and provide peacekeepers to help end international crises, and the purpose of our air force was to project power and bring support to threatened allies.

In the world we actually live in, though, the purpose of the navy is to technically have a navy that technically does things, the purpose of the army is to technically have an army that technically does things, and the purpose of the air force … you see where this is going, right?

Our navy does things! It shows up places, and patrols areas. But only as much as necessary to technically tick that box. The army is in much the same condition; with a growing number of domestic commitments sapping its strength and budget, even its ability to assist with disasters at home is largely maxed out, but we send a few hundred soldiers here and there, thereby allowing ourselves to proclaim that we’ve … sent soldiers somewhere. The air force, as was just reported this week, can’t even really do even that much this year. The exhausted force is skipping the very modest — a half-dozen fighter jets — annual mission to Europe. The air force is just too burnt out to sustain even that tiny mission.

This is a big and growing problem. Canada, again, is rich enough to make a difference in global security affairs, if we chose to make different choices with how we spend our money. We have made the opposite choice. We field just enough of a military to be able to make just enough difference to avoid being accused of being total deadbeats, and no more.

Can it fight? Eh, maybe a bit. Can it make a difference? Depends how you define “difference”, I guess. Does it make the world and our allies safer? In a way? Can it keep Canadians safe at home? Sort of.

This isn’t a failure of our policy. This is our policy. We show up with as little as possible for as brief a time as possible, but gosh, do we ever talk about the showing up. 

November 9, 2022

Liberal political fortunes ride “especially women in the suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area” … and those women are angry right now

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

In The Line, Ashley Csanady has some advice for Justin Trudeau in the lead-up to the next federal election that he really needs to pay attention to:

Poll after poll has told us the Liberals lost white male voters a long time ago, and their electoral fortunes, especially in Quebec and suburban Ontario, rely on women, especially women in the suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area. This isn’t to say dads and other caregivers aren’t angry. Families take many shapes and anyone with small people at home has faced the same indignities over the past nearly three years. However, politically and demographically, it’s the Ontario moms who are going to make or break the next election. And when folks are angry, it doesn’t matter who the incumbent is, they are wont to vote them out.

Nor is it not just about the children’s pain meds.

It’s about the fact we can’t find antibiotic eye drops over-the-counter either (a shortage one pharmacist told me is even worse than the one for pain and fever meds for the wee ones). Another shortage that means we must then turn to an already over-burdened health-care system to get a prescription for a medicine that may or may not be in stock.

Oh, and if that respiratory virus going around turns nasty, we aren’t even certain there will be a hospital bed for our babies when they need it most.

Then there is the infuriatingly slow roll-out of affordable childcare in this province. Parents once again caught between the feds and the province in a battle that may drag out the process so long that many expecting relief will see their kids off to junior kindergarten before it arrives.

Grocery bills are skyrocketing, and while I admit I’m privileged enough to absorb the eye-popping increases, so many families simply cannot. Imagine telling a picky toddler they can’t have their favourite snack because you can’t afford the crackers.

Now, Ontario moms had to deal with yet another disruption to their kids’ schooling, which threw their work lives into chaos once again. More disruptions are possible should bargaining fail again. This just after many women who left the workforce or took a step back from their careers during the pandemic were just getting back into the swing of things.

I made this point — that Ontario moms are angry and much of that anger is directed at political leaders, but I don’t expect it to fall on Ontario Doug Ford — on Twitter a couple weeks back. For this, I was “reminded” — more like chided — that many of these challenges are Mr. Ford’s fault. Or global challenges no logical person could blame the prime minister for. The partisans in my mentions were right on both counts. But here’s what they got wrong:

It doesn’t matter if I’m being “unfair” to Mr. Trudeau, because politics is unfair.

And as for Mr. Ford’s share of the blame, voters punish who’s up next at the ballot box, especially in a crisis. They had a chance to take out their rage on the PCs in June. They didn’t. So who does that leave up next?

September 30, 2022

Witness about to testify on Bill C-11? Time to break out good old Parliamentary bullying and intimidation tactics!

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

It’s had to believe, but the Liberal government continues to defy expectations in their continued mission to prevent public participation in political processes, as Michael Geist documents here:

“In the east wing of the Centre Block is the Senate chamber, in which are the thrones for the Canadian monarch and consort, or for the federal viceroy and his or her consort, and from which either the sovereign or the governor general gives the Speech from the Throne and grants Royal Assent to bills passed by parliament.”
Photo and description by Saffron Blaze via Wikimedia Commons.

The Senate Bill C-11 hearings have provided a model for the much-needed, engaged, non-partisan inquiry that was largely missing from the House committee’s theatrics in which the government cut off debate on over 150 amendments. But this week those hearings attracted attention for another reason: serious charges of witness intimidation and bullying by government MPs, most notably Canadian Heritage Parliamentary Secretary Chris Bittle (yes, the same Bittle who last month suggested I was a racist and a bully for raising concerns about Minister Pablo Rodriguez silence over Canadian Heritage funding of an anti-semite as part of its anti-hate program).

