Quotulatiousness

February 16, 2019

The state of play in the SNC-Lavalin affair

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

If you happen to have misplaced your Libranos scorecard, Daniel Bordman has a quick summary to bring you up to date:

So here is how the accusation stands: The PMO put pressure on the AG to the benefit of SNC-Lavalin, she refused and was shuffled out of the AG position.

This led to a massive public outcry from the Conservatives, NDP and the 10 or so Journalists left in the mainstream media. The original plan was for the new AG, David Lametti, to explain to the public why this story is overblown and there was no need to look any further into the allegations.

His plan: he went on TV and explained to the public that he had spoken to Justin Trudeau and he had denied the allegations, so no investigation was needed. Brilliant! If only Bruce MacArthur and Alexander Bissonnette had known of this expert legal strategy of denying what you were caught doing, they could have escaped justice.

It is also important to note that the Prime Minister admits to having “rigorous conversations” with Jody Wilson Raybould over the SNC-Lavalian case.

After the Shaggy “it wasn’t me” defence failed to convince anyone outside of the CBC editorial board of Justin Trudeau’s innocence, a new plan was formed.

Plan B seemed to be, have everyone smear Jody Wilson-Raybould and act like it was her scandal not the PMO’s.

While she was remaining silent due to attorney-client privilege (which is a debatable position), Trudeau continued to speak for her. Again, it should be pointed out that Trudeau could have waived this at anytime to let her tell her side of the story, he didn’t.

This all came to a head when Trudeau claimed that “her presence in the cabinet speaks for itself”. The next day she resigned.

Off to Plan C, which seems to have been concocted by new Liberal strategist, Kim Jong Un.

A committee will be constructed to investigate these accusations, which of course will have a majority of Liberals and be headed by Liberal MP, Anthony Housefather, who has already added his flare to the investigation suggesting the reason that Jody Wilson Raybould was shuffled out of the AG position was because she didn’t speak French.

Remember, he is the impartial leader of Liberals investigating an allegation of Liberal corruption. It is also important to point out that both of the ministers in charge of immigration matters, Ahmed Hussain and Bill Blair, can’t speak a word of French between them.

January 18, 2019

QotD: Political colours in the US and Canada

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

We, Conservatives, were a coalition from the very beginning, in Canada. We were, of course, the Liberal-Conservative Party under Sir John A, reflecting the alliances formed between Ontario and Atlantic Canadian Tories and Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine’s moderate Parti bleu in Quebec. This was in contrast to the Liberals who were formed by the Clear Grits from Upper Canada and the Papineau’s radical Parti rouge in Quebec.

(So Quebec has always been central to both Conservative and Liberal political success in Canada and it was Quebec that gave us our modern Conservative blue and Liberal red icons ~ which are opposite to the Democratic blue and Republican red in the USA.)

Ted Campbell, “Our Conservative Roots”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-03-05.

December 16, 2018

Mackenzie King at war

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell remembers Canada’s Second World War Prime Minister:

Prime Minister Winston Churchill greets Canadian PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1941.
Photo from Library and Archives Canada (reference number C-047565) via Wikimedia Commons.

I was born in 1942, William Lyon Mackenzie King was the prime minister; my mother often said that, in the 1940s, it seemed that he would never cease to be prime minister, and she thoroughly detested him; it wasn’t all of his policies she hated, it was, mainly, how he approached the war, and a few other things ~ she was, later, fond of the Canadian poet F.R. Scott’s rather bitter epitaph:

He seemed to be in the centre because we had no centre,
No vision to pierce the smoke-screen of his politics.

Truly he will be remembered wherever men honour ingenuity,
Ambiguity, inactivity, and political longevity.

Let us raise up a temple to the cult of mediocrity,
Do nothing by halves which can be done by quarters.

Now, Canada fought a good war, we made four absolutely vital contributions:

  • We were the true “breadbasket of the empire,” our farmers fed our large Army and much of Britain’s, too;
  • We were a major part of the “arsenal of democracy,” our factories and shipyards turned out all of the things, from tanks and trucks and bombers and corvettes to Bren guns and grenades that were needed to help defeat the Axis powers;
  • We managed the all important British Commonwealth Air Training Plan that was a key element in the allies’ eventual success; and
  • We played a huge and a significant leadership role in the Battle of the Atlantic ~ the only battle Churchill said that he really feared losing.

