Quotulatiousness

September 13, 2021

“Only the most fanatical Justin Trudeau partisans will begrudge Jody Wilson-Raybould for her moment of revenge”

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

Howard Anglin responds to an early excerpt from former Trudeau cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould:

Jody Wilson-Raybould, 30 January, 2014.
Photo by Erich Saide via Wikimedia Commons.

Reading the first excerpt of her book, I did find myself occasionally cocking an eyebrow at the portrayal of a wide-eyed innocent who somehow awoke to find herself in a den of partisan thieves.

It was, after all, the Liberal Party she had joined — the most ruthless and successful vote-winning machine in Western politics this side of Mexico’s PRI — not the parish altar guild.

But setting aside questions of systemic hypocrisy and looking only at the SNC-Lavalin imbroglio, it is as clear today as it was in 2019 that Wilson-Raybould was right and Trudeau was wrong.

She was right as attorney general to rebuff political pressure to offer SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement — a slap on the wrist that would have seen the engineering and construction company avoid criminal conviction and remain eligible for more federal contracts — and Trudeau and his office were wrong to pressure her to consider it.

Now, she is fully justified in reminding us of that fact. And if the book’s self-righteousness message is belied by the calculated timing of its release, well, she has earned the right to say “I told you so” at the time of her choosing.

As far as the election goes, the most important revelations are about Trudeau’s character.

To constitutional law nerds like me, however, the highlight is Wilson-Raybould’s disagreement with the prime minister over the role of the Attorney Genereal, including her description of a freshly briefed Trudeau expatiating scholastically on the nuances of the Shawcross doctrine before she drily punctures his condescension with the comment: “You have been talking to a lawyer.”

Coming from someone who was until a few weeks earlier “his” lawyer, at least in his capacity as head of government, the comment is doubly ironic.

Wilson-Raybould had, by her account, explained the doctrine and its implications at length to Trudeau, as well as to his principal secretary, Gerry Butts, and the Clerk, neither of whom is a lawyer but both of whom were nevertheless dispatched to try to explain their version of it to her and her lawyer chief of staff.

June 27, 2021

“Apologies are just a subset of performance art for Trudeau, not actual admissions of failure and expressions of regret”

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

From The Line‘s weekend wrap-up post, a reminder that the top leadership of the Canadian Armed Forces and the government are still embroiled in scandal:

Canadian Defence Minister (at least for the moment) Harjit Sajjan during his pre-ministerial career.

In other news, your Line editors continue to think that not enough of you are tuned in to the sexual misconduct scandal still roiling the Canadian Armed Forces. Yes, yes, we know the military is this weird, complicated thing that no one really pays much attention to in this country. But you really ought to be.

You all know the basic outline already: sexual harassment and assault is a major problem in the armed forces. In 2015, former Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps completed a major report into the issue, and recommended sweeping changes. A few of the changes were made, but the report was mostly immediately assigned dust-collector status and forgotten. That would be bad enough, but what really gave this life was that the Trudeau government — specifically, National Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan — was given a heads-up that Gen. Jonathan Vance, the country’s top military officer, was himself accused of misconduct. And the PMO found a way to bend the nature of the space-time continuum as they contorted and twisted their way out of having to do anything about it.

It’s a horrific look for a government that considers itself feminist, especially when the guy at the top has some baggage of his own. The Liberals did what Liberals do — said they should have done better and circled the wagons. Accountability is for chumps, after all. This week, Gregory Lick, the ombudsman for the Canadian Armed Forces — a position that exists to give serving members of the armed forces a place to go with complaints within their chains of command — took aim at his own chain of command — Minister Sajjan, saying that his reporting structure has to be changed because Sajjan, frankly, ain’t interested in hearing about problems that the Liberals find awkward.

Here’s Lick:

    The collective actions or, in some cases, the inaction of senior political, military and civilian leadership within the government have eroded trust within the defence community … When leaders turn a blind eye to our recommendations and concerns in order to advance political interests and their own self-preservation or career advancement, it is the members of the defence community that suffer the consequences … It is clear that inaction is rewarded far more than action. In the four months since the most recent outbreak of multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, the actions of the minister of National Defence, senior government and military officials have bitterly proved this point. The erratic behaviour of leadership defies common sense or reason. The concept of ministerial accountability has been absent.

Folks, trust us when we tell you that by the standard of Ottawa bureaucratese, that statement is blistering. Lick is directly targeting Sajjan with that last sentence. Translated into normal Canadian English, Lick is accusing Sajjan of inaction in the face of obvious problems.

