Quotulatiousness

December 30, 2025

“This is where Canada is now”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison handily sums up the state of the nation:

I’ve reached the point most people hit right before systems fail.

The point where facts stop working.

Charts don’t matter. Reports don’t matter. Evidence doesn’t matter. You can post receipts until your fingers cramp and political partisans will still clap, chant, and rationalize while the house fills with smoke. They are not misinformed. They are committed. And commitment beats reality every time.

That’s where Canada is now.

The Liberals and the NDP no longer govern with outcomes in mind. They govern with narratives. If the story sounds compassionate, the damage underneath is waved away as acceptable collateral. Housing explodes. Healthcare buckles. Food banks flood. Productivity sinks. And if you point to any of it, you’re told to be kinder, quieter, or more patient.

Patience is a luxury people without power can’t afford.

What scares me isn’t just the policies. It’s the psychology. We are watching a ruling class that confuses control with competence and optics with success. Every failure is met with more management, more spending, more moral language, and less accountability. When reality resists, they don’t change course. They tighten.

That’s where Mark Carney enters the picture, and why he should worry anyone paying attention.

Carney doesn’t speak like a democratic leader. He speaks like a risk officer explaining why losses are necessary. “Sacrifice.” “Stability.” “Confidence.” These are not solutions. They are words used when the model is failing but the managers refuse to admit it. In his world, the problem is never the plan. It’s public resistance to the plan.

That mindset is poison in a democracy.

The Liberals broke affordability and papered it over with subsidies. The NDP cheered and demanded more of the same. Now Carney offers to professionalize the decline. Smoother language. Tighter controls. Bigger levers. Less dissent. He doesn’t promise prosperity. He promises management.

Here’s the part people don’t want to hear.

You can’t fix a country by overruling its citizens.
You can’t tax, regulate, borrow, and moralize your way out of shortages.
You can’t feed kids, house families, or staff hospitals with press releases.

And when governments start treating criticism as a threat rather than a warning, history tells us what comes next. Not reform. Hardening. Surveillance language. Emergency logic. Ever broader definitions of “harm”. Ever fewer off ramps.

This is how civilizations don’t collapse in a bang. They collapse in meetings.

I don’t expect to convince partisans anymore. That window is gone. This is a warning, not an argument.

If you are still cheering while food banks replace paycheques, while hospitals ration care, while housing becomes a privilege, while leaders talk about sacrifice without ever naming their own, understand this: they are not fiddling while Rome burns. They are insisting the fire is necessary.

And once that belief sets in, facts won’t save us. Only consequences will.

By then, our children are already in the smoke.

December 12, 2025

British Columbia’s embrace of UNDRIP entails vast unintended consequences

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

The government of British Columbia may have downplayed or even deliberately lied about the impact of incorporating the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) into BC’s legal system, but I suspect even they are suddenly realizing just what a legal disaster they have unleashed on their province (and indirectly, on the rest of Canada):

A map showing the Cowichan title lands outlined in black. These lands were declared subject to Aboriginal title by the BC Supreme Court earlier this year, in accordance with the UNDRIP provisions added to BC law in 2019.

When the B.C. NDP introduced a 2019 act committing the province to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), they very specifically assured critics that it would not be a “veto” over existing laws.

“The UN declaration does not contain the word veto, nor does the legislation contemplate or create a veto”, Scott Fraser, the province’s then Indigenous relations minister, told the B.C. Legislative Assembly.

Fraser explained that it was not “bestowing any new laws”, it would not “create any new rights” and it certainly wouldn’t make B.C. subservient to a UN declaration.

Fraser would even explicitly assure British Columbians that there was no conceivable future in which, say, a private landowner could suddenly see their property declared Aboriginal land.

“We are not creating a bill here that is designed to have our laws struck down,” he said.

That it only took six years for all of these scenarios to take place may explain why there is so much panic in B.C. right now.

The newly appointed head of the B.C. Conservative Party is calling for an emergency Christmas session of the legislature to excise UNDRIP from provincial law, saying it has become an anti-democratic tool.

Even B.C. Premier David Eby — a onetime champion of the legislation — has said that “clearly, amendments are needed”.

And British Columbians, whose support for the UN law was already not great, are growing restless. According to an Angus Reid Institute poll released on Wednesday, Eby ranks as one of the least popular provincial leaders in the country.

What changed was a Dec. 5 B.C. Appeals Court ruling that not only struck down a B.C. law (the Mineral Tenure Act) on the grounds that it violated UNDRIP, but effectively ruled that any law or government action could similarly be overturned if it wasn’t in line with the 32-page UN declaration.

By writing UNDRIP into B.C. law, the province had adopted the Declaration as “the interpretive lens through which B.C. laws must be viewed and the minimum standards against which they should be measured”, read the majority decision.

Although UNDRIP is mostly filled with uncontroversial declarations about languages and traditional medicine, its clauses are pretty uncompromising when it comes to issues of land use or resource development.

“Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired”, reads a subsection of Article 26. It also states that Indigenous peoples “own, use, develop and control” any land that they’ve held traditionally.

Eby is saying that the courts took it too far, and that writing UNDRIP into B.C. law was only ever meant as a holistic decision-making guide, rather than a law superceding all others.

As Eby told reporters this week, by signing onto UNDRIP, B.C. wasn’t intending to put courts “in the driver’s seat”.

November 3, 2025

The BC government “has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.”

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

A Fraser Institute commentary by Bruce Pardy addresses the role of the NDP government of British Columbia in undermining the established laws on land title in the province among other actions to the advantage of First Nations bands and to the definite disadvantage of ordinary British Columbians:

Recently, British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma said that fee simple title in private property is superior to Aboriginal title. She’s a day late and a dollar short. In fact, her NDP government, led by Premier David Eby, has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has granted several First Nations a portion of a 1,846-acre land claim on Lulu Island. B.C. Supreme Court

A few days earlier, the City of Richmond sent out a letter to more than 125 property owners warning them that the security of their land is in doubt. “For those whose property is in the area outlined in black,” the letter reads, “the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership … The entire area outlined in green has been claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.”

The Richmond letter is a consequence of a recent decision of the B.C. Supreme Court, which awarded Aboriginal title over 800 acres of land in Richmond to the Cowichan First Nation. Wherever Aboriginal title is found to exist, said the court, it is a “prior and senior right” to other property interests, whether the land is public or private.

It is finally dawning on British Columbians that obsequious devotion to reconciliation is putting their land at risk. Sharma claimed that B.C. was pursuing multiple grounds of appeal, but that makes her a hypocrite. Her government did not robustly defend in court against the Cowichan claim. And in a dozen other ways, the Eby government has sought to put title and control of B.C. into Aboriginal hands.

In early 2024, it proposed to amend the province’s Land Act, which governs the use of Crown land in B.C. It planned to give B.C.’s hundreds of First Nations a veto over mining, hydro projects, farming, forestry, docks and communication towers. The government tried to consult quietly, but the backlash was immediate. It withdrew the proposals, promising to be more transparent. But it did not shelve its objectives or its plans. And did not deliver on its promise. Instead, it sought to make agreements over specific territories with specific Aboriginal groups, often negotiated covertly and announced after the fact.

In April 2024, the Eby government recognized Aboriginal title to Haida Gwaii, the archipelago on Canada’s West Coast. Around 5,000 people live on Haida Gwaii. About half are Haida, who voted overwhelmingly in favour of the deal. But non-Haida residents had no say. The Haida agreement says private property will be honoured, but private property is incompatible with Aboriginal title, which is communal. If Haida Gwaii really is subject to Aboriginal title, then no one can own parts of it privately.

Update: I forgot to include the URL to Mr. Pardy’s article … fixed now.

April 30, 2025

After the votes were counted

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

John Carter suggests that votes should be allocated to reflect the costs imposed on the voters by taxation, that is to ensure that those with the most “skin in the game” at least have their votes weighted more than those who pay little or no taxes but can still vote themselves more benefits:

Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs taxeater status?

So anyhow.

For my American readers, in Canadian elections the Liberal Party is denoted by red, as the Devil and Karl Marx intended.

It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups: migrants, public sector workers, and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups, and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation’s capital.

Perhaps it’s that it’s tax season and I’m in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but I can’t help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote. It’s common for “taxpayers” to be used as a synonym for “the voting public”, but this is a bit of linguistic legerdemain which obscures a core dynamic rotting the heart out of every liberal democracy: most of the population are not, in fact, taxpayers. First there are those who don’t earn enough to pay taxes, such as university students; then there are those receiving direct welfare payments of one form or another; then there are public employees, who although they pay tax on paper, are clearly net recipients of government largess since their paychecks come from taxes in the first place.

The most successful parties in country after country are the parties that mobilize client groups by promising to steal money from productive citizens and transfer that wealth to their non-productive clients. This dynamic is baked into the cake of any universal suffrage democracy, which is why Universal Suffrage is a Suicide Pact. Parties need client groups for electoral support; wealth can only be plundered from the productive; therefore the only available relationship is to cultivate non-productive clients.

The problem, of course, is that over time this destroys the economic productivity of the liberal democracy, because the productive groups will become less productive because what’s the point, or they’ll just look for the exits, while the client groups will swell, becoming simultaneously too expensive to maintain and to electorally heavy to dislodge.

I suspect you could fix all of this by simply tying votes to tax receipts, with only those who are net taxpayers being given the franchise in any given election. At a stroke this would disenfranchise the welfare underclass, government bureaucrats, and university students, all of whom should be prohibited from voting as a matter of principle. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could implement a tax-weighted vote: the more taxes you pay, the more your vote counts.

In addition to the salutary effects of reducing the electoral weight of female voters (since men tend to pay more in taxes), weighting votes by tax receipts would lead to a very interesting incentive structure. On the one hand, everyone hates paying taxes, and wants to minimize the taxes they pay; if only taxpayers were voting, this would place a strong downward pressure on taxes and, hence, on the size of government (thus forcing states to find other ways of funding themselves, via e.g. tariffs or service fees). On the other hand, people like to vote, so there would be a strong incentive not to evade taxes. On the gripping hand, since paying more tax means your vote counts for more, there would be a countervailing incentive to pay as much tax as you can afford. One might imagine a state functioning as a sort of de facto oligarchy, with the billionaires happily paying obscene levels of tax in order to gather as much political power to their class as possible, and enforcing their tyranny by voting to keep taxes on everyone else to the absolute bare minimum. This would be a truly dystopian brier patch to be thrown into.

Alas, we do not inhabit such a political experiment. Returning to the ostensible topic of yesterday’s Canadian election, however, it would probably not be an exaggeration to posit that if we did inhabit such a system, Canada’s Conservative Party would have rolled the Liberals in this and, in all likelihood, almost every other election.

That is not, however, what happened.

The high-level outcome is that, after running the country into the ground for the last decade, the Liberal Party has been elected for the fourth consecutive time, with a mandate to complete the project of crashing the plane of Dominion with no survivors. It brings me absolutely no pleasure to report that I predicted the Liberals would win before the election was even called. The Liberals are four seats short of forming a majority in parliament, meaning they cannot quite form a stable government on their own. This is not a problem for the Liberals, however. Despite the glorious collapse of the New Democratic Party – which plummeted from 25 seats in the last federal election to 7 in the current election, by far their lowest in 30 years – the NDP retains just enough seats for them to form a stable coalition government with the Liberals. In other words, the outcome of this election is that Canada will be in essentially the same situation it was in before the election, with the only meaningful difference being that the Liberals have a few more seats than they did before.

April 29, 2025

Canadian federal election result

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

April 26, 2025

The week-before-the-vote Bullshit Bulletin

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

The Line‘s invaluable bullshit tracker includes some steaming bullshit from Mark Carney, the Conservative campaign, and, perhaps the most acrid bullshit from the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh:

Jagmeet Singh, the empty turban. He is the current (and possibly last) leader of the federal New Democratic Party, and it’s his conscious actions that may have doomed his party to parliamentary oblivion.

This article, about a recent meeting between Singh and the Toronto Star editorial board, is just absolutely bonkers. Jagmeet. Our dude. We like you. We do. But this is some epic bullshit.

This passage, in particular:

    The NDP leader stood by his decision not to plunge the country into an early election last fall while support for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals plummeted, telling the Star‘s editorial board he “couldn’t stomach” the idea of causing Pierre Poilievre’s seizure of power, and that he made the choice to put Canada’s interests ahead of those of the New Democratic Party.

    “While we could have won lots of seats, it would have meant a Pierre Poilievre majority Conservative government, and I could not stomach that,” Singh said, making the argument that an election would have jeopardized progress on pharmacare deals and dental care expansion. “I love my party. I care deeply about it. I want us to win. I want us to up our seats. I know we’re good for people. But in that moment, I made a decision for the interest of the country ahead of my party. And that was a decision I made wide-eyed, and I stand by that decision.”

Hmmm. Okay. So. Let’s take that at face value. If only for the sake of argument.

Singh realizes what the logical endpoint of that argument is, right? … right?! The story of this election, to the extent there is a single one, is that the NDP collapse made it impossible for the Conservatives to win. We have lots of criticisms of the CPC campaign; we’ve made some already and we’ll have more to say when it’s over. But we recognize the truth that without a strong NDP, even a perfect and flawless Conservative campaign was always going to be an uphill battle. It’s just a really difficult situation for the Conservatives to overcome.

And you know what Singh could do to make that a permanent state of affairs? Give up! Tank the NDP completely. Do a national tour asking everyone to vote Liberal. Defect and become a Liberal. Spend his post-politics career, which seems set to start sometime early next week, campaigning for a two-party system, under which the Liberals defeat the Conservatives over and over.

End the vote splitting by ending the NDP. That’s a case that many Liberals have made before. And fair enough. But it’s some kind of bullshit to see Singh himself making it, and we can’t imagine his NDP colleagues are particularly pleased to see their leader taking a position that the Liberals took years ago: that the best way for left-leaning voters to stop the Conservatives is to put the country first, and vote for them.

September 7, 2024

What is Jagmeet Singh’s actual plan here?