But under King we did each with apparent reluctance, seemingly trying to never serve any vital interest if there was even a remote chance that any political constituency might be offended ~ something that reminds me of Justin Trudeau in 2018. Our large and entirely commendable war efforts were, in the main, directed, sometimes despite King, by the indefatigable C.D. Howe, and the national unity concerns were assuaged by recruiting the universally respected Louis St Laurent.

The King era was characterized by extraordinarily tepid leadership at the top but brilliant work by strong ministers in a small cabinet. It also began Phase 1 of a national political civil war. I think that in the First World War many Canadians had either understood or had been, largely, indifferent to Quebec’s objections to conscription. But in the 1940s we had better mass communications and many Canadians were less understanding of Quebec’s reluctance to participate in that war, especially as Canadian casualties mounted after Hong Kong and then in Italy and then in France, Belgium and Holland. Louis St Laurent did not try to explain French Quebec’s misgivings to English Canada, his job was to maintain, by force of his own stellar reputation and personality, just enough support in Quebec and, as he easily did, to “outclass” the vocal, crypto-fascist, French Canadian opponents to the war. But there was another division fomenting inside the Liberal Party of Canada: both Howe and St Laurent had a new vision for Canada in the post war world; both saw Canada as an important actor on the world stage; both were frustrated by King’s timid leadership; it is very probable that had St Laurent, the foreign minister, rather than King, [been] the prime minister, led Canada’s delegation to the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco in June of 1945 that Canada, not France, would have been the fifth member of the Security Council (or that it would have had only four members. as originally planned). St Laurent, especially, was known, liked and respected in both London and Washington; both he and Howe were highly regarded as leaders and as statesmen … King was not; Churchill distrusted him because he has actively supported Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and it seems to me that both Churchill and Roosevelt saw him as little more than an errand boy.

November 15, 2018

QotD: The French language in Quebec

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

To follow Quebec politics, to read a French-language Quebec newspaper, is to regularly come across trumped-up or bewildering linguistic angst. A new study or census will show French is in pretty good shape, and the language hawks will immediately start slicing and dicing the data to paint the most dire possible picture. The Habs will appoint a captain who doesn’t speak French. A newspaper columnist will hear a friendly “bonjour-hi” one too many times shopping in downtown Montreal and blow his stack. While First World parents around the world strive to have their children learn as many languages as possible, you still encounter the odd Quebec voice wondering if francophone children learning English represents an existential threat to their society.

Chris Selley, “Oh no… It really looks like Justin Trudeau truly, deeply believes all those silly Liberal myths”, National Post, 2017-01-19.

November 7, 2018

Quebec cabbies sue provincial government for declining revenues and lost capital cost due to Uber competition

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

William Watson makes the argument that it’s the ripped-off taxi customers who should be suing, not the cabbies:

There are at least two problems with the court case, one technical, one regarding fairness. The technical one: Cabbies want compensation for both declining revenue and the capital loss on their permits. But that’s double-counting. The permit is an entitlement to earn the revenues. Its value falls only because expected revenues have fallen. Give operators one or the other, if the law eventually says you must, but not both. They can have their compensation but not eat it, too.

The fairness question concerns where the taxi cartel’s surplus came from all these years, which is no mystery: It came from taxi users. But what are we, chopped liver? Why don’t we start a class action suit of our own to get back all the money ripped off from us over decades of artificially restricted taxi supply?

Basic fairness would certainly require that. Unfortunately, the law may not. The taxi drivers’ case against the government is that, despite statutes on the books about needing a taxi permit in order to provide taxi services, when Uber came along the government decided not to enforce the law. That created two classes of taxi driver: Uber drivers, whom the government turned a blind eye to, and regular taxi drivers, whom it continued to subject to close regulation. That double standard was an unfairness, yes, but a minor one compared to the long-lasting aggravated rip-off of consumers.

Bottom line: Taxi drivers lobby for and get a law allowing them to overcharge their customers. When in a bout of good policy sense (a “Taxi Spring” you might say) the government decides not to enforce it, the taxi drivers set about suing taxpayers instead. However unfair that may seem — and it’s exasperating! — I suppose, in the end, supply-and-demand must take notice of the principle of rule of law.