[…]

What was it that Lick said about ministerial accountability again? About inaction? Oh dear, it’s totally slipped our little ole minds. Probably nothing important!

More seriously: We don’t expect much to come from this. From any of it, or from all of it. Firing Sajjan would require Trudeau to admit he’d fell short, and, well, we all know this guy is way more comfortable apologizing for stuff that happened a century before he was born than he ever is admitting he himself screwed up. Apologies are just a subset of performance art for Trudeau, not actual admissions of failure and expressions of regret. But let’s not mistake what has happened here. A slew of senior military officers have quit or been removed. The PMO has been singed. Sajjan has been directly called out, and his own assistant implicated.

There is no mystery here. Canadians have been told there is rot in the government, and that our men and women in uniform are suffering for it while Trudeau looks the other way. And you’ll have to get used to that, too.

May 9, 2021

“The PMO and senior defence officials knew [about the sexual assault allegations]. For three years. … No one cared.”

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

The federal government collectively and individually (in the person of Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff) continues to do their vastly unconvincing Sergeant Schultz imitation, “I see nothing! I hear nothing! I know nothing!”

John Banner as Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes, 1965.
CBS Television promotional photo via Wikimedia Commons.

We at The Line ended a long week staring agog and aghast at Katie Telford, the prime minister’s chief of staff, who was interviewed by members of the Standing Committee on National Defence over her knowledge (such as it was) of the sexual misconduct allegations made against now-retired Army general Jonathan Vance.

Vance, until recently the chief of the defence staff, the highest position in the Canadian Armed Forces, was accused of sexual misconduct by a female subordinate in 2018, but nothing came of it because, well, hey, Telford explained. Life is complicated. Right?

We don’t really have the emotional wherewithal to summarize the entire proceeding at length. Suffice it to say that nothing new was learned. Telford’s defence continues to be the same as the ones offered by other Liberal officials — they knew there was an allegation of some kind, but not what the allegation was. And they were clearly content to leave it that way for three years. The problem for Telford, of course, is that Global News already obtained documents showing internal emails among senior staff openly discussing “sexual harassment” allegations against Vance. We accept that Telford and other high mucky-mucks didn’t know the details of the allegations, but if they didn’t know that they were related to sexual misconduct, their ignorance was a product of a deliberate, sustained multi-year effort.

Our official opposition wasn’t exactly draping itself in glory either, alas, which might explain why they remain a distant second in the polls. The Tory MPs on the committee clearly had their battle plan, and they were sticking to it: they wanted to know why Telford hadn’t told the PM that there had been allegations of some kind against Gen. Vance, or who had made that decision, if not her. We know that they wanted to know this because they asked her this 50 or so fucking times. And each time she just declined to answer, offering up some word salad instead. Yet the Tory MPs just kept going in again and again, like infantry marching into machine-gun nests in one of the dumber battles of the First World War. We assume their strategy was to create memorable soundbite moments of Telford refusing to answer, or maybe trip her up into a gotcha. But the Tories spent so much time repeating the one question Telford had already made manifestly clear she was not gonna answer that they didn’t ask a way better question: what the hell are women in the armed forces supposed to react to the fact that their government knew that there were sexual misconduct allegations against Gen. Vance, and that they just sat around and waited for him to retire three years later?

Look, we weren’t born yesterday. If we were, we wouldn’t be as exhausted as we are. (Though probably roughly equally as frightened of sudden loud noises.) We know that there is a political desire for the CPC to link Trudeau himself to the scandal. But there was a bigger, more profound scandal laying right before their eyes — everyone in the PMO and the senior levels of National Defence knew there were unanswered questions about Gen. Vance and they were all A-fucking-OK with that. For years. The right questions to ask weren’t what Trudeau knew, and when, or who chose to tell (or not tell) him this, that or the other thing. The only relevant question is how these people could dare look any female member of the military, or any of their loved ones, in the eyes.

The PMO and senior defence officials knew. For three years. They didn’t know everything, but they knew enough to know they should know more. No one cared. So Gen. Vance stayed in command, and oversaw the military’s efforts to, uh, root out sexual misconduct and end impunity among high-ranked abusers.

That’s what the CPC should have been asking about, and that’s what Canadians should be angry about. But they didn’t, and we aren’t. And that’s why nothing’s gonna change.

May 2, 2021

“The PMO was told that Canada’s top soldier was accused of sexual misconduct, and they ignored it. It just didn’t move their give-a-shit needle.”

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

The weekend edition of The Line looks at the outrageous failure of Canada’s military high command and the government officials charged with oversight of the Canadian Armed Forces:

Canadian Defence Minister (at least for the moment) Harjit Sajjan.

