Quotulatiousness

October 18, 2024

Justin Trudeau “has, yet again, outsmarted himself for the short-term win”

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

A rare appearance of a Matt Gurney column outside the paywall at The Line explains why the Prime Minister couldn’t resist the temptation to attack Pierre Poilievre on the national security file, despite the fact that it gives Poilievre a strong counterattack:

Prime Ministers Starmer and Trudeau at the NATO summit in Washington.
Image from Justin Trudeau’s X account.

What Justin Trudeau did on Wednesday from the witness standing at the foreign interference inquiry — when he made his dramatic announcement of having seen a list of Conservatives who are compromised by or vulnerable to foreign interference — makes a kind of sense.

It does. It was an effective attack on Pierre Poilievre, who has stubbornly led with his chin for months. The reaction of many of my Conservative friends was telling. They knew Trudeau landed a hit, and they were pissed. They were ready for it — I think their counterattack was as good or better. But this whole story, or at least this little snippet of it, starts with Trudeau taking a swing, and not missing.

[…]

In that context, Trudeau’s decision to tease the possibility of some unnamed Conservatives being involved in the machinations of foreign interference makes sense. He saw Poilievre’s chin and decided to shove his fist into it. It’s politics. I get it.

But, once again, I’m not sure that the PM thought this through all the way. Our PM has a habit of occasionally letting his combative instincts get the better of him. The man has a weakness for showy, dramatic gestures, and loves to try and seize the big moments. Sometimes they blow up in his face. I think this one will, too. It is, I suspect, less a punch to the face, and more of an elbow-to-the-boob. It’ll cause more problems than the gesture was worth.

[…]

Trudeau doesn’t get a lot of opportunities to look like a tough leader these days, and he got two this week. His eviction of six Indian diplomats that Canadian intelligence believes were involved in guiding violent crimes in Canada, aimed at politically connected members of Canada’s large Indian diaspora, was one (and I am not yet cynical enough to believe the timing was politically motivated). The second, of course, was Trudeau’s bombshell testimony. Given the shellacking he’s been taking of late, it probably felt amazing [to] go on the attack yesterday.

The problem for the prime minister is that, today, having had his dramatic moment, there’s no follow through. He dropped the mic and then Poilievre did what he was always and obviously going to do: the opposition leader picked that mic right back up again and started talking into it.

Here’s part of Poilievre’s statement (full statement is here):

    My message to Justin Trudeau is: release the names of all MPs that have collaborated with foreign interference. But he won’t. Because Justin Trudeau is doing what he always does: he is lying. He is lying to distract from a Liberal caucus revolt against his leadership and revelations he knowingly allowed Beijing to interfere and help him win two elections. … If Justin Trudeau has evidence to the contrary, he should share it with the public. Now that he has blurted it out in general terms at a commission of inquiry — he should release the facts. But he won’t — because he is making it up.

If Poilievre’s decision to forgo a security clearance is overly complicated and technocratic, then Trudeau’s decision to attack him for it suffers the same drawbacks. By comparison, Poilievre’s approach, here, is better, simpler, and most crucially, it’s right: Release the names!

If MPs from any party have been compromised, the public deserves to know.

I don’t say that lightly or impulsively. There are absolutely downsides to releasing the names, including the very real risks to compromising our investigations and destroying the reputations of people who may have committed no crime. This sucks. But there are greater downsides to not releasing the names — until the Canadian public knows them, our entire democratic system is suspect. To put it another way, if it is inappropriate to release the names in full, then it is equally if not more inappropriate for a prime minister to publicly tease those names during his testimony, while hiding behind oaths of national security in order to avoid handing over the receipts. Protections of “national security” are intended to protect real sources and reputations — not to serve as a launchpad to lob allegations at foes while dodging accountability and transparency.

October 2, 2024

Poilievre should learn from “Two Tier” Keir’s political stumbles

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

Sir Keir Starmer swept into office just four months ago, but if you tracked the unforced errors, gaffes, stumbles and bumbles it might as well have been four years instead. Most politicians winning nearly 2/3rds of the seats in Parliament can expect a lengthy “honeymoon” period, but “Two Tier” Keir is far from a typical politician … he’s terrible at his new job. In The Line, Andrew MacDougall charts some of the worst self-inflicted wounds Starmer’s government has suffered and indicates how Pierre Poilievre can avoid them:

Prime Ministers Starmer and Trudeau at the NATO summit in Washington.
Image from Justin Trudeau’s X account.

If Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre thinks he’s halfway home to a happy life in power, he should look across the pond to see the misery now engulfing Sir Keir Starmer and his new Labour government.

Where to start? Sadly for Starmer, there is a smorgasbord of bad political choice.

[…]

And while Starmer did his level best to stay vague during the election campaign about his planned solutions, as all good opposition leaders do in order to minimize incoming attacks, he was meant to have a plan to sort it all out once he got into the building. But there’s no plan. And that’s according to sources inside 10 Downing Street. That’s right: we’re just three months into a majority parliament and a government with a virtually unopposable mandate and the calls are already coming from inside the building saying it’s all gone to shit.

As I was saying, it’s all very late-stage Trudeau.

Fortunately for Canadians who are desperate for a diversion from Trudeau’s path, Pierre Poilievre is a better politician than Keir Starmer. A vastly better politician. And while that might sound like a pejorative in an era where no politician is trusted, the pile of public policy muck heaps facing Western governments won’t be cleared without someone who understands — deeply and intuitively — the politics of the current time.

Starmer understands none of the current dynamic. He defeated the U.K. Conservatives because the U.K. Conservatives defeated themselves. The country would have taken anyone to stop the Tory psychodrama, even a boring North London lawyer who wouldn’t know politics if it smacked him on his newly-tailored arse. People are angry that nothing appears to be working as it should. Not the hospitals. Not the borders. Not the economy. And not their culture. Everything feels different and/or worse to what they’ve come to expect and they blame the (waves arms frantically) “establishment” for their ills. There’s a reason Nigel Farage’s Reform party won its first seats and came second in nearly a hundred more.

People who are already feeling stretched don’t want to hear, as they’ve heard from Starmer, that their taxes are going up. They want to hear they’re going to go down. “Axe the tax”, anyone? They don’t want to hear that things suck; they want to hear how things will get better. They don’t want to be sung hymns about the benefits of immigration. They want to see someone spot the problem that’s gotten out of control and assure them that it’s not racist to do something about it. They want someone who looks and sounds like them, not another politician in a suit saying things politicians in suits always say. They want radical change, not minor dial adjusting on the dashboards of power. Anything else is more of the discredited same.

Canada’s late-stage Trudeau inheritance is daunting. It cannot be avoided. But it must first be acknowledged, not by simply pointing at the last guy and saying “It’s all his fault” (i.e. the classic politician move), but by mirroring the real distress being felt by the many who’ve lost out where and as the traditional power brokers have won. This is where the room to manoeuvre comes from. Something has gone wrong and it’s going to take something different to produce a different result.

August 30, 2024

Experts are concerned that criticism of experts will weaken their role in our political system

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

In the National Post, Geoff Russ dares to imply that the experts are not the divinely inspired superior beings with unfailing wisdom about any and all issues:

So-called “experts” have weakened Canada’s political discourse far more than Pierre Poilievre ever has. Journalist and author Stephen Maher recently penned a column in the Globe & Mail titled, “By slamming experts, Pierre Poilievre and his staff are degrading political debate”.

Maher is an even-handed journalist, and his column should not be written off as the scribblings of a Liberal partisan. What his column misses is how the term “expert” has been abused, and the degree to which “experts” have thoroughly discredited themselves in recent years.

Poilievre’s criticisms of the “experts” would not resonate if they lived up to the title bestowed upon them.

For example, the Doug Ford government’s decision to close 10 safe injection sites after implementing a ban on such facilities located near schools and child-care centres. The closures were lamented by “experts” trotted out by the CBC as putting peoples’ lives at risk.

The safe injection sites slated to be shut down are near schools and daycares, and there is demonstrable proof that crime rises near these sites wherever they are located.

Derek Finkle recently wrote that the critiques of the closures levelled by selected “experts” failed to note how community members had been threatened with rape, arson, and murder since the injection site in his Toronto neighbourhood had been opened.

These are reasonable grounds for a government to reconsider whether they should allow drug-use, supervised or not, to proliferate in neighbourhoods where families reside.

For all their alleged expertise, many “experts” seem unwilling to actually investigate what is happening on the ground, and often give plainly bad advice altogether, and this goes back decades.

The “experts” failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis, they said the risk to Canadians from the coronavirus was low in early 2020, and they failed to prevent runaway inflation after the worst of it had subsided.

Was it not the “experts” who asserted that arming and funding of Ukraine prior to Vladimir Putin’s invasion in 2022 was a bad idea? After the invasion began, was it not the “experts” who confidently predicted Putin’s army would conquer the whole of Ukraine in a matter of days, and not be bogged down in a years-long conflict that would reshape global trade?

The truth is that we live in a worse-off world because of the advice and predictions of “experts”.

July 26, 2024

Latest Liberal ad totally DESTROYS Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives

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

If you’re new here, you may not recognize my headline as being sarcastic. Here’s Chris Selley‘s attempt to figure out what the Liberal brain trust is up to with their latest anti-Tory ad:

“The CEO of Elections Canada has indicated his opposition to it, and let me just say I’m at peace with that.”

These words, spoken by Pierre Poilievre a decade ago, are part of an absolutely bizarre 46-second video the Liberal Party of Canada released in recent days trying to convince us — a very novel approach — that the Conservative leader is too wacky and full of dangerous ideas to vote for.

Read that sentence again. It’s supposed to be a scare quote. Are you scared? Or, more likely, do you not know what the hell he’s talking about? Removed from its context it’s not just uncontroversial; it barely even exists. It’s like someone negotiating the return date on their dry cleaning, or asking for no mayonnaise on their Whopper.

There’s another quote like that in the same 46-second video: “We’re Conservatives, so we don’t believe in that”.

Believe in what? No idea. Keynesian economics? The curse of the Oak Island treasure? Could be anything.

The notion that communications is the Liberals’ “problem” is as laughable as ever, but good grief are they ever terrible at communicating.

Usually politicians take other politicians’ quotes out of context to make them look bad. Here the Liberals have done … I really have no idea what. It’s like they’re so hopelessly ensconced in their echo chamber that they can’t tell which echoes have even escaped the chamber into the real world … if the real world even still exists.

Those intimately familiar with Poilievre’s parliamentary record (which is what, maybe 90 people in the world?) might surmise, correctly, that in the first instance he was talking in his role as minister of state for democratic reform in the Harper government about Bill C-23. That was the 2014 legislation that, most controversially, toughened voter-ID requirements: Your voter-information card, delivered by mail, would no longer be sufficient proof of your identity to cast your ballot. You wouldn’t be able to “vouch” for another voter.

This was unnecessary, I felt at the time, and I might still, though the prospect of electoral fraud doesn’t make Liberal eyes roll quite as theatrically as it used to. But it seems clear the serious foreign interference in play is considerably smarter and more insidious than just sending some people to vote without proof of citizenship (which few of us offer up to vote as it stands).

Anyway, Poilievre was telling a Senate committee, on April 8, 2014, that he understood then chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand disagreed with the bill, and that he disagreed with Mayrand, and that he was “at peace with it.”

I do hope you were sitting down for that bombshell.

July 19, 2024

The rise of the reactionaries – Gen X poised to pounce and seize

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

Andrew Potter tries to explain why Gen X are much more likely to support conservative policies than the groovy fossil Boomers and the painfully Socialized Millennials and GenZ’ers:

Generation X Word Cloud Concept collage background
Best Motivation Blog: What Generation Is X

As North American politics continues its rightward lurch, it is becoming increasingly commonplace to note the outsized role of Gen Xers in pushing this trend. In 2022, a Politico essay tried to explain “How Gen X became the Trumpiest generation“. That same year, an essay in Salon lamented how “of course Gen X was always going to sell out and vote Republican”. Writing in The Line last year, Rahim Mohamed wondered “how Generation MTV became Generation GOP?” These aren’t outliers – there is a whole sub genre of cultural commentary devoted to trying to explain just why Gen Xers are so right wing, compared to both their Boomer predecessors and the Millennials and Zs who followed.

This raises a couple of questions, the first of which is: is it even true? And if so, why?

On the facts of the matter, it appears that members of Generation X are, on the whole, more conservative than other generations, and this is especially true in the United States. For the past three or four years, polls have consistently shown that Gen Xers are more likely to see the country as going in the wrong direction, more likely to disapprove of Joe Biden, and more likely to support Donald Trump and vote Republican, than any other generational cohort. And while every generation tends to become more conservative as it ages, it is a tendency that accelerated under Gen X.

Pollsters have found similar support for these trends in Canada. An Abacus survey conducted last August found Gen Xers had the highest level of support for the Conservatives, with 41 per cent of those surveyed intending to vote CPC. And just this past June, the pollster Frank Graves released a series of charts tracking sentiment in Canada on a number of issues, including national attachment, social cohesion, and voter intention. He found significant intergenerational discord, with members of Gen X showing the highest level of support for smaller government, and Gen X males having the highest level of support for the CPC.

So why is this the case? How did the generation that fought (and won) the first culture war against conservatives, that launched the antiglobalization movement, that made heroes out of left wing icons like Kurt Cobain and Naomi Klein, become the most right wing cohort of all? Did we follow our Boomer parents’ hippies-to-yuppies trajectory in selling out? Or is there something else at work, beyond crass financial self-interest?

There’s probably at least something to be said for the “crass self-interest” angle. Despite the long-standing claim to being the first generation to do worse than their parents, the truth is, Gen X is raking it in. Starting right around the pandemic, Canadian Gen Xers quietly overtook Boomers as the generation with the highest average household net worth. It may also explain why alone amongst the generations, members of Gen X list “cost of living” as their most salient political issue, in contrast with both the older and younger cohorts who identify things like climate change, health care, and the environment as the most important issues facing Canada.

June 17, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

Here are facts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When do you think impeachment proceedings would start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 28, 2024

Trudeau is at his very best in tackling imaginary problems

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

Tristin Hopper calls attention to just how much of the federal government’s attention is focused on problems that don’t actually exist, except in the Prime Minister’s vivid imagination, like the notorious “hidden agenda” of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives to turn Canada into the world of The Handmaid’s Tale by banning abortion (and undoubtedly forcing women to wear the distinctive red-dress-and-bonnet uniforms, too):

In Trudeau’s fevered imagination, this is what the Tories want Canadian women to be wearing in future.

The Trudeau government has initiated another round of warning that Canadian abortion access is at risk.

“Women’s rights, reproductive rights, and equality are non-negotiable,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared at a recent speech, as Liberal Party social media accounts broadcast accusations that their opponents endanger a “woman’s right to choose”.

This would all make perfect sense in the United States, which has indeed seen a wave of new state-level laws effectively banning abortion outright.

But the Liberals are talking about Canada, a country that has no abortion laws whatsoever, and no political inclination to create any.

Polls show an incredible 80 per cent of Canadians supporting a “woman’s right to an abortion”. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t once touch abortion during his nine-year tenure.

As noted, Canada literally has no legal language dealing with the whole abortion issue … and therefore any Conservative government would have to create a new law to even begin to address an issue that a super-majority of Canadians are already against “fixing”. Conservatives can be incredibly dumb at times, but that would be stupidity of a very high order indeed.

Then, there’s Trudeau’s determination to link Poilievre with Diagonal, er, Dialagon, er, Dialysis, I mean “Diagolon”, which is apparently some super-powerful secretive extreme right-wing conspiracy to … do something diagonal-ish? I dunno. I’d never heard of ’em until Trudeau started trying to tie Poilievre to them:

Earlier this month, the Liberal’s main attack against the Conservatives was that they were in thrall to Diagolon, a supposed white supremacist militia with designs on destroying Canada from within.

“What has not been answered by the leader of the Opposition is why he chooses to continue to court extreme right nationalist groups like Diagolon,” said Trudeau in the House of Commons on April 30, one of several times he would slap down a question from the Conservatives by bringing up Dialogon.

Poilievre’s alleged ties to Diagolon are pretty tenuous. At a Nova Scotia fundraiser, among the attendees who queued up to shake Poilievre’s hand was Diagolon founder Jeremy MacKenzie, who claimed he did it just to get Poilievre in trouble. More recently, Poilievre visited an anti-carbon tax encampment where one of the RVs had a small Diagolon logo scrawled on its front door in permanent marker.

What’s more, multiple police investigations have concluded that Diagolon isn’t even a group, much less an organized anti-government militia.

It’s basically three guys on a podcast and their followers — whom they’ve occasionally met for BBQs. According to an RCMP profile of Diagolon put together at the height of Freedom Convoy, it was “exceedingly difficult” to nail down Diagolon as “a distinct group, with common ideology, a political agenda, and the cohesion necessary to advance such an agenda.”

The bought-and-paid-for Canadian media, of course, haven’t done much to point out just how ludicrous these accusations are, because even if they’re not, y’know, true, they are “truthy”. It’s not likely to change, as the legacy media still hate and fear anyone who might threaten their cosy subsidy deal with the Liberals.

And then there’s the Liberals’ fixed belief that Canada is the most racist country to ever have existed and that our entire culture is based on white supremacy and oppressing the “global majority” at all times:

Derived from the U.S. academic dogma of critical race theory, anti-racism holds that Canada’s basic structures — from its police forces to its justice system to its parliaments — are all fundamentally white supremacist. As such, they can only be remedied by “deliberate systems and supports” favouring “equity-seeking groups”, according to official Government of Canada literature.

The Trudeau government has established an Anti-Racism Secretariat, they’ve poured tens of millions of dollars into race-specific grants and they’ve subjected every arm of the federal government to anti-racism mandates and training.

Agencies such as the Canada Research Chairs program now openly screen for candidates based on ethnicity and other immutable characteristics. And perhaps most infamously, it was a federal anti-racism program that paid more than $500,000 to Laith Marouf, a virulent antisemite who has repeatedly referred to his benefactor as “Apartheid KKKanada”.

All of this has proceeded on the core assumption that Canada is — and always has been — a country defined by “systemic racism”. This was stated most plainly in an internal Canadian Armed Forces report which declared “racism in Canada is not a glitch in the system; it is the system”.

There’s a lot of (imported) fretting and huffing and puffing about this “issue”, yet there is almost no evidence for any of it being true in Canada. It would be statistically more likely to be true that much of our government and business organizations are actively over-hiring and over-promoting people on the basis of them not being white or male or heterosexual than the reverse.

April 8, 2024

“The carbon rebate seems to be one of those rare examples of people getting mad at receiving government money rather than being grateful”

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson makes a strong argument that the vaunted (by Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party) carbon tax rebate is actually the big problem with the carbon tax, not the “Conservative misinformation” constantly being pointed at by the government’s paid accomplices in the mainstream media:

Is the purpose of the Liberals’ carbon tax to materially reduce carbon emissions — or is it a wealth redistribution program? I ask because every time the Liberals defend the carbon tax by resorting to the awesomeness of the rebate, what they cease to talk about is how effective it is at actually reducing carbon emissions.

Instead, we fall into an endless series of counterproductive debates about whether what individuals are getting from the rebate equals what they’re paying out in tax. And that debate is repeated every quarter, and each time the carbon tax rises. In other words, our entire political discourse about the tax is centred on wealth redistribution — not emissions.

That makes people suspicious of the government’s actual goals, and skeptical about its claims. This, again, is a problem of message dilution. If you cannot clearly express your intentions, then you’re not going to get political buy-in to your aims. This problem is particularly acute on a policy that is — by definition — demanding a sacrifice of cash and/or quality of life by Canadians. People can get on board with sacrifice, but only if it’s tied to a clear, obtainable, and material objective.

[…]

And here’s where we get into the real dark heart of the problem.

It’s the rebate itself.

I understand why the Canada Carbon Rebate happened. The government wanted to introduce a carbon tax without disproportionately penalizing the poor — the demographic least able to make the investments and lifestyle changes necessary to respond to the tax. But did that relief have to come in the form of a rebate?

Well, no.

There are lots of methods a government can use to ease poverty. But governments love themselves a rebate. Why? Because rebates are normalized vote buying. One that all political parties are guilty of using. The Liberals implemented the rebate thinking Canadians would hit their mailboxes every quarter, see a few hundred bucks, and get warm fuzzy feelings for Papa Trudeau and the natural governing party. “Government’s looking out for me!”

Getting government cheques is popular, and the Liberals were no doubt trying to replicate the appeal of the Canada Child Benefit.

But that didn’t happen here. The carbon rebate seems to be one of those rare examples of people getting mad at receiving government money rather than being grateful. Why?

Well, may I suggest that it’s because every time people open up those cheques, instead of processing the dopamine hit of “free” money, they’re instead reminded of how much they had to pay in to get it. They do the math in their head, think about their rising grocery bills and gas, and come away thinking “not worth it”. Every single quarter, millions of Canadian households are feeling as if they are paying dollars to get dimes — and it’s pissing them right off. Further, demanding they acknowledge they’re better off in the exchange is only adding salt to the wound. Throwing Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) reports at them doesn’t change their minds. It just pisses them off more.

To put it more pithily — a benefit is a gift. A rebate is a value proposition. And a hell of a lot of Canadians are looking at this rebate and determining that its value is wanting — all the more so as the goals of that purchase haven’t been clearly articulated.

March 29, 2024

“Constitutional monarchy, such as we have, is a gift not to be ignored”

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

In The Line, Graeme Menzies makes a pitch for a renewed royal presence in Canadian affairs:

The role of the Crown in Canada has been given a particularly cold shoulder by Trudeau. He’s first in line at the funerals and wedding parties, and quick to boast of his lifelong friendship with members of the royal family, but of all Canada’s 23 prime ministers Justin Trudeau is the one who has done his best to erase them from Canadian cultural identity. His record appointing governors-General suggests he’s been actively doing his best to tarnish that office.

Trudeau was the first prime minister not to approve the traditional Jubilee Medal for her late majesty Queen Elizabeth II — Canada’s loyal and beloved monarch for over 70 years. Under his watch, the anticipated Canada 150 Medal was also quashed. Later, under pressure, he agreed at the very last minute that a medal should be issued to celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III; but other than a couple lines about it in a news release last May, nothing has come of it. Not a single medal has been produced or issued.

This is where a post-Trudeau government must really seize the day. The monarchy is a great gift to Canada. It’s probably the single most important thing that distinguishes Canada from the United States. Take it away and we’re just Puerto Rico — another American protectorate, waiting for the day it gains statehood and a star on the flag.

It is foolish to think any serving prime minister will ever command the respect and affection of the majority of citizens; but Queen Elizabeth often did and there’s no reason to think King Charles cannot do so as well. The past visits to Canada by William and Kate, the future King and Queen of Canada, have been nothing short of sensational.

But the next prime minister will have to act on this. Constitutional monarchy, such as we have, is a gift not to be ignored. It is to be embraced and folded fully into a forward-looking vision of a new, proud, strong nation. To begin with, the next prime minister should ask the King, or the Prince of Wales, to visit Canada annually. The presentation of Orders of Canada should be timed to coincide with these visits. I would even go so far as to suggest Canada reinstate knighthoods. If Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney can be knighted then why can we not have Sir Randy Bachman and Dame Joni Mitchell?

The King of Canada can also play an important and useful role toward Canada’s reconciliation efforts. Trudeau and his radicals have done much to make it seem the Crown and Indigenous peoples are incompatible but a closer review of history books would suggest otherwise. It wasn’t the King who came up with the Indian Act — our elected political leaders did that. The statue of Tecumseh in Windsor is marvellous, but there should be another in Ottawa and it should be unveiled by the King. Same for Chief Maquinna who, apart from a likeness chiselled into the exterior of the British Columbia Legislative Library Building, has no statue, and I’ll bet dollars to donuts he is virtually unknown to most Canadians. That should be changed.

Most Canadians would rather see the King unveil a statue like that than the current, or the next, prime minister. When a prime minister is involved, it’s political. When the monarch does it, we can all get behind it. It’s unifying.

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.”

January 29, 2024

What’s a little imaginary evidence among Laurentian co-conspirators?

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

Elizabeth Nickson may be speculating a bit ahead of the situation, but it really does look as if Trudeau is facing electoral disaster (but as long as Jagmeet honours their agreement, he doesn’t have to face the voters quite yet):

And just like that, Canada’s storied Liberal Party, in power for one hundred years, the country’s self-described “natural governing party,” is done. Before the ruling this week, Pierre Polievre’s Conservatives were projected to win 222 seats, according to Angus Reid’s January 21st poll, with the Liberals at 53 seats. Trudeau’s partner-in-crime, the fetching champagne socialist Jagmeet Singh, he of the mauve headwraps and Rolex watch? Twenty-five seats. With the decision, handed down by a federal judge, that Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act illegally, to end the truckers’ protest in Ottawa and at border crossings in Ontario and Alberta, Canada’s ruling elite has given up. They cannot continue the fiction any longer.

To illustrate how ridiculous Canada’s public life is, the findings by the RCMP and government were entirely driven by a government-funded Non-Governmental Organization, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, or CAHN. The group was used in a perfect illustration of the Iron Triangle of government and bureaucratic action. The government funds an anti-hate group, which immediately identifies opposition to the government, labels it as hate, feeds it to the police which proceeds to investigate.

The astroturfed outfit accused a podcaster of being a “white supremacist” and an “accelerationist”. The RCMP then provided CAHN’s “evidence” to legislators who then fed it to the subsidized media. Like a very, very good little girl, Canadian senator Paula Simons said he (the podcaster) wanted to “accelerate racial conflict to lead to the eventual creation of a White ethnostate”, during a debate in the house. None of this was found in any of the hundreds of hours of said podcast. Nevertheless, it was reported widely across the media as cold hard fact.

As in every single western democracy now staggering under unsustainable government-caused debt, the “natural ruling party” stood up for the thousands upon thousands of activist groups who besiege citizens with scare- and sob-stories meant only to increase the tax base for the Liberal elite. In recent years, to combat growing anti-government populism, elites in every western democracy have also supported political action groups meant to drive its enemies into the dirt. As reported by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, these are coordinated through the Five Eyes and gamed at the World Economic Forum, in a cross-cultural assault by the elites on the people.

In short, CAHN drove virtually 100 percent of the evidence used to invoke the Emergencies Act. All of its accusations were found to be fake, fictionalized or exaggerated, as the attached FOIA documentation demonstrated. The outfit is a typical attack dog, staffed by members of the hard left, like this character, its face: Sue Gardner. These people are sent around the Stations of the Activist Cross, acquiring credits, awards and citations, to give themselves credibility, without having creating anything of value in the real world. The marshalling of the greedy hard left by corporatists to force ideological purity upon the middle and working classes was a masterful strategy. It, and its international cadres, are entirely focused on destroying the political power of the middle and working classes by accusing them of “racism” and “hate”.

The residential school system in the historical record and in current politics

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

Barbara Kay discusses the residential school system debate that’s likely to become one of the issues in the next federal election:

“Canadians deserve to know the truth“, Pierre Poilievre told reporters earlier this week, regarding 2021 claims made — but never investigated — of unmarked graves at the Kamloops, B.C. Indian residential school. Poilievre said he was open to “a full investigation into the potential remains at Residential Schools”, wherever that may lead.

This is a bold move, taken in the full knowledge that the Liberals will put a demonizing spin on his comments, even though the Conservative leader also said that “the residential schools were an appalling abuse of power by the state and by the Church at the time”. If Poilievre feels confident to, as he put it, “stand in favour of historical accuracy” on this file, then he believes a critical mass of Canadians will support the proposal.

Trudeau’s government, by contrast, is wedded to the unquestioning, emotive approach to IRS history. From the day that First Nations announced the “discovery” of 215 unmarked graves in Kamloops, arising solely from a finding of “soil disturbances” by ground penetrating radar the Liberals sprang into supportive action. They were emboldened by an overzealous media, starting with the New York Times, which falsely claimed a “mass grave” had been found. Flags were lowered, and Trudeau issued a plangent apology for the children “whose lives were taken” at Kamloops.

Only there was no evidence of lives illicitly “taken”. To date, in spite of the government’s allocation of $7.9 million for the task, no excavation has been done at Kamloops. Excavations in other suspected sites have not turned up human remains. But the media long avoided contrarian copy. (Post columnist Terry Glavin’s May 2022 feature article on the graves in these pages broke the mainstream silence.)

Not that there wasn’t any published pushback. There was plenty, from a cadre of highly accredited scholars, investigative journalists, judges, lawyers and independent researchers, who have amongst themselves amassed probably a million hours of research into all facets of government-Indigenous relations, including the IRS. Only they appeared in non-mainstream media, such as C2C Journal, the Dorchester Review, True North, the Western Standard, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, Quillette and in some cases their own substacks. For their pains, most of them were labelled “deniers” by media and politicians.

Excellent articles on the IRS by these indefatigable researchers have now been compiled into a single volume, Grave Error: How the media misled us (and the truth about residential schools), edited by historian Chris Champion, publisher of the Dorchester Review, and Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and chair of the Indian Residential Schools Research Group (I am an IRSRG board member).

September 20, 2023

“Future Edward Gibbons’ [will] have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet”

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

In The Line, Andrew MacDougall finds something good to say about social media:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Say what you will about social media, but one unalloyed good is the future Edward Gibbons’ of this parish are going to have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet.

Future historians will not only know what happened as we cratered, but, thanks to our ubiquitous digital sketch pads, they will have all of the horrific micro detail. They will know how many times we circled the bowl, what we were saying about circling the bowl as we were circling it and which streaks we were or weren’t arguing about as we went down. Social media is an infinite canvas home to a limitless number of voices and — while we might not be richer for it in the present — our future societal homicide detectives will be forever grateful that we left so many stains to analyze.

For example, when historians consider — as they surely will — whether the moment Canada truly began to crumble was when a WestJet cabin crew allowed Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre to grab the conch and address a planeload of (mostly) Conservative Party of Canada delegates on his way back from a successful party convention, we will have a panoply of voices to consult. From all walks of life and social stations, too. What, for example, did a famous singer like Jann Arden have to say about the whole episode?

Well, thanks to our good friend ex-Twitter we don’t have to guess; we know. And what Arden said was: “Hey @WestJet you and I will not be doing business ever again. This is so ridiculously disappointing.”

In life, I try my best not to be insensitive, but imagine having so little going on that this is considered a good use of your time? Imagine possessing such a delicate constitution that you would rather chain yourself [to] the be-vomited reclining seats of Air Canada than ever fly WestJet again. When you live in Calgary. And what has to be going on to then quote-tweet a bunch of nasty replies and joust with a network of digital cretins, as Arden went on to do. Dozens of them. Who stirs the sewage and then pins the best turds to their page?

As someone who has spent (far) too much time wasting time on platforms like ex-Twitter, I feel I speak from experience. I’ve picked a fair few fights I didn’t need to pick. Both with randoms, and rock stars. I have fed the trolls and I have done performative tweeting. And you know what I’ve learned? The only people who win are our algorithmic overlords. People like Arden are the modern-day Olds-and-Milner lab mice hammering the dopamine reward button — look at me get likes and retweets! — until they (metaphorically) die.

August 30, 2023

It’s hard to believe, but the big cabinet shuffle didn’t help Trudeau’s poll numbers

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

Rather the opposite, as Paul Wells explains:

The good news for Team Trudeau is that sometimes new inertia pushes old inertia off the front pages. In June, the apparent decision to stall on an inquiry into foreign election interference seemed bold to the point of recklessness. Now the conventional wisdom barely notices it’s happened. Perhaps one explanation for Pierre Poilievre’s rise in the polls is that he is now complaining about things more Canadians care about.

From Abacus

Did somebody mention polls! For many more reasons than this, the polls are dire for the Liberals. A cottage industry sprang up over the weekend, consisting of Liberal sympathizers pointing out that polls have often been lousy at predicting the future: Dan Arnold and Tyler Meredith; Gerald Butts; David Herle. They all have this much of a point: polls don’t predict the future, opinions can change, campaigns matter. Neither you nor I know what the future holds.

And yet. If Brian Mulroney managed to overcome John Turner’s polling lead in 1986-88, it’s partly because Mulroney’s government was still new, Mulroney was much less of a known quantity than Turner, and Mulroney was able to turn Turner’s chosen issue, free trade, into a huge advantage. If Trudeau has won three times while his share of the popular vote declines, it’s partly because he was less of a known quantity in earlier elections. There’s a reason why the last leader to win four consecutive elections was Wilfrid Laurier. It’s hard.

What Trudeau used to have was agility. He was a critic of the status quo. Stephen Harper needed to have jets in the air over Iraq; Trudeau didn’t. Harper had a low cap on the number of Syrian refugees he could accept; Trudeau didn’t. Harper and Mulcair were obsessed with balanced budgets. Trudeau was less of a fuddy-duddy. He’d change everything, from the electoral system on up.

This sort of stuff is simply easier for the young leader of a third party than for a prime minister nearing a decade in office. But as their manoeuvring room and novelty wear off, incumbent leaders can usually offer compensating virtues: their experience and wisdom. Sure, he’s less exciting than before, but now he’s a surer hand.

Unfortunately, for that to work you need to be a surer hand.

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.

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