November 4, 2018

That pesky Supreme court ruling on the Churchill Falls deal

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I use the term “pesky” in the headline to avoid being slagged by one or possibly even both of my Newfoundland and Labrador readers … to curry favour with them, I’d need to escalate from somewhere between “ethically doubtful” and “outrageous”, and even that might not capture the essence of anger and resentment at Quebec’s amazingly great deal long-term on cheap hydro-electric power from the Churchill Falls facility. It is, as Wikipedia says, “the second largest hydroelectric plant in North America, with an installed capacity of 5,428 MW”, and thanks to Quebec financing and astute negotiations, most of that output is sold to Quebec at a very small proportion of today’s open market price. Colby Cosh arches an eyebrow over a Supreme Court justice’s lone vote of dissent on the case:

Churchill Falls generating station, Labrador.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It is my solemn duty to perform one of the important functions of a newspaper columnist: raising one questioning eyebrow. On Friday the Supreme Court issued a judgment in the long battle between Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corp., a subsidiary of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, and Hydro-Québec. CFLco is the legal owner of the notorious Churchill Falls Generating Station in the deep interior of Labrador, close to the border with Quebec.

The station was built between 1966 and 1971. Hydro-Québec provided backing when the financing proved difficult for the original owner, an energy exploration consortium called Brinco. This led to the signing of Canada’s most famous lopsided contract: a 1969 deal for Hydro-Québec to receive most of the plant’s output for the next 40 years at a quarter of a cent per kilowatt-hour, followed by 25 more years at one-fifth of a cent. The bargain ends in 2041, at which time CFLco will get full use and disposal of the station’s electricity back.

This has been a heck of a deal for Quebec. It took on the risk of financing and building the station in exchange for receiving the electricity at a low fixed price — one that both sides in the court case agree was reasonable at the time. But it meant that Newfoundland saw no benefit from decades of oil price shocks, from the end of nuke-plant construction in the U.S., or from the increasing market advantage hydroelectricity enjoys while dirtier forms of power generation attract eco-taxation.

It has been maddening for Newfoundland to remain poor while Hydro-Québec grows fat on the profits from a Newfoundland river. Quebec, for its part, has never been completely convinced of the legitimacy of its border with Labrador, and it sees its good fortune as a sort of angelic reward for having to be part of Confederation. The Churchill Falls deal is (quite reasonably) regarded as proof that Quebec’s homegrown industrialists were able to beat resource-exploiting Anglo financiers at their own game. There are thus reasons beyond the bottom line that Quebec has never wanted to renegotiate the Churchill Falls contract. But the bottom line is enough.

October 3, 2018

Quebec election results – Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) majority

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

Global News rounds up the final poll results from Monday’s Quebec election:

After a 39-day election campaign, voters in Quebec headed to the polls Monday and elected the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) to power.

The CAQ, headed by François Legault, won a majority of seats delivering a crushing blow to the Quebec Liberal Party, who had held power for 13 of the last 15 years.

The CAQ was elected in 74 of the province’s 125 ridings, compared to 32 for the Liberals.

The Parti Québécois (PQ) suffered a double blow going from 28 seats to 9 and is once again without a leader, after Jean-François Lisée announced he was stepping down after losing his riding of Rosemont.

I really haven’t been following Quebec politics at all, so I didn’t know much about the CAQ’s stance on the issues. Here, cribbed from the Wikipedia page are some of their issues gleaned from the party platform (selective emphasis mine):

  • CAQ Leader François Legault has promised to reduce the tax burden of Quebecers. A CAQ government, he says, will further harmonize school taxes across the province, a tax cut valued at $700 million.
  • A long-standing party proposal is to create a Quebec version of Silicon Valley, which they’ve dubbed “The Saint-Laurent Project”. It envisions turning the Saint-Lawrence Valley into a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, with the collaboration of universities.
  • Hoping to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs from the province’s civil service.
  • As premier, Legault says he would temporarily reduce the number of immigrants Quebec accepts annually from 50,000 to 40,000.
  • To qualify for a Quebec selection certificate, the CAQ wants immigrants to pass a values and language test. Immigrants would also have to prove they have been looking for employment. Some experts have questioned the legality of the plan.
  • The party favours decentralizing health-care administration, while maintaining a universal free public health care system, Legault was quoted saying “The important thing is the universality of care. … I do not want more private. Our public [health care] is a jewel of Quebec.”
  • Like the PQ, the CAQ also vowed to renegotiate with the Quebec’s medical specialists in order to cut their compensation by an average of $80,000 per year. Legault believes the specialists will be open to striking a new deal.
  • Would overhaul the province’s longterm care system (CHSLDs) with a new network of smaller, more “humane” homes at an initial cost of $1 billion.
  • Wants to abolish school boards and replace them with service centres that would provide administrative support to schools. The party believes this would give schools greater autonomy and make the education system cheaper to run.
  • Wants to increase the mandatory age of staying in school to 18, to reduce the drop out rate.
  • Wants added homework help, extracurricular activities (sport and culture), additional funding for career guidance and tutors assigned to more vulnerable students.
  • The CAQ is also proposing to do away with progressive daycare pricing, though over a period of four years. All Quebec parents would be charged the same daily rate, regardless of their annual income.
  • Opposes the wearing of religious symbols, including the hijab, by police officers and others who wield coercive state power. The party would also ban school teachers from wearing religious symbols.
  • Would pass a “Secularism Charter” to reduce the scope of religious accommodations available to civil servants.
  • Calls itself nationalist. It wants more power for Quebec, but within Canada. Legault, a former PQ cabinet minister, has promised a CAQ government will never hold a referendum on Quebec sovereignty.
  • Legault wants to seek additional powers for Quebec, including control over immigration, increased fiscal capacity and a say in the nomination of Supreme Court justices. Some of these measures would require re-opening the Constitution.
  • Supports international greenhouse gas reduction targets and would promote “technological innovations to ensure their achievement”.

October 1, 2018

The rebirth of Quebec separatism?

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

Conrad Black wants to provoke clinical depression in anyone who was around for the last round of Quebec separatism, and warns that we’ve been ignoring the issue while it’s been reviving in La Belle Province:

Canada is very late and very laconically beginning to consider the implications of the Quebec election on Oct. 1. If, on Monday night, as polls indicate, 40 per cent of Quebecers have voted for overtly separatist parties (Québec solidaire and the Parti Québécois) and 30 per cent for a party that declines to say separation is undesirable, only that it will not hold a referendum (Coalition Avenir Québec, or CAQ), no one should imagine that this is not a threat to this country. I have written here before that Canada would regret the refusal of Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau to discuss methods of reintegrating Quebec into the Constitution, which would not have solved the problem permanently, but would have greatly strengthened federalism.

The issue of separatism appeared to die, but that is the nature of Quebec nationalism: it never dies, it just becomes comatose for a time. And though almost no one yet describes this Quebec election in these terms, the governing Liberals of Premier Philippe Couillard seem to be about even at 30 per cent with François Legault’s moderate left, constitutionally ambiguous CAQ. Legault was long an explicit separatist, and has not renounced that view (and his wife, Isabelle Brais, thinks English Canada has no culture and should have no status in Quebec). The Quebec Liberal party, like the British Columbia Liberal party, is really a Liberal-Conservative coalition. It governed very efficiently these past four years, but became an ecologically obsessed and eccentric regime. While it retains the support of most of the non-French, it is now pulling only a very unfeasible 17 per cent of the French Quebec vote.

Though the CAQ has been slipping, it has been losing ground to Québec solidaire, a rabidly separatist party that proposes immediate, unconditional secession. It is led by a declared Marxist who opposes the right of the State of Israel to exist, and, astonishingly, it may hold the balance of power in the National Assembly. It threatens to pass the original separatist PQ of former premiers René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, which hasn’t changed its tune but is whistling it more softly. The independence of Quebec has not been much raised in the campaign, but the implications of the emerging voting patterns assure that it will re-emerge.

And no discussion of the separatism question is complete without at least a nod in the direction of the Charlatan Accord:

The Charlottetown agreement on a substantial decentralization, put to a countrywide referendum in 1992, was defeated by 54 per cent of Canadians, though it had been approved by the federal parliament and all the provincial legislatures. Bouchard, Mulroney’s most prominent Quebec MP, deserted the government, founded the separatist Bloc Québécois, and led the 1995 referendum campaign in Quebec after Parizeau was elected premier. It was a slightly more explicit separatist question than Lévesque had posed 15 years before. Chrétien was over-confident, mishandled the campaign, and gave a slightly panic-stricken appeal to Quebec voters on referendum-eve. It was 50.6 to 49.4 per cent for the federalists, a clear separatist victory for the French Quebecers, and the turnout was 93.4 per cent.

Chrétien somewhat redeemed himself with the Clarity Act of 1999, based on the results of a Supreme Court referral, which held that any secession had to be on the basis of a substantial majority supporting a clear referendum question to secede. (I was one of those who urged that the Act also provide that any county in a seceding province that had voted not to secede and was contiguous to another province, should secede from the province and remain in Canada. My precedents, though I never got to cite them, were West Virginia and Ulster.) Lucien Bouchard lost interest in the idea of independence, and the Liberal party has governed in Quebec for 13 of the past 15 years. The present premier, Couillard, is the most unambiguously federalist Quebec premier since Jean-Jacques Bertrand in 1970, and it will not be long before he is missed by those in Ottawa who declined to discuss these issues with him. If he is out on Monday night, Couillard’s successors will blow a cold wind on Ottawa and across Canada just as the Trudeau government appears to be set to break up the relationship with the United States, and our automobile industry prepares to repatriate to the U.S. Justin might do better as the next leader of the Quebec Liberals.

July 20, 2018

No end in sight for our national fake poutine crisis

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

A few key posts from the Twitters to illustrate the problem:







July 6, 2018

Lac-Mégantic, five years on

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

Five years ago today, we learned of the tragedy that had struck the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic in the small hours of the morning:

Updates as they came in: initial post, locomotive fire, media access, still questions more than a week later, first anniversary, and the Transportation Safety Board report.

Earlier this week, Asad Iqbal reported from Lac-Mégantic:

Rail safety advocates say that five years after the Lac-Mégantic train derailment, not enough has been done to prevent similar tragedies from happening elsewhere in Canada.

On July 6, 2013, 47 people died when a train loaded with 7.7 million litres of fuel rolled unmanned into the downtown core and exploded in the middle of the night.

Commemorative events honouring the victims will take place throughout the day on Friday.

Meanwhile a citizens’ committee for rail safety and surveillance will mark the disaster by heading north to the neighbouring town of Nantes, where the train started rolling down the steep hill toward Lac-Mégantic in 2013.

“Five years after the tragedy we have not seen a significant improvement of rail safety measures,” said Robert Bellefleur, a spokesperson for the Coalition des citoyens et organismes engagés pour la sécurité ferroviaire.

The federal and provincial governments announced in May a bypass would be built around the town of Lac-Mégantic, Que. (Julia Page/CBC)

Tanker cars carrying dangerous goods are regularly parked at the top of this steep hill above the town, Bellefleur said, a disturbing image for people who drive past.

“The main risk factor that contributed to the tragedy is not even solved,” said Bellefleur.

June 14, 2018

The economic idiocy of Canada’s supply management system

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

Andrew Coyne, who finally seems to have weaned himself off the PR voting jag, explains the Canadian government’s idiotic yet deeply entrenched supply management bureaucracy:

How did supply management, of all things, come to be at the centre of everything?

The policy, under which farmers in a number of sectors — milk, cheese, eggs, poultry — are organized into government-approved price-fixing rings, enforced by a complex system of quotas and protected by prohibitive tariffs on imports of the same goods, has been in place since the early 1970s. It affects fewer than 15,000 farmers nationwide, who between them account for less than one per cent of Canada’s GDP.

Yet it has somehow become the central issue not only of our domestic politics, but of international trade talks. It was the pretext for Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imports of aluminum and steel, and is his most-cited grievance with Canadian trade policy. As such, it has become the rallying cry of preening political patriots, each of the parties seeking to outdo the others in defence of a policy whose avowed purpose, let us remember, is to make basic food items more expensive for Canadians.

It has also become a source of deep division within the Conservative Party. It was already, of course, thanks to last year’s leadership race, in which Maxime Bernier made its elimination the central plank in his campaign, as Andrew Scheer made its retention the key to his. Indeed, Scheer’s narrow victory was directly attributable to the votes of thousands of Quebec dairy farmers, who took out party memberships for the sole purpose of ensuring Bernier’s defeat. It is even possible the Scheer campaign encouraged them in this endeavour.

[…]

There is no serious case for supply management — a policy that is is as unjust, inasmuch as it imposes the heaviest burden on the poorest families, as it is inefficient; that locks out new farmers and deters existing farmers from seeking new markets; and that makes us look utter hypocrites in free-trade talks, not only with the U.S., but the rest of the world — and no serious person whose livelihood does not depend upon it would make it.

And yet every member of every party is obliged to swear a public oath of undying fealty to it. That all do, but for one, is a sign of the institutional rot in our politics. For they do so not in spite of its awfulness but because of it — because the willingness to say two plus two equals five has become the ultimate test of loyalty.

On other issues, that might be because of genuine agreement. But a willingness to sign onto a truly hideous policy like supply management — that’s certain proof an MP is a “team player.”

April 15, 2018

Stalin in WW1 – Quebec – Scottish Home Rule I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 14 Apr 2018

Chair of Wisdom Time!

April 12, 2018

“Bernier was accused, variously, of naivete, hypocrisy, vanity, divisiveness and sour grapes”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Andrew Coyne covers the “revelations” (that anybody who’d been paying attention already knew) about how the federal Conservative leadership race was won and lost from Maxime Bernier’s upcoming book, Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada.

You would think this would be something of a scandal. The leadership race was hijacked by members of a vested interest who not only had no prior involvement with the party, but most likely wished it ill: what in civilized countries are called “entryists.” The winner of the race, the party’s current leader, sold himself and the party, not just to the highest bidder, but to a particularly venal bidder at that, with a direct financial interest in the outcome.

The result was to leave the party hitched to what is widely acknowledged as an indefensible policy, one that takes food off the table of the country’s poorest families for the benefit of a dwindling number of wealthy quota-owners. That the policy — combining internal supply quotas, sky-high external tariffs, and heavy doses of government regulation — makes a mockery of every principle for which the party allegedly stands is probably worth mentioning as well.

So naturally the response of party supporters, on being lately reminded of all this, was fury … at the guy who pointed it out.

That would be Bernier. In his forthcoming book, the plangently titled Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada, a chapter of which was released this week, the former industry minister recalls how Scheer’s campaign courted the dairy industry’s “fake Conservatives,” who were “only interested in blocking my candidacy and protecting their privileges.” He notes the ballooning of party membership in Quebec just before the vote, from 6,000 to 16,000, and its collapse back to 6,000 shortly afterward.

And that’s about it. He does not attribute his defeat solely to his stand on supply management: indeed he thinks he won more votes than he lost over it. Neither does he question the legitimacy of Scheer’s victory — indeed he acknowledges that Scheer’s tactic is “fair game in a democratic system.” He merely points out that this sort of squalid trading of votes for favours is “why so many people are so cynical about politics.”

January 9, 2018

The Seven Years War: Crash Course World History #26

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Britain, France, History, India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

CrashCourse
Published on 19 Jul 2012

In which John teaches you about the Seven Years War, which may have lasted nine years. Or as many as 23. It was a very confusing war. The Seven Years War was a global war, fought on five continents, which is kind of a lot. John focuses on the war as it happened in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. the “great” European powers were the primary combatants, but they fought just about everywhere. Of course, this being a history course, the outcomes of this war still resonate in our lives today. The Seven Years War determined the direction of the British Empire, and led pretty directly to the subject of Episode 28, the American Revolution.

December 9, 2017

The unique culture that is Quebec

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

Paul Wells on the latest blow struck in the never-ending battle against the English language in La Belle Province:

This is the thing about language politics in Montreal. It’s a game with many participants but few spectators. It’s addictive fun to play and unbearable to watch. If you’re not arguing about the state of the fragile equilibrium — standoff? Cold war? — between the local francophone majority and the continental anglophone majority, then you’re just living your life. And living your life is almost always very different from whatever the current argument is about.

The latest argument is so stupid I have avoided it for a week. Probably you have heard anyway. Quebec’s National Assembly passed a unanimous resolution urging merchants to greet customers with a hearty “bonjour!” The unstated subtext was that they should stop there and not add an incriminating “Hi!” in English. In fact, in the motion’s original wording, as presented by the Parti Québécois leader Jean-François Lisée, it wasn’t even unstated. The frequent use of “Bonjour-hi” by Montreal merchants was described as an “irritant,” until Quebec premier Philippe Couillard sat down with Lisée and haggled over the motion, line by line, eventually removing the bit about “hi” being an irritant.

Thus amended — essentially, Say ‘bonjour!’ to customers, because the English language is… well, you know — the motion was adapted unanimously by the National Assembly.

Unanimous motions of the National Assembly are believed, by its members and by about three staffers at Le Devoir, to carry a particular weight, because they mark occasions when the representatives of the Québécois nation put aside their differences to speak with one voice in sacred defence of the besieged descendants of France on American soil. Unfortunately, the rush of passing such a motion must be intense to the point of addiction because for many years now, the members of the National Assembly have been passing so many that by now the effect is ruined.

Here is a partial list of unanimous motions going back to 1960, including 15 so far this year alone. Five in November. On Nov. 14, the representatives of the Québécois nation put aside their differences long enough to demand a share of federal subsidies for electric-car recharging stations proportional to Quebec’s share of Canada-wide electric car sales. Come on. I’m a big fan of the National Assembly, but these days, it’s precisely at its most solemn moments that it’s the biggest farce.

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