This week saw a mealy mouthed political non-apology for the record books from Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan, who wants any women in the military who feel like they were let down to know that the government is very, very sorry. Gee, thanks, Minister. What a profile in courage that is. How reassuring to the women — and some men! — in the military either living with the reality or memory of sexual misconduct in the ranks.

And then there was the double-double approach to Supreme Court justices. Marie Deschamps wrote a detailed report on sexual misconduct in the military in 2015 (this report was discussed in depth here at The Line previously). Some of the action items in that report have been enacted, and things are therefore slightly better. But there is a lot more that could be done, that was already spelled out by Deschamps, and the report is just sitting there, neglected by all comers like those weird bagels with raisins in them. Now that the Minister has gotten the non-apology monkey off his back, maybe he’d like to grab the goddamn report he already has and, like, you know, do something with it?!

No. No, dear readers, he does not. What he’d like to do is appoint another former Supreme Court justice to write another report.

LOL! Just kidding. What he wants to do is buy time. The minister is hoping — and he will probably be proven right! — that Canadians won’t care about some lady soldiers getting harassed or outright raped in the military, not if his government can stick the vaccine landing, as seems increasingly likely. Sajjan has had literally years to take on the well-known issues inside the Canadian Forces, and he’s nibbled around the edges a bit, and no more. Only now that his ass is hanging out in the wind, along with a bunch of PMO staffer asses, and perhaps the prime minister’s, has the party rediscovered the urgency of the issue.

Pointing out the many ways that Trudeau and his government fail to live up to their own branding is almost a joke these days. Like, gosh, what more can we say? But if you have any capacity for shock and outrage left, and yeah, we know that’s a big if, this should set you off. The facts are plain. There’s no longer any dispute. The PMO was told that Canada’s top soldier was accused of sexual misconduct, and they ignored it. It just didn’t move their give-a-shit needle. That needle didn’t quiver for three years, until some great reporters at Global News dug this up and put the PM in danger of yet again being revealed to be a hypocritical fraud on women’s issues.

And we can’t have that! So let’s call in a retired Supreme to get to the bottom of all this. A few years from now.

Sorry, ladies of the armed forces. Better is always possible for you. But under Trudeau and Sajjan, it’s possible only in theory, and only when they get nervous about their own fates.

Thanks for your service, though.

March 21, 2021

“Speaking of military affairs […] the sexual misconduct scandals continue to rock the senior leadership of the Canadian Armed Forces”

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

The weekend round-up at The Line includes a bit more on the ongoing scandal where over a third of the senior military leadership of the Canadian Forces are currently under investigation for sexual impropriety:

Canadian Defence Minister (at least for the moment) Harjit Sajjan in better times.

We noted with interest Steve Saideman, who holds the Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton, has called for National Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan’s resignation — and Saideman is no partisan alarmist.

We agree with Saideman. Sajjan should quit or be sacked, frankly, pour encourager les autres. He should be epically sacked for birthing one of the stupidest possible excuses for inaction that we’ve ever heard from a minister of the Crown. Sajjan, under sharp questioning at committee, said — he really said this, we shit you not — that it wasn’t his place to get involved when allegations of sexual misconduct by retired army general Jonathan Vance were brought to his attention because, since Sajjan is an elected official, his involvement would politicize the matter.

Think about that for a minute. The entire goddamned basis of our system of government is ministerial accountability. Once upon a time, before it became awkward and inconvenient for him personally, Prime Minister Trudeau used to even boast about how he was bringing back government by cabinet, in contrast to that nasty, evil, centralizing Harper fellow. But according to Minister Sajjan, ministers are actually the wrong people to get involved in these serious issues … because they’re politicians. This completely inverts the way our government is supposed to work, though it might actually be a depressingly accurate summary of how Trudeau’s cabinet ministers interpret their roles.

But think about the message it sends to to our women (and men!) in uniform who’ve been the victim of abuse and harassment, sexual or otherwise: sorry, guys, I’d love to help and all, but I’m too busy being a fucking Liberal politician to step in as minister of National Defence.

Sajjan’s gotta go. Now. If he doesn’t quit he should be fired. And as we’ve been saying for weeks now, this is only getting worse — the sexual misconduct scandal that was frantically ignored by Canada’s self-styled feminist government has now made The New York Times, which means, if you’re an Ottawa Liberal, this is about as real as it gets. All that media attention was nice when it was fawning, with nice photo spreads, but … this? This isn’t fun for the Liberals at all.

March 14, 2021

“You mean Justin Trudeau might have not lived up to his own self-branding and may have even — this is hard to even type — fallen short of the standard he sets for others?!”