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson outlines the NDP leader’s options now that the Confidence and Supply Agreement has been “ripped up”:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announces the end of the Confidence and Supply Agreement.
Screencap from the NDP official video via The Line,

… I’m starting to consider the possibility that Jagmeet Singh is bad at politics.

I mean, think about this.

We at The Line have long pointed out that CASA was a bad deal for the NDP. It earned the party only a few piecemeal spending concessions like two-treatment Pharmacare and a half-baked dental program. It’s the Liberals who will, and have, taken full credit for both.

Meanwhile, Singh has lost all credibility as a government critic. What blows he can level at the Liberals are fatally undermined by the fact that he’s supported them for years. If the Liberals are complacent in enabling corporate greed, then Singh is demonstrably an enabler of a government that is “too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interest to fight for people”?

I realize that nobody in Liberal-land is going to take this advice seriously, but I’m going to offer it anyway. On its current trajectory, Canada is heading toward a two-party system. Either the Liberals are going to eat the NDP, or the NDP is going to eat the Liberals. Until Wednesday, I put my money on the latter. Now, I’m not so sure.

If the Liberals maintain any existential instinct at all, they’d call Singh’s bluff. Drop the writ on a party that’s demonstrably unprepared to fight the battle it’s proclaimed. Eat the left, and survive to fight on another day. The meal is right there for the taking.

Singh’s big announcement about “ripping up” CASA — meep meep — gains him absolutely nothing. What additional leverage can he expect to acquire in a post-CASA parliament that he didn’t already possess?

Perhaps Wednesday’s announcement was merely a gambit to soothe internal problems, or distance himself from the Liberals. Okay, fine. This might be a viable strategy if it buys Singh a few months to trash Trudeau and raise funds off the effort while frantically trying to wash off the stinky stain of hypocrisy.

But what’s going to happen when the Liberals face their next confidence motion, presumably as soon as the Conservatives can arrange one? What happens at the next one, and the next one after that?

What credibility can Singh possibly hope to maintain if he votes for the Liberals, again? How in the world is the NDP seriously going to claim to have ripped up CASA while effectively acting as if it is in a CASA? The NDP cannot credibly distance itself from the sitting government while spending the next year propping up said government again and again and again in successive confidence motions. Especially after such a brazen display of pulling out of the deal.

No. They’re going to have to pull the trigger, and soon. Obviously. Clearly.

Singh sees this.

Right?

September 6, 2024

“I support Jagmeet Singh’s right to terminate his half pregnancy”

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

Matt Gurney on NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s decision to pull the plug on the Confidence and Supply Agreement that had propped up Justin Trudeau’s government, long after it became clear that the Liberals were garnering all the benefits and the NDP were losing core supporters over the arrangement:

Let us start with words of affirmation and support: I support Jagmeet Singh’s right to terminate his half pregnancy. How could anyone not? His constant daily humiliation was getting uncomfortable to observe.

I know you might be expecting some kind of political analysis here. What will the end of the Confidence and Supply Agreement — or Supply and Confidence Agreement (we probably should’ve settled on one before the thing collapsed)—mean for Canadian politics, the upcoming elections, and the next general federal election? But the truth is, I don’t know. No one does. All we can say with any particular certainty is that our minority government situation has become more complicated. The Conservatives will keep trying to bring the government down. Don’t be surprised if they try to make everything a confidence motion, if only to further embarrass Singh. The NDP, for their part, will face some brutal decisions. Most polls show them heading for a wipeout, with half of their seats looking likely to flip to someone else. They’d need a huge spike in the polls just to break even. So, that’s going to be fun for them to navigate. Then, of course, there’s Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. Their prospects look awfully bleak, too. But it’s entirely possible they might decide to rip the Band-Aid off and call an election at some point in the reasonably near future.

Am I predicting any of these things? No. Like I said, I have no idea what’s going to happen. If I had to guess, I’d say the NDP will continue to support the government unofficially for the foreseeable future while all the parties reassess the new reality on the ground. But that guess is entirely subject to revision as events unfold. Time will tell. What more can I offer you?

So, in terms of political commentary on yesterday’s news, that’s about it. I don’t expect any immediate changes, and we’ll see where things shake out. Thanks for reading.

But there is a related point I’d like to make. And though it may sound snarky, I mean it with total sincerity. I am so, so happy for Jagmeet Singh. Since the deal was announced, he’s had to keep Trudeau in office while also acting like he was as disgusted with the PM as the typical Canadian voter seems to be. It was, truly, cringe-inducing, a real-life manifestation of the first half of the Hot Dog Car sketch (the back half gets weird).

I wasn’t kidding when I said it was painful to watch. And it wasn’t just me who noticed — a few podcasts ago, Jen and I had a laugh at Singh getting hit by Twitter’s Community Notes fact-checking service. After one of his regular tweets attacking Trudeau, a note was added to it, reminding readers that Singh was officially, as per a signed agreement, responsible for keeping Trudeau in power. It was laugh out loud funny, and, alas for the NDP leader, we were very much laughing at him, not with him.

That’s finished now. His nightmare is over. He can stop looking so goddamn ridiculous every day now. The deal is dead.

And now that it is, we can finally take a long look back at it and wonder how the hell Singh ever decided that the deal, or at least how he behaved during the deal, was a good idea.

In the National Post, Chris Selley seems a bit less charitable toward Singh, for largely the same reason … the pain and humiliation was almost entirely self-inflicted:

So, the deal is off. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh apparently located a few scraps of dignity in some long-forgotten kitchen drawer or closet. Just minutes before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was set for a press conference to give himself yet more credit for the NDP’s national school-lunch program, Singh announced he was calling off the NDP’s two-and-a-half-year-old confidence-and-supply agreement with the governing Liberals.

“Canadians are fighting a battle … for the future of the middle class,” Singh pronounced. “Justin Trudeau has proven again and again he will always cave to corporate greed.” Reports suggest it was the Liberals last month ordering the railway unions back to work and into binding arbitration with their employers that finally soured the milk in Dipperland.

“In the next federal election, Canadians will choose between Pierre Poilievre’s callous cuts or hope” Singh continued, casting himself as the Barack Obama figure in the forthcoming contest — “hope,” he specified, “that when we stand united, we win; that Canada’s middle class will once again thrive together.”

Because a Canadian political announcement must come with some impenetrable bafflegab, Singh added the following: “It’s always impossible until it isn’t. It can’t be done until someone does it.”

Up is left. Forward is up. United we dance. The future.

All the reasons for the NDP to cut the Liberals loose on Wednesday were so myriad and obvious that it’s difficult to remember what on earth the point of this agreement was supposed to be. Singh got no cabinet seats out of it, maybe just a few “thanks for your contribution” pats on the back from Trudeau and his ministers along the way. But the NDP essentially gave away any policy wins to the Liberals.

New Democrats understand better than anyone else the fundamentally amoral nature of the Liberal Party of Canada. They understand the Liberals’ all but total conflation of the party’s best interests with the country’s, and therefore its utter lack of shame. Anything the Liberal party does, anything it says, even if it’s completely the opposite of it did and said yesterday, is precisely the medicine Canada needs. And the NDP understands as well as the Conservatives do how mainstream Canadian media privileges the Liberals in that regard.

September 5, 2024

CASA doloroso, or Jagmeet finally locates a pair

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

Ding, dong! The long-running deal between the New Democrats and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals has finally been terminated. It was Jagmeet Singh’s support that kept Trudeau in power and had been intended to run until next summer, but Singh announced he was no longer going to provide confidence and supply votes in Parliament. The editors at The Line warn us that this doesn’t automatically mean we can start heating up the tar and ripping open the feather pillows quite yet:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh in happier days at a 2017 Pride parade.
Photo via Wikimedia.

On Wednesday, Jagmeet Singh finally took longstanding criticism to heart, and announced he would be tearing up the Confidence and Supply Agreement, the deal that allows the Liberals to hold the confidence of the house.

That said, don’t expect an election just yet.

CASA has been an unmitigated disaster for the little sister of the non-alliance alliance between the two parties. As we’ve previously noted here at The Line, Singh proved to be a weak negotiator, agreeing to support Justin Trudeau with nary a cabinet seat nor a concrete spending promise. To date, the only real concessions the NDP have landed amount to, essentially, half-baked Pharmacare and dental programs that are little more than targeted subsidies to the poor. The merits of these programs in and of themselves is a debate for another day; however, what benefits they do bring have not benefited the NDP one whit.

That’s because the Liberals will — and have — taken full credit for these programs, while Singh has been left in the unenviable position of having to criticize a sitting government that he continues to buttress through the CASA. In other words, for virtually no spending concessions, the NDP has fatally undermined its position as a credible critic of the government.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party — still strong in the polls — can lean on the NDP’s hypocrisy in order to gather up traditional blue collar and even union workers into the bosom of its culturally cozy embrace.

Obviously, this position is untenable. However, we at The Line admit to being surprised that Singh is actually ripping it up ahead of the deal’s natural expiry in June of 2025. Rather, we expected the Liberals to rag the puck on this government for as long as constitutionally possible — and, to be honest, we thought the NDP would stay in step because the party is, at its heart, weak.

Lo! We were surprised.

By ending CASA, the party has time to restore some of its spent credibility, bashing Trudeau hard to drum up fundraising ahead of the next election. Without the NDP’s support, the Liberals can carry on only until they are required to pass a confidence motion — likely the Spring budget. This gives the NDP a few months to generate support. Of course Singh won’t win that election, but he can now leave his party in a stronger position to live to fight another day.

That is … unless Trudeau decides to respond to the collapse of CASA by simply dropping the writ now, catching his opponents on the left off guard and unprepared to run a full election campaign.