The Globe and Mail reported late on Tuesday night that Bittle – together with his colleague, Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner – had sent a letter to the Lobbying Commissioner to seek an investigation into the funding of Digital First Canada, a group representing digital first creators. The letter may have been shopped around to other MPs as Liberal MP Anthony Housefather has told the Globe he did not sign it. DFC’s Executive Director, Scott Benzie, had appeared before the Heritage committee months ago and Bittle used his time to focus on the organization’s funding. Leaving aside the fact that government MPs reserve these kinds of questions only for critics of Bill C-11 (there were no similar questions this week from Ms. Hepfner to the Director of Digital Content Next, whose organization supports Bill C-18 and counts Fox News among its members), the timing of Globe story was incredibly troubling. The Lobbyist Commissioner letter was apparently filed nearly two months ago and Benzie had been assured that he was compliant with the law. Yet the story was presumably leaked to coincide with Benzie’s appearance before the Senate committee last night.

The letter and leak smacked of witness intimidation and bullying with the government seeking to undermine critics of the legislation hours before a Senate appearance. Indeed, the entire tactic felt like the policy equivalent of a SLAPP suit, which are used to intimidate and silence critics through litigation. By the end of the day, the tactic had clearly backfired on Bittle and the government. Conservative MP John Nater filed a point of privilege in the House of Commons, arguing that Bittle had attempted to intimidate a Senate witness.

    I rise on a question of privilege, for which I gave notice earlier this same day, regarding the conduct of the member for St. Catharines, who attempted to intimidate Scott Benzie, a witness appearing before a committee of the Senate studying Bill C-11, an act to amend the Broadcasting Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other acts, as reported yesterday by the Globe and Mail.

    While I appreciate that this attempt to intimidate relates to proceedings of a Senate committee currently studying Bill C-11, the culprit in this case is a member of the House, and that same witness appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage during its deliberations on Bill C-11, an appearance where Mr. Benzie, no doubt, first established himself as an undesirable witness for the government on the merits of Bill C-11.

The government response was surprisingly muted with MP Mark Gerretsen simply asking for a couple of days to formulate a response, perhaps recognizing that defending Bittle would mean defending the indefensible.

August 17, 2022

“It’s weird what happens when you choke off people’s ability to make a living”

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

Elizabeth Nickson offers to decode the latest war cry from the great and the good, the well-meaning, the deluded, and the modern-day fellow travellers (who are still useful idiots):

The political circus is gripping, the play before us hypnotic. Audience members drop in, forswear the brutalism of it and go back to their lives, refusing engagement, refusing to look. That’s what it’s for, to alienate you from the real stuff that goes on in the middle of nowhere, where I live.

[…]

This is a slogan that has been picked up by every operative in every western democracy. State legislators appear on MSNBC frantic with fear, wall-eyed, saying the right is stealing democracy.

Expect to hear this ceaselessly for the next three years. Every hour of every day.

This is what they really mean:

When I moved to the middle of nowhere twenty years ago, I became fascinated with local politics. It seemed that there were a lot of little groups, attached like sucker fish to the giant tax eating behemoth that slid through our lives. Their aims were simple and seemingly good hearted, more waterbird protection, more water protection, more tree protection, more protection of the other sexed, more goodness towards and immigration of the huddled masses in South and Central America, more legislated feminist demands, endless demands of the schools by advocacy groups funded by teachers unions, and of course, stopping all development and industrial production because of climate change. They all had groups, they all lived on little bits of money, they were always harried and despairing. They fought a tight game. Small advances, lots of setbacks. Mostly innocent, though the enviro people had deep-buried terrorist groups who created lovely fires for any developer who particularly crossed them. But otherwise, you could invite them to tea with the Queen.

Twenty years on, they flourish with budgets of seven or eight figures, most of which they receive from the various governments they lobby, but also from the world’s greatest foundations, not to mention substantial funding from the EU, the WEF and the UN. And they are in every capital, waking up every morning for one reason: to force the government to cave to their needs. They are always attached to the bigger of the left-wing parties, who fund them big time. In the US it is the Democrats. In Canada, the Liberal Party. They are paid to act as political action committees, while posturing as neutral advocacy groups. They write legislation. And boy, have they written legislation. They developed a thousand, thousand committees which have methodically re-written laws from the extreme local to national.

The ones I met were upper-middle-class, from nominally Christian households, who had been captured by the socialist dream. They called what they did a new iteration: participatory democracy. Leaders were from Britain or the US. Those seemed the most aggressive. More connected. Very little work has been done on their unnerving connectedness. Most reporters agree with their task, don’t want to dig.

The reason they called it participatory democracy was because they were participating. It seemed no one else was, other than business needing a rule change or permit, so they had free rein. And, to give them credit, they did change the culture. It is rare to find a soul who does not support equality of the sexes, the protection of the environment, acceptance of the other-sexed, pity for the huddled masses in the south and an anxious wish for people of colour to do well.

But then … the German Malthusian Eugenicists at the WEF realized they could fund them and bend them to their purpose. With 100x the power, the good kids went rogue. The goal was to break the power of the American middle class in order to save the climate. To disenfranchise them, to de-legitimize them, to identify them as racist, sexist, homophobic and patriarchal. To de-pluralize them. To drive them to the margins. It was, frankly, an adoption of evil, an adoption of kill-to-save.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress