Quotulatiousness

September 27, 2024

Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet as “the Errol Flynn of Canadian politics”

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

In the National Post, John Ivison suggests to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals that the Bloc’s price for supporting the government are just going to keep on rising every time they’re asked to save them from a confidence vote in the Commons:

Yves-François Blanchet Portrait Officiel / Official Portrait a Ottawa, ONTARIO, Canada le 1 December, 2021.
© HOC-CDC
Credit: Bernard Thibodeau, House of Commons Photo Services

It is an indication of how desperate the Liberals are to cling to power that they are even considering a deal with Yves-François Blanchet, the Errol Flynn of Canadian politics.

As was said of the hell-raising movie star by his friend David Niven: “You always knew precisely where you stood with Errol because he always let you down.”

The Bloc Québécois leader will leave the Liberals in the lurch as soon as they refuse his extortionate demands, so best to tell him from the outset to go forth and multiply.

Blanchet has imposed an Oct. 29 deadline before his party pulls support for the government on future House of Commons confidence motions.

The Liberals must back two Bloc private member’s bills, Blanchet said, or the mood will become impossible. “And as soon as it becomes impossible, we will know what to do,” he added, ominously.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said conversations are ongoing, though Blanchet said he has had no discussions with the Trudeau government.

Good, because both Bloc bills are policy madness.

Blanchet has presented them as “good for everybody”, but the truth is they benefit very narrow sections of society — older voters and some farmers — and are bad news for everyone else.

One of the bills, Bill C-319, calls on the government to extend the 10-per-cent increase in Old Age Security payments the Liberals made in 2022 for those over 75 to include the 65–74-year-old age group. The bill is at third reading in the House of Commons but requires the government’s blessing to pass because it commits Freeland to spend money. Lots of money.

The other, Bill C-282, requires the government to exempt the supply-managed farm sector (i.e., eggs, chicken and dairy) from future trade negotiations. It is mired in the Senate’s foreign affairs and international trade committee, where one hopes it will be amended beyond recognition.

August 1, 2024

The Rarest 1911: North American Arms Co

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 22, 2024

In the summer of 1918, the US government wanted to increase production of M1911 pistols, but all current manufacturers were working at capacity. So they looked to issue new contracts, and someone realized that the Ross rifle factory was a potential option. Now, the Ross Rifle Company was bankrupt by this time, and its factory lay essentially abandoned. So in June of 1918, two Canadian lawyers by the names of James Denison and Edmond Ryckman incorporated the North American Arms Company Ltd in Quebec, signed a contract to manufacture 500,000 1911 pistols for the US, and then leased the Ross factory for a term of 18 months. Whether they would have been successful in producing pistols at scale is unknown, because their contract was cancelled on December 4, 1918 before any deliveries were made. With the end of the war, arms requirements plummeted, and pretty much all ongoing weapons contracts were cancelled, not just this one. However, parts for 100 pistols had been produced, and these were assembled and sold commercially after the contract was cancelled.
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June 8, 2024

Eco-terrorism – it’s all over Canada

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

Elizabeth Nickson on the strong likelihood of any given wildfire in Canada being not just man-made but deliberately set for political reasons:

“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

A Google Earth satellite video is making the rounds on twitter. it shows the moment an arc of fires began in northern Quebec, the smoke rising. It looks like people calculated the prevailing winds so that the smoke would blow south. Then connected via sat phone, they lit them. It’s another psy-op from our gracious overlords. We aren’t afraid enough, despite every nasty limiting idiotic play they have visited upon us in the last four years. Monkey Pox failed, more plague warnings were greeted by a shrug. But this one, the world bursting into flame? Be very very afraid.

Justin Trudeau lost no time in announcing that the fires were from “climate change” and the carbon tax, which is impoverishing everyone not in government or on lush pensions, is just the beginning of the restrictions he must institute or we are all gonna die.

The stupidity and cruelty of this is almost unimaginable. But fires have worked over and over again to terrify people into quiescence. The rumours that they were deliberate were the stuff of fantasy until people started getting arrested. Alberta shows that almost 60 percent of fires in that province are human caused. And in Canada, as of today, we have arrested dozens. They will be released, their bails paid by a high-priced lawyer because most of them act as agents of the hyper-rich, paid through a cascade of environmental NGOs. The richest people among us are burning the forests in order to force compliance.

When I moved back to the country 20 years ago, the movement adopted me because I was writing for the Globe and Mail and Harper’s Magazine. I interviewed hundreds of local activists, the ones who, with the inspiration of RFK, Jr. had shut down the biggest industrial forest in the world in an action called “The War of the Woods“. They were mostly ordinary people, socialists and scientists of one stripe or another and deeply profoundly committed to saving the earth. The fact that they had eliminated the principal source of funding for health care and education — forestry — their own in fact, went right over their heads. It didn’t matter. “Climate Change” was an existential threat and those trees must stand to suck up “carbon”, or CO2, as it used to be known.

I met Denis Hayes too, the founder of Earth Day, head of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, founded by the heiresses to Weyerhaeuser. He excitedly told me how he created the storm of protest that led to Bill Clinton shutting down the western forests of the U.S., during the same period that Clinton was giving away American manufacturing to China. The result was devastation in forested communities from northern California to the Canadian border. Hayes, a tall, attractive Ivy Leaguer married to a woman whose father won a Nobel in chemistry, slithers through every institution. When I hung out with him, his target was Bill Gates’ climate initiatives and clearly, he has succeeded.

His “work” turned the forests into a tinderbox. Today, the 9th of June, 2023, a full thirty years too late, the Wall Street Journal editorial board finally acknowledges that sustainable forestry management may be the principal cause of the forests burning down. Holly Fretwell, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and professor at Montana State, gives, in this book, a thoroughgoing analysis of how wrong-headed and destructive “green” has been in the forests. Also this book by me, and a follow-up policy paper, also by me. These were not popular opinions, but they were, in fact, right. It is not “climate change” burning down the forests, it is government in the hands of brutal greens, in pursuit of an impossible goal.

May 2, 2024

Gad Saad’s latest “affront to human dignity” kerfuffle

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

Gad Saad managed to do more than just ruffle the feathers of the Québécois last year by calling the Quebec accent “an affront to human dignity”:

In my 30-year career as a professor and public intellectual, I have never shied away from tackling sacred cows. As a free speech absolutist, I firmly believe that short of the usual caveats (e.g., direct incitement to violence, defamation), free speech is a deontological principle that is inviolable. As a Jewish person, I support arguably the most offensive speech possible, namely the denial of the Holocaust. Such is the price that we must pay to live in a truly free society.

As I explain in my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, the operative zeitgeist in the West is that one’s speech should be tempered in order to minimize the prospect of hurt feelings. This is a terrible reflex in that it forces people to engage in arguably the most pervasive form of censorship, self-censorship. The reality though is that truth must be anti-fragile to mockery, derision, satire, criticism and scrutiny. If it cannot withstand such stressors, it is undoubtedly false. Or as the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk remarked in Critique of Cynical Reason (p. 288): “How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot stand satire is false.”

This brings me to a bewildering episode that I faced last summer. The cancel mob came for me albeit in a truly unexpected manner. On July 25, I appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast for the ninth time to promote the release on that day of my latest book, titled The Saad Truth About Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life (paperback edition to be released on May 14, 2024). My conversations with Joe are always fun, informative and far-ranging. At one point during our chat, we were jocularly discussing various accents that I found to be auditorily unappealing. I remarked that my family and I had just returned from Portugal, and accordingly I had found the Portuguese accent to be less than attractive. I then qualified Hebrew as “violently ugly”. But it was the third accent that unleashed the tsunami of rage, insults, threats and calls to have me fired from my 30-year professorship. I jokingly said that the French-Canadian accent was an “affront to human dignity”. The sentence in question has become a trademark hyperbolic humorous phrase that I use when expressing an over-the-top esthetic opinion. It is a running gag that has appeared on numerous occasions on my X (formerly Twitter) feed. I have referred to The Beatles, musicals, Lionel Messi haters, fans of Cristiano Ronaldo, and the song “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette as an affront to human dignity/decency. If my wife burns our dinner, I might joke with her that the dish is an affront to human dignity.

In the past, I have triggered the ire of many ideological groups including Islamists, trans activists and vegans. But nothing compared to the unbridled hate that I received from some of my fellow Quebecers, which was largely set off by an article written by Marc Cassivi in La Presse regarding my apparent “linguistic genocide”. My stellar 30-year record as an academic and international bestselling author had never managed to capture the attention of French-Canadian society but once I dared to joke about the local accent, I had committed a linguistic capital crime. And it was time for me to pay!

March 26, 2024

Montreal’s La Presse issues apology for antisemitic editorial cartoon

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

Caroline Glick discusses the blood libel cartoon published by Montreal’s La Presse on 20 March, 2024:

According to Canada’s La Presse, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a vampire, and he is poised to suck the life out of the Palestinians in Rafah, Hamas’s final outpost in southern Gaza. The publication that was once a paper of record in Canada ran a political cartoon on March 20 portraying Netanyahu as a vampire, with a huge hooked nose, pointy ears and claws for fingers, dressed in Dracula’s overcoat while standing on the deck of a pirate ship.

The caption, written in blood-dripping red letters, read: “Nosfenyahou: En Route Vers Rafah.” Nosferatu, the Romanian word for vampire, was the title of a proto-Nazi German silent horror film from 1922 chock-full of anti-Semitic poison. The film, which became something of a cult flick, featured a vampire with a long Jewish nose. He arrived at an idyllic German town with a box full of plague-carrying rats that he released on the innocent villagers as he plotted to suck his realtor’s blood.

La Presse‘s cartoon didn’t leave any room for imagination. It wasn’t making a political or military argument against Israel’s planned ground operation in Rafah. Its goal wasn’t to persuade anyone of anything.

The Netanyahu-the-vampire cartoon asserted simply that Netanyahu is a Jewish bloodsucker and, more broadly, the Jewish state — and Jews worldwide — must be vigorously opposed by all right-thinking people who don’t want Jewish vampires to kill them.

As the paper no doubt anticipated, the cartoon provoked an outcry from Canadian Jews and some politicians. And after a few hours, the newspaper took it off its website and apologized. Anyone who thinks that means that the good guys won misses the point of the move. The Jewish outcry and pile-on by politicians and media coverage proved the point. Jews are evil and control everything, even what a private paper can publish. Like Nosferatu in its day, the cartoon will become a piece of folklore, additional proof that the Jews are the enemy of humanity.

In other words, the cartoon was a blood libel.

We’re seeing lots and lots of it these days. And so, it is worth recalling what a blood libel is.

In its original form, of course, the libel was specifically about blood. About 1,000 years ago, Christians in England began accusing Jews of performing ritual murders of Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzahs.

The accusation was inherently insane. Jewish law prohibits murder. It prohibits cannibalism. It prohibits child sacrifice. It prohibits eating food with blood. But none of that mattered. Like the cartoon in La Presse, the blood libel didn’t seek to persuade anyone. It presumed that its target audiences already hated Jews or had a latent tendency to hate Jews, which the blood libel aimed to unleash. The purpose of the blood libel was to scapegoat the Jews and to incite target audiences from London to Damascus to act on that hatred. Over the millennium, hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred in Europe and the Islamic world in response to blood libels.

February 25, 2024

Canadian publishing “has been decimated since Ottawa took an active interest in it and while federal policies haven’t been the whole problem, they’ve been vigorous contributors”

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte contrasts the wholesome intentions of the Canadian federal government on cultural issues with the gruesome reality over which they’ve presided:

Even James Moore, [Liberal cabinet minister Melanie] Joly’s Conservative predecessor in the heritage department, applauded her initiative as good and necessary, although he warned it wouldn’t be easy. Moore had wanted to do the job himself, but his boss, Stephen Harper, didn’t want to waste political capital on fights with the arts community. He told Moore his job in the heritage department was to sit on the lid.

Joly got off to a promising start, only to have her entire initiative scuppered by a rump of reactionary Quebec cultural commentators outraged at her willingness to deal with a global platform like Netflix without imposing on it the same Canadian content rules that Ottawa has traditionally applied to radio and television networks. Liberal governments live and die by their support in Quebec and can’t afford to be offside with its cultural community. Joly was shuffled down the hall to the ministry of tourism.

She has been succeeded by four Liberal heritage ministers in five years: Pablo Rodriquez, Steven Guilbeault, Pablo Rodriguez II, and Pascale St-Onge. Each has been from Quebec and each has been paid upwards of $250,000 a year to do nothing but sit on the lid.

The system remains broken. We’ve discussed many times here how federal support was supposed to foster a Canadian-owned book publishing sector yet led instead to one in which Canadian-owned publishers represent less than 5 percent of book sales in Canada. The industry has been decimated since Ottawa took an active interest in it and while federal policies haven’t been the whole problem, they’ve been vigorous contributors.

Canada’s flagship cultural institution, the CBC, is floundering. It spends the biggest chunk of its budget on its English-language television service, which has seen its share of prime-time viewing drop from 7.6 percent to 4.4 percent since 2018. In other words, CBC TV has dropped almost 40 percent of its audience since the Trudeau government topped up its budget by $150 million back in the Joly era. If Pierre Poilievre gets elected and is serious about doing the CBC harm, as he’s threatened since winning the Conservative leadership two years ago, his best move would be to give it another $150 million.

The Canadian magazine industry is kaput. Despite prodigious spending to prop up legacy newspaper companies, the number of jobs in Canadian journalism continues to plummet. The Canadian feature film industry has been moribund for the last decade. Private broadcast radio and television are in decline. There are more jobs in Canadian film and TV, but only because our cheap dollar and generous public subsidies have convinced US and international creators to outsource production work up here. It’s certainly not because we’re producing good Canadian shows.

[…]

When the Trudeau government was elected in 2015, it posed as a saviour of the arts after years of Harper’s neglect and budget cuts. It did spend on arts and culture during the pandemic — it spent on everything during the pandemic — but it will be leaving the cultural sector in worse shape than it found it, presuming the Trudeau Liberals are voted out in 2025. By the government’s own projections, Heritage Canada will spend $1.5 billion in 2025-26, exactly what it spent in Harper’s last year, when the population of Canada was 10 percent smaller than it is now.

That might have been enough money if the Liberals had cleaned up the system. Instead, they’ve passed legislation that promises more breakage than ever. Rather than accept Joly’s challenge and update arts-and-culture funding and regulations for the twenty-first century, the Trudeau government did the opposite. Cheered on by the regressive lobby in Quebec, it passed an online news act (C-18) and an online streaming act (C-11) that apply old-fashioned protectionist policies to the whole damn Internet.

This comes on top of the Liberals transforming major cultural entities, including the CBC and our main granting bodies, The Canada Council and the Canada Book Fund, into Quebec vote-farming operations. The CBC spends $99.5 per capita on its French-language services (there are 8.2 million Franco-Canadians) and $38 per capita on Canadians who speak English as the first official language. The Canada Council spends $16 per capita in Quebec; it spends $10.50 per capita in the rest of Canada. The Canada Book Fund distributes $2 per capita in Quebec compared to $.50 per capita in the rest of the country. Even if one believes that a minority language is due more consideration than a majority language, these numbers are ridiculous. They’re not supporting a language group; they’re protecting the Liberal party.

November 7, 2023

Potentially killing off Quebec’s English-language universities isn’t a bug, it’s a feature

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

Chris Selley on the Quebec government’s vindictive decision to massively hike tuition rates for out-of-province students of the province’s three English-language universities:

“McGill University Montreal 3” by Laslovarga is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s universities have begun to budget for the nightmare Quebec Premier François Legault’s government has imposed on the English-language schools by doubling out-of-province tuition fees — a way to keep socially corrosive anglophones out of Montreal, the premier has said in so many words.

In an open letter Thursday, McGill principal and vice-chancellor Deep Saini suggested the policy might lead to a $94-million annual shortfall in revenue, necessitating the layoff of 700 staff and closure of certain programs (notably the Schulich School of Music) and fewer athletics teams. It depends how many international students they can recruit to replace out-of-province Canadians unwilling to splash out $17,000 a year. (Yes, those international students would also speak English. No, Legault’s plan doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.)

Concordia president Graham Carr said much the same in an internal university memo on Tuesday, estimating the Coalition Avenir Québec’s latest attack on English could cost it 10 per cent of its total budget. As for Bishop’s, a small 180-year-old liberal-arts college near Sherbrooke: “I don’t believe that Bishop’s can survive under this policy,” former university principal Michael Goldbloom said bluntly this week.

Premier François Legault says he’s willing to meet with officials from all three universities. So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice. The provincial Liberals, what’s left of them, have spoken out against the tuition grab, as has Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante.

But opposition to this in Ottawa remains utterly pathetic. “Quebec makes its own decisions, but I don’t necessarily think this is the best one,” is still the best Pablo Rodriguez, the prime minister’s Quebec lieutenant, has managed to muster. Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia, who represents a riding on Montreal’s West Island, is the only MP to have mentioned it in the House of Commons, calling it “an improvised and populist policy that is not justified.”

September 17, 2023

The Ballad of Chiang and Vinegar Joe – WW2 – Week 264 – September 16, 1944

World War Two
Published 16 Sep 2023

The Japanese attacks in Guangxi worry Joe Stilwell enough that he gets FDR to issue an ultimatum to Chiang Kai-Shek, in France the Allied invasion forces that hit the north and south coasts finally link up, the Warsaw Uprising continues, and the US Marines land on Peleliu and Angaur.
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August 6, 2023

QotD: Pierre Trudeau’s legacy

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have banged on and on and on, to the annoyance of some of my readers, about how Pierre Elliot Trudeau reshaped Canada, almost entirely, in my considered opinion, for the worse. I have singled out, frequently, his evident distaste for the Canadian military and his very real isolationism and reluctance to have armed forces, at all.

There is a lot of documentation about Pierre Trudeau and his views and attitudes, much of it laudatory, some of it critical. I make no secret of the fact that I assert that one Canadian prime minister (perhaps, in my opinion, Canada best-ever leader) the great Liberal Louis St. Laurent, gave Canada a coherent, principled, liberal, values-based grand strategy in the late 1940s and then, just 20 years later another Liberal, Pierre Trudeau, tore it all down, threw it all aside and imposed new, very illiberal, values on Canada ~ all because, I guess, he could not reconcile the facts that stared him in the face in the late 1940s with his own personal choice to have stood, firmly, on the wrong side of history in 1944 when he elected to continue to study (this time at Harvard) rather than to join in the fight to crush Hitler.

M. St. Laurent and M. Trudeau could not have been more different. Louis St. Laurent was an internationally respected lawyer, he was “a man of the world”, neither an anglophile, like Sir Wildred Laurier, nor an anglophobe like Trudeau, he was secure in being a Canadian. He came to politics reluctantly, as a duty, but he quickly became known to, respected by, and, indeed, often friends with Harry Truman, George Marshal, Dwight Eisenhower and Dean Acheson, with Anthony Eden, Ernest Bevin, Clement Atlee, Sir Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, and with Tage Erlander of Sweden, Jawaharlal Nehru and V.K. Krishna Menon in India, Sir Robert Menzies of Australia, Tunku Abdul Rahman in Malaysia and leaders, from the West, the East and the non-aligned states. Pierre Trudeau, on the other hand, was a small, very parochial man who did not, really, understand Canada, beyond French-speaking Québec. He became “famous” for opposing Maurice Duplessis ~ something, I have suggested, that would not be much beyond the intellectual capabilities of a somnolent house cat. He travelled the world but never seemed, to me, to have acquired the respect that was accorded to Louis St. Laurent or Mike Pearson … except, perhaps from Fidel Castro.

Ted Campbell, “Pierre Trudeau’s legacy”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2019-08-02.

July 20, 2023

Water Bombing Workhorse That Keeps On Evolving; the story of the Canadair CL-215, 415, and 515

Filed under: Cancon, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Polyus
Published 16 Jul 2021

The Canadair CL-215 is the most successful flying boat amphibian since the second world war. Its multi-role capabilities range from aerial spraying, search and rescue, cargo service, to its most notable role, as a water bomber. It has the most outstanding performance of any aerial fire fighting platform. Starting production in the late 1960s, it continued production in several forms through ownership by Bombardier and later by Viking Air. The latter is currently developing the exciting next generation CL-515 First Responder with deliveries expected in 2024.
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May 9, 2023

Apparently, we are all misunderstanding the Trudeau masterplan

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

All the smoke about Canada not having a national identity is there to hide Justin Trudeau continuing his father’s masterplan to DESTROY QUEBEC:

Quebec caught in a trap. French forced into decline. Its political influence doomed. 12 million residents in Montreal. Quebec with 5 million. Ottawa’s grand plan explained. Justin is smarter than we think. They want to assimilate us all. All this, without any debate. Two catastrophic scenarios.”

Forget King Charles III’s coronation or the Liberal Party Convention. If you woke up Saturday morning in Quebec, this was the apocalyptic front page that graced your browser, courtesy of the Journal de Montreal:

The Journal‘s cri-de-coeur was in response to the federal government’s increase in the annual immigration level to 500,000 people. This increase, designed to boost the population of Canada to 100 million by the end of the century, would marginalize Quebec’s influence within Canada. It is estimated that Quebec’s overall share of the Canadian population would fall from 25 to 10%, while francophone Quebecers would be in the minority within their own province for the first time in 500 years.

This would displace Quebec from the center of power in Canada. Its official language, French, would be relegated to the same status as all languages and cultures other than English. Instead of being one of Canada’s two official languages, French would merely be one of many, and Quebec, no longer a nation, but a province like any other.

But wait: Journal authors further suggest that this was the grand plan of Prime Ministers Justin and Pierre Elliott Trudeau all along. In a very colorful column, “How the Trudeaus Drowned Quebec“, columnist Richard Martineau even compares the current PM to the protagonist of an infamous Stephen King novel:

“For Justin, Canada is not a country.
It is a hotel, an Airbnb.
And Quebec is just one of the many rooms in this vast real estate complex.
Room 237, here. Like the one in the movie The Shining.
Come, drop your bags and settle in! All we ask is that you pay your taxes.

It’s true that Trudeau Sr. paved the way for the reduction of Quebec’s power in Canada, but it didn’t start with his 1981 Charter of Rights, as the Journal claims. It actually began a decade earlier, in 1971, with the creation of Canada’s Official Multiculturalism Policy. The policy enshrined the idea that linguistic and cultural minorities in Canada should be encouraged to preserve their heritage, and allocated federal funding to help them do so.

Official multiculturalism was both a vote-getter for the Liberals and a means of diffusing the English-French “two solitudes” paradigm that was threatening to tear the country apart. At the time, Canada had just lived through the October Crisis of 1970, which had seen Trudeau invoke the War Measures Act in response to terrorist acts by the Front de Liberation du Quebec. Official multiculturalism was seen as a way to boost the federalist cause by aligning the interest of linguistic and cultural minorities within Quebec with those of the federal government.

The larger impact, however, was to enshrine multiculturalism outside Quebec, where most minorities settled, and where garnering favour with different cultural communities became standard operating procedure, particularly for the federal Liberal party. Immigration thus became a politically untouchable issue, except in Quebec, where the protection of the French language continued to take precedence over concerns for minority rights.

February 17, 2023

Quebec suddenly realizes there are significant problems with Bill C-11

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

Michael Geist, who has been doing heroic work covering the federal government’s attempts to seize control of what Canadians can see and publish online, says that Quebec has finally woken up to the threat to their culture embedded in the federal government’s Bill C-11:

Bill C-11 – and its predecessor Bill C-10 – have long been driven by the government’s view that the bill was a winner in Quebec. Bill C-10 was headed for easy passage in 2021, but was derailed by the government’s decision to remove safeguards over regulating user generated content that came largely from the Quebec-based music lobby. Nearly two years later, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and his staff have ignored the concerns of thousands of digital creators, disrespected indigenous creators, and indicated that he will likely reject Senate amendments designed to craft a compromise solution, all in the name of keeping Quebec lobby interests satisfied. Yet as the government considers the Senate amendments, the Quebec legislative assembly this week passed a last minute motion calling for further changes to the bill, including scope to enact its own rules and mandatory consultations with the province on the contents of a policy direction to the CRTC that Rodriguez has insisted on keeping secret until after the bill receives royal assent (a full copy of the motion is contained at the bottom of this post). The Conservatives have been calling for the Quebec motion and the Senate amendments to be sent back to committee for further study, which the Globe reports may delay the government’s response to the Senate amendments.

It is not clear what prompted the Quebec government to finally wake up to the centralizing power over digital culture that comes from the bill (and just wait until it realizes that Bill C-18 encroaches on provincial jurisdiction with the regulation of newspapers). But this issue has been there from the beginning. In March 2021, Philip Palmer, a former Justice counsel, argued that Bill C-10 was unconstitutional, making the case it fell outside federal jurisdiction. In a post on his submission, I noted:

    Quebec has a long history of taking issue with federal involvement in broadcasting, putting a potential challenge in play. Indeed, it is odd to see this legislation viewed as a political winner in Quebec, when it effectively asserts federal jurisdiction over an area that has long been contested in the province.

Palmer appeared before the House committee studying Bill C-11 and warned MPs about the constitutional jurisdictional overreach. His opening statement noted:

    C-11 lacks a foundation in Canadian constitutional law. Internet streaming services do not transmit to the public by radio waves, nor do they operate telecommunications facilities across provincial boundaries. They and their audiences are the clients of telecommunications common carriers, which are subject to federal regulation. Netflix, for instance, in this case is no more a federal undertaking than a law firm such as McCarthy Tétrault or a chain store like Canadian Tire, both of which rely extensively on telecommunications services.

Liberal MP Anthony Housefather followed up on the issue, asking Palmer to cite caselaw to back his claim. His response:

    The principal case for all federal regulation of broadcasting space is, of course, the radio reference of 1932. In that, the court relied upon the provisions of subsection 92(10) of the Constitution Act to find that, in transmitting radio waves, they necessarily exceeded provincial boundaries and, therefore, could only be effectively regulated at the federal level. The key is that, in order to be regulated by the federal government, the “undertaking”, as the Constitution uses the word, has to be one that has the facilities to exceed provincial limitations and provincial boundaries.

Housefather wasn’t convinced and asked Professor Pierre Trudel, a vocal supporter of Bill C-11, for his view. Trudel didn’t deny the issue. In fact, he confirmed it, suggesting that the Supreme Court would ultimately have to determine the question:

    If this were unconstitutional, it would be because it would be a matter of provincial jurisdiction. The question would then have to be asked: is it better for 10 provinces to put in place regulations on these matters or for the federal authority to do so? There are arguments that radio waves are not the only basis for federal jurisdiction in these matters. There is, among other things, the question of national interest and the inherently interprovincial nature of the activity. In short, all these arguments may have to be argued before the Supreme Court. Either the federal government has authority, or the provinces do. Therefore, it is to be expected that the Canadian state will intervene sooner or later, whether through the provinces or through the federal government.

The takeaway from this exchange – a former justice lawyer citing caselaw to confirm the shaky constitutional foundation of the bill and a professor confirming the Supreme Court would have to decide – should have provided a wakeup call to Quebec, which has a long history of challenging federal jurisdiction in communications that dates back nearly 100 years with repeated efforts to enact provincial laws and policies in the area. Left unsaid is that if the “national interest” dictates federal regulation of anything that touches the Internet, there are few limits on federal powers and little left for the provinces.

January 27, 2023

Canada’s worsening refugee problem

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

Paul Wells discusses some of the frustrations being aired on the French-language Radio-Canada news channel about the increasing, possibly record-breaking flow of asylum seekers entering Canada at the Roxham Road pedestrian border crossing from Champlain, New York:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

The issue at hand is Roxham Road, a pedestrian border crossing between small-town Quebec and upstate New York, 45 minutes’ drive from Montreal City Hall. Thousands of people walk into Canada there every month and demand asylum. Caring for them and processing their claims takes money and work. Along comes [former Parti Québécois leader Jean-François] Lisée with a suggestion.

If Justin Trudeau can’t get changes to the bilateral Safe Third Country Agreement to slow this human traffic — and colleagues report that he can’t — then, Lisée says, Quebec should make the newcomers the rest of Canada’s problem.

Within 24 hours after somebody walks across Roxham Road, Lisée says, “We’ll sort them, we’ll keep all the francophones and those who have immediate family in Quebec. And the others, we’ll put them in a nice air-conditioned bus and we’ll take them to Immigration Canada in Ottawa.”

I should emphasize a few things here, to salvage any hope of a civil discussion.

(1) What Lisée is suggesting won’t happen. In particular, it won’t happen because the party he used to lead has three seats out of 125 in Quebec’s National Assembly.

(2) The very suggestion made the other panelists uncomfortable. They took turns criticizing Lisée.

(3) The panel show’s host, Sébastien Bovet, immediately drew the obvious parallel: This is what governors in the U.S. south do. “Ron DeSantis charters flights and buses to send migrants north”, Bovet said, and indeed it is true. We shall see whether there are legal repercussions for DeSantis’ lurid stunt.

(4) Finally, I don’t think asylum seekers should be sorted by language ability and sent packing if they fail either. What’s going on at Roxham Road is a policy crisis, but it’s also a human drama. Lisée spoke during the same week as the funeral for a Haitian man who died trying to cross back into the US after his claims in Canada got hung up in procedural limbo.

Having said all of that, perhaps we can notice the scale of what’s happening at Roxham Road, and ponder how it fits into a generalized sense of Canadian bewilderment.

If you’re wondering why so many in Quebec are freaking out about a single pedestrian border crossing, it may be because the numbers are a bit breathtaking. This chart shows that 39,171 asylum claimants were intercepted by the RCMP between regular ports of entry in Quebec in 2022, compared to 369 in the entire rest of the country combined. So if asylum claims are a problem — and whatever else they are, they’re at least an administrative challenge — then 99.1% of the challenge is in Quebec.

That figure of 39,171, or 107 people a day, is more than twice as many as in any previous year in the last decade and, I’d guess without having statistics dating back further, the most in any province in any year in Canada’s history. (Much of this statistical background was covered in a column by the Toronto Sun‘s Brian Lilley earlier this week.)

January 16, 2023

“The Commission has no power to find liability. Its report will not bind the government”

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

Donna Laframboise continues to cover the Emergencies Act inquiry submissions, including one from Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Shortly after the Emergencies Act commission finished listening to witnesses, he authored a grim opinion piece in the Toronto Sun.

His expectations are exceedingly low. In his words, the commission’s

    mandate is not to rule on the legality of the government’s actions but to inquire into “the circumstances that led to the declaration being issued and the measures taken for dealing with the emergency”. The Commission has no power to find liability. Its report will not bind the government. The Commission is ritual, and the purpose of ritual is performance not outcome – to make it appear that there is accountability without having to provide it. [bold added]

Let us hope he’s mistaken, and that Commissioner Paul Rouleau has a pleasant surprise in store for us. Whatever happens, Pardy’s article provides a useful history lesson. It describes the series of events that prompted the use of similar legislation the last time around:

    Between 1963 and 1970, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) committed hundreds of bombings and several robberies, killing six people, including Quebec deputy premier Pierre Laporte. In response, Pierre Trudeau’s government invoked the War Measures Act.

Six murders – including the politically motivated kidnapping and execution of a deputy premier. Seven years of violence. Hundreds of bombings. Compare and contrast to the three-week festive, bouncy-castle, hot-tub trucker protest in which not a single person was robbed, bombed, or murdered.

Times sure have changed. Today, the same Canadian federal government that talks constantly about equity, diversity, and inclusion failed to do a single thing to make the protesting truckers feel as though their concerns, perspectives, or lives mattered. Diversity is something the government preaches, but doesn’t practice. Disagree with the Prime Minister and you’re a fringe minority with unacceptable views. Inclusion is a fancy word that makes politicians feel good about themselves, but it isn’t a principle that informs their actual behavour.

December 6, 2022

Elizabeth Nickson on Prime TV’s new mystery series, Three Pines

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

I don’t watch much TV myself, aside from Minnesota Vikings football games, so what little I know about current TV offerings is pretty much all second-hand … and as Elizabeth Nickson‘s review shows, I don’t think I’m missing much at all:

I had the distinct unpleasure this week of watching Prime TV’s new mystery series, Three Pines, set in the village I grew up in, Knowlton, Quebec, where the author now lives and the geography within which she sets her series. I have a rule of not watching anything violent (except Yellowstone) but to catch a glimpse of the village I ranged through as a kid, I sucked it up.

Of course, I was immediately insulted, as the first scene had a white-blond beefy Anglo (Nazi Alert!) cop in Quebec City (an Anglo cop in Quebec City is vanishingly rare) beating up an Indian woman. The thing marched on, hitting every nasty leftie trope, through an increasing ugly physical landscape. The writer, Louise Penny, is very successful, top of the NYTimes bestseller list with every book and much loved by women of a certain age. Penny’s work is a look inside their heads. Hillary Clinton and she are friends, ’nuff said.

The show is like a beautiful painting over which an angry adolescent has thrown red and black paint in order to “show reality”. A friend who who lives across the street from Penny’s palatial residence states that, contra her reality, there has been one murder in the village in the last 80 years and that was an argument over a pig.

Penny has populated my village with killers, bigots, madmen and women, noble Indians, and noble artistes who wrestle with evil normals, all of whom are unhappy because they are so unethical, bigoted, homophobic and racist. There is also a former residential school in situ, which there was not. There are literally no children in the show. No children, no families. (Penny is childless like most of her generation of Canadian artists) Just noble artistes, hard-done-by-noble Indians and noble French policemen.

Oh wait, there is one 12 year old. She murders her mother.

An unrelated thematic undercurrent about Canada’s maltreatment of its native peoples clubs the viewer, so of course that gives Penny permission to trash the culture she exploits. There is, apparently, no wound that she will not scrape at, making it bigger, more dramatic, more focused on her hatred for white Anglo men.

And women. The villain, like all her villains, is a sick, entitled, white woman. Basically Penny loathes rich white people of any sex, while living a lush life in the place they created. Because Knowlton was the summer and weekend place of Canada’s then corporate elite. A village of 500 bulked out to 1500, as the interlocking network of the people who built the infrastructure of modern Canada came to summer. Penny profits off the product of bitterly hard generational labor, while trashing it. Which is a metaphor for our arts.

I went to the local school for seven years so was friends with both parts of the community. My father was on every committee in the village, and he and his fellows made sure there was not one fallen sparrow in the region. The only way anyone fell out of the network of care that used to exist in every small town in Canada and the US, was through alcoholism. Aside from crime caused by that sickness, there was virtually none. And for the fallen, there were halfway houses and treatment. Unlike Penny’s implication of hate and neglect, Indians in the area were, to the extent they allowed, helped, funded, cared for. Like almost every early settler family, my father’s family had married into two Indian tribes, and in the case of my father, given his cousinage, were understood.

Because that’s what Christians do, and at the time, everyone was Christian.

That job now falls to bureaucrats who, like Penny, see everyone as unreconstructed bigots, walking beasts capable of sudden mayhem, and treats them accordingly. The village, if my eyes are telling me true, is no longer beautiful. At least the filmmakers don’t see any beauty in it. Setting it there, like Penny, they hope to capitalize on the mythical small town’s history as a place where happiness and safety were possible. And then they can destroy its memory as a place where goodness reigned.

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