September 4, 2024

There’s always been “BC weird”, but today’s BC politics is weirder than ever

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

Although I can technically say I’ve been to British Columbia, a couple of hours driving around just west of the BC/Alberta border in 1988 doesn’t give me any real understanding of Lotusland’s, uh, unique political landscape. Fortunately, here’s Rob Shaw in The Line to give a somewhat better-informed view of BC politics today:

British Columbia politics has always been weird.

This is a province in which an obese Taiwanese billionaire once bought a premier’s personal amusement park using envelopes stuffed with cash in his underwear; where the clerk of the legislature was convicted of fraud; where the Speaker claimed the legislature’s ceremonial mace was bugged by spies; and an MLA stole from a children’s charity for the disabled.

In short, the province has a bit of a reputation. So it might be tempting to view the most recent headlines about the implosion of the former dominant B.C. Liberal party — and the meteoric rise of the B.C. Conservatives — as keeping with British Columbia’s unique brand of zaniness.

Except, it isn’t.

B.C.’s political realignment mirrors one that’s already occurred in several other provinces and is playing out federally, as well, as a tired, middle-road centrist party is squeezed out by a harder-right, hungrier, more-energetic conservative movement.

At the leading edge of it all is an unlikely figure — a 61-year-old former Liberal cabinet minister with a low profile, who was booted from the B.C. Liberal caucus in 2022 by leader Kevin Falcon for sharing a social media post questioning the role of CO2 in climate change. Rather than retire quietly, John Rustad took the ejection, pivoted and joined the moribund B.C. Conservative party, which had clocked only 1.9 per cent of the popular vote in 2020. He gave the party a seat in the legislature, and a profile to grow. Since then, it has skyrocketed.

“Of course nobody thought you could do this in a year, take a political party from two to three per cent to challenge to form government,” Rustad told me. “Lots of people ask me about it and I put it down simply to people are really desperate and looking for change.” Last week — two years and 10 days after he was fired — Rustad stood in a Vancouver hotel ballroom to accept Falcon’s political surrender. The leader of the B.C. Liberal dynasty, a party that ruled the province from 2001 to 2017 under premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, announced that he was disbanding B.C. United ahead of the next election. Supporters were encouraged to flock to the Conservatives.

“This is the right thing to do for the province,” Falcon said at the Aug. 28 press conference. “I said to John: I may only agree with about 75 per cent of what you might believe in, but I do know this, that on his very worst day John Rustad would be a far better premier than (B.C. NDP premier) David Eby on his very best day. And I’ve never lost sight of that bigger picture.” The Conservatives have been within striking distance of the governing NDP for months, according to polling done by almost every firm in the country.

March 21, 2024

“That is a catastrophic miscalculation for the NDP, and it’s the single best thing that happened to Poilievre”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney reflects on what he got wrong about Pierre Poilievre and why he misread the situation leading up to Poilievre becoming Conservative leader:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

“Think of Trudeau in late 2019,” he told me from the bar. “India trip. SNC-Lavalin. ‘Thank you for your donation.’ Black and brown face. Canadians were souring on him. They were starting to think he was a fake, and maybe a bit of an asshole. His disapproval ratings were soaring. Then COVID hits, and he’s doing his smiling, reassuring press conferences every day outside his house. His disapprovals tank. Canadians are reminded of 2015 Trudeau. But then pandemic ends, and we’ve got some Trudeau missteps. ‘Unacceptable people’, COVID-era wedges. He’s going back to his 2019 position: people don’t like him.”

“And then,” he told me, “just as Canadians are starting to think the PM is an asshole again, the NDP decides to sign an agreement with him. [NDP leader] Jagmeet [Singh] could not have screwed up more. This is a historical, books-to-be-written-about-it screw up. Because just as Canadians are remembering that they don’t like the PM, Singh is giving those voters no reason to go to the NDP.”

Normally when the Liberal vote collapses, he continued, those voters disperse across all the parties. But CASA, my source told me, was like a funnel, forcing all the voters the Liberals were losing to go to the Conservatives instead of going everywhere. “If you’re angry at Trudeau, if you don’t like him, if you’re sick of him, you can only go Conservative this time. Singh did that. That is a catastrophic miscalculation for the NDP, and it’s the single best thing that happened to Poilievre. None of us saw that coming.”

He had other thoughts, as did others I spoke to. The People’s Party having been neutered as a threat was something I heard repeatedly, which matters, but not in the way that you think. “The PPC wasn’t a huge draw on our voters,” a senior Tory told me. “People still think the PPC was just our most-right-wing fringe. Wrong. It was drawing voters from everywhere, including typical non-voters. So the problem wasn’t that we were losing votes. The problem was that the fear of the PPC gave too many of our western MPs licence to get away with anything or oppose anything. ‘If we do/don’t do this, Maxime Bernier is going to kill us!’ Guess what? Portage-Lisgar was Bernier’s best possible shot and we annihilated him. No one is afraid of the PPC anymore. No one can use the PPC as leverage against the leader.”

I asked about that — Poilievre’s hold over his own party. In my 2021 column, I had noted that O’Toole never really had full control. Every Conservative I spoke to agreed: Poilievre has the most control over his caucus of any CPC leader they can remember. Better than O’Toole, better than Andrew Scheer, and as good, at least, as Stephen Harper. Not all the MPs were thrilled when O’Toole was replaced, but the smell of impending victory has a way of winning over new friends.

I talked with the source at the bar for a long time, and we covered a lot of ground. A lot has gone right for Poilievre, he said. Some of it is luck, some of it is timing, but some of it is entirely to Poilievre’s credit. My source isn’t one of Poilievre’s guys, so to speak. He’s just long-time CPCer, who served all four leaders of the modern era. He has never hesitated to critique the current leader in our chats, but he gave credit where he felt it due. “Poilievre was talking cost of living and inflation back when the PM was taking time at press conferences to tell everyone he doesn’t care about monetary policy, and when the finance minister and the governor of the Bank of Canada were telling everyone there was nothing to worry about, and when all the economists on Twitter were saying that deflation was the worry. Poilievre was right. In public, loudly, right. About the issue that was about to completely take over Canadian political conversation. He called it. Trudeau, Macklem and Freeland were wrong. People may not remember the details, but they remember that.”

February 14, 2024

“… one of the most contemptible pieces of legislation since the introduction of the Indian Act in 1876″

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

In the National Post, Stephen Buffalo explains why many Canadian First Nations people are angry with NDP MP Charlie Angus for his recently introduced Private Member’s Bill in Parliament:

“Charlie Angus at convention 2023 2 (cropped)” by DrOwl19 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

First Nations people used to consider NDP MP Charlie Angus an ally, as he has been outspoken on issues of Indigenous poverty and government mismanagement. Canadians do not want to know what many Indigenous people are calling him these days.

Last week, Angus tabled a private member’s bill, C-372, that is one of the most contemptible pieces of legislation since the introduction of the Indian Act in 1876. Angus’ proposed fossil fuel advertising act would outlaw oil and gas advertising and the “promotion” of fossil fuels, even by some private citizens. If passed, this would be the most egregious attack on civil liberties in recent Canadian history.

It is astonishing that an experienced parliamentarian like Angus could bring such nonsense forward. All Canadians, of all political stripes, should be outraged at this attempt to stifle public discussion.

Through actions like this, Angus and his environmental supporters — like the Sierra Club, Suzuki Foundation, Earthjustice, Greenpeace, 350.org and others — have shown themselves to be no fans of Indigenous peoples. These single-minded environmentalist organizations ignore the interests of First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities, except when they want to impose their will on them.

Angus has thrown his lot in with the wrong people. They are happy to tell us what to do on energy and environmental matters. But they are never around to fix our water issues, health-care problems, housing crises and rampant drug challenges. They clearly want Indigenous people to stay silent and follow their lead. No wonder many Indigenous folk describe environmentalists as the “new missionaries”.

While some of our members share the views of Angus and his ilk, most First Nations people support carefully managed resource and infrastructure development. We need our own resource revenue to break free from our dependence on government and to chart our own futures. Indigenous communities finally have prosperity and independence in sight.

People like Charlie Angus may agonize over our hardships, but they are content to maintain the Indian Act-style paternalism that created so much of the pain we endure. They must back off. First Nations, Metis and Inuit folk will not accept being shut up and will not tolerate people trying to tell us how to use our land and our resources.

February 11, 2024

Charlie Angus, Canada’s one-man campaign for struggle sessions, re-education, and prison for people who say things he doesn’t like

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines the inside thoughts of NDP MP Charlie Angus, who introduced a Private Member’s Bill this week to criminalize speech that even hints at not being fully onboard with Team Climate Catastrophe, especially anything supporting the use of fossil fuels:

“Charlie Angus at convention 2023 2 (cropped)” by DrOwl19 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Monday
It’s an odd thing to work in the House of Commons; a place where the country’s most cynical, power-mad misanthropes are gathered together into one distilled mass of treachery.

This is why I aligned myself with the only true bastion of moral rectitude in this wretched, faithless town. The NDP does not court power, and thus remains untainted by it. Only by insulating ourselves against the corrupting lure of ambition can we truly know we are on the right side of history.

And today, more than ever, I know the only true moral course is to introduce a federal program of jailing any Canadian who expresses positive opinions of a non-renewable fuel source. Not every Canadian, mind you, just those who can’t provide evidence that an oil company doesn’t indirectly benefit them in some way.

Tuesday
As predicted, the usual agents of disinformation have libelled my bill as “illiberal” or “fascistic”. We’ll prescribe appropriate criminal consequences for this kind of mendacity in due course, but for now I would only ask these deceit-merchants to consider what we’re up against.

Oil companies are, quite literally, the knowing architects of the complete destruction of the human race. If the so-called “market” had been left to its own devices, the world would currently be a utopia of bottomless green energy. But instead, the oil and gas industry has tricked humanity into believing that fossil fuels are bringers of anything except slavery.

Against this kind of perfidy, I was forced to devise legislation that was broad enough to eliminate any conceivable loophole. If we banned pro-oil commercials, they would simply pour their advertising dollars into billboards. If we banned billboards, they would start embedding secret pro-gasoline messages in popular music. If we banned that, they would train armies of crows to attack e-cyclists while cawing the words “Suncor” and “pipelines”.

And you know what they would say when I tabled a bill to ban the attack crows? They would call it “illiberal”.

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.

January 11, 2023

“The PM and the public safety minister were lying to the public. That should matter.”

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

The editors of The Line regretfully return from holidays to start a new year, and the federal government’s gun confiscation bill (not called that, of course) gets both barrels:

The first item worth mentioning: remember how back in November and December the prime minister and the public safety minister, Messrs. Trudeau and Mendicino, were dismissing any suggestion that they were banning hunting rifles as hype? Or Conservation misinformation? When they were saying that the suggestions were false, and those making them were sowing confusion?

Well! Funny thing happened over the break. The PM, in his year-end interviews, is now admitting that the suggestions were, in fact, right. 

Take this, for example, from his sit down with CTV News (our emphasis added): 

    “Our focus now is on saying okay, there are some guns, yes, that we’re going to have to take away from people who were using them to hunt,” Trudeau said. “But, we’re going to also make sure that you’re able to buy other guns from a long list of guns that are accepted that are fine for hunting, whether it’s rifles or shotguns. We’re not going at the right to hunt in this country. We are going at some of the guns used to do it that are too dangerous in other contexts.”

We’ll skip much analysis here. We think this is dumb policy, and we’ve explained why before, but it’s at least an acknowledgement of what their policy actually is, and very obviously was since the very time it was announced back in November. There’s no room for any confusion or doubt here. The Liberals spent weeks crying LIES! and MISINFORMATION! at people who were accurately describing what they were doing.

You can support the policy being proposed — again, we don’t, but that’s fine — but you can’t excuse this. The PM and the public safety minister were lying to the public. That should matter.

We’ll have more to say on this later. But for now, that’s the update: The Liberals now admit they’re trying to do the dumb thing they spent weeks insisting they weren’t doing.

This is, incredibly, a kind of progress.

Related somewhat to the above: a smart friend of The Line, who cannot be named as this stuff is their day job, told us weeks ago to watch for a schism in the NDP over this issue. For the Liberals, their dumb policy proposal still makes political sense. Well, it probably does — we have some suspicion that the LPC has maxed out the electoral utility of hammering on guns, and may now face more blowback than benefit, but time will tell. Still, the proposal may make sense for the Liberals: they are utterly dependent on urban and suburban women to survive, and the dumb gun proposal apparently resonates with them. And that’s true for part of the NDP’s base, too, but, critically, our friend reminded us, not for all of it.

The federal NDP of today is a strange creature. It’s partly very much a party of the deepest, wokest downtown ridings, but there’s also a big contingent of Dipper MPs from places like northern Ontario and rural parts of Manitoba and British Columbia. Cracking down on guns just plays differently there. When the policy was first announced, this division among NDP MPs didn’t take long to come into public view. Jagmeet Singh, himself very much of the NDP’s woke urban contingent, was quiet for a few days before very clearly and obviously pivoting to oppose the proposed expansion of the banned firearms. The Liberals can afford to write off their last remaining rural, non-urban MPs. The NDP simply can’t.

And, our friend told us — again, this was weeks ago, right at the outset — if Singh didn’t get the message pronto, the party would fracture over this … and that Wab Kinew, leader of the Manitoba NDP, would be the leader of the rebels.

We aren’t experts on Kinew, or in internal NDP power dynamics, so we simply thanked our friend for the tip and analysis, and assured them we’d keep an eye on it. And we did.

And wouldja look at that.

Interesting, eh?

Anyway. As of now the Liberals are still talking tough on the amendment. But they need at least one party to work with them to push it forward. We can’t say for sure, but we wonder if the Liberals are comfortable talking tough about it because they now accept they can’t push it forward — at least not any time soon. The Bloc seems wary of getting saddled with this and the NDP, indeed, might split over this issue if Singh were to try.

So we’ll keep watching this, and particularly Mr. Kinew, who may indeed covet Mr. Singh’s job.

To our friend: you were right. Thanks for the tip.

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