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

Over at The Line, they’ve had to double the number of fainting couches available for overwhelmed and emotionally depleted staff members after discovering that the ongoing military leadership scandal goes up to the man at the top, Justin Trudeau himself:

We told you a week ago about the sexual misconduct scandal(s) at the very top of the Canadian Armed Forces. Army General Jonathan Vance recently retired after serving as the chief of the defence staff, the highest post in the military. Shortly after, Global News reported that he had faced two allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct during his career. Then, Vance’s successor was also required to step aside while being investigated for allegations of a sexual nature.

This is embarrassing for the military, but as we noted last week, there’s danger here to the government — Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan was told about the allegations against Vance, and passed that up the chain of command … meaning the PM knew, and did nothing.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You mean Justin Trudeau might have not lived up to his own self-branding and may have even — this is hard to even type — fallen short of the standard he sets for others?!

OK, OK. We had to sit down a minute there and catch our breath. It’s all just so much to take in. The government clearly knows it’s in trouble. Sajjan gave some testy testimony in which he said that it would have been inappropriate for him take an active role in any investigation. This is an awfully god-damned novel interpretation on ministerial responsibility that we’re excited to see become even dumber as this unfolds. The PM, for his part, has adjusted his ass covering; where once he said that he was not aware of the allegations against Gen. Vance, he now admits he was told in 2018, but says he did not know the details.

Think about that for a minute. The prime minister of Canada, the self-styled feminist prime minister of Canada, was told that the country’s top soldier, a man in a position of incredible power and authority, was accused of sexual misconduct, and … that’s it? Like he didn’t ask any questions? Give the old general a buzz and ask what’s up? A government that tried to sink an admiral in a case so flimsy it collapsed once readily available facts came to light couldn’t be bothered to find out if all that smoke around the general may have been from a fire?

This is, remarkably, not even the funny part. Everything above is embarrassing and awful and pathetic, but it actually gets worse.

March 13, 2021

As of today, one third “of the most senior admirals and generals (four and three star officers) in the Canadian Armed Forces have been accused of some sort of impropriety”

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

Ted Campbell regards this new fig leaf of appointing some sort of “watchdog” for the Canadian Armed Forces — in light of the ongoing investigations into impropriety on the part of too damned many senior officers — as worse than a waste of time:

Another “watchdog” is going to do exactly nothing. The former Ombudsman did his job, he did the right thing. The problem was that the political leadership ~ specifically Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan ~ decided to ignore him and then to shut him out of the process. I have no idea why Minister Sajjan decided to put the interests of the most senior military officers ahead of those subordinate to them, but he did. The Ombudsman was the watchdog we needed. He did all the right things. Defence Minister Sajjan failed the men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces, he failed the institution and he failed Canada. Another watchdog will not fix that.

Some years ago I said that our military needed to be seen in human terms. Our men and women in uniform, I said, needed to be tough, superbly disciplined, well trained, adequately equipped and also properly organized and well led, too. I believe that the Canadian Armed Forces are not well enough led and that has led to a breakdown in discipline which I said, back in 2016, “is the sine qua non of soldiering.” I stand by that. Nothing, not firepower, not leadership, not fighting spirit, not huge budgets and the finest hardware, nothing else matters as much as discipline. I will not be moved off that position because I know that I have 3,000 years of history to back me up.

I remember, in 1961, reading an article, I’m pretty sure it was in Time magazine, but Google doesn’t help me out there, which noted that Lieutenant General Geoffrey Walsh had taken over (as Chief of the General Staff) (and I’m about 99% sure I have the words correct) “the small but superbly disciplined Canadian Army.” I showed the little article to an older soldier who said something like “this is some [expletive] Yank magazine, eh? Well, it figgers; they look at us and they think we’re the [expletive] Grenadier [expletive] Guards. All they see is the marchin’ and the drill and we look great ’cause they’re a sloppy bunch of [expletive]. But you remember, kid, what I tell ya. The real discipline ain’t on the parade square, it’s in the field and you listen to what I [expletive] tell ya’ and then you do like I [expletive] tell ya’.” (It was that kind of [expletive]😉 army 60 years ago.) And he was right of course. Yes, our Regiment was a thing of beauty when we trooped the colour ~ as good as any other regiment in the world ~ but what made us better than any of the rest was self-discipline, learned the proper way by the examples set by good, tough leaders. Somehow the Canadian Armed Forces seems to have lost too much toughness, too much discipline and far too much leadership.

March 6, 2021

Vaccinations and Communist Famine | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.12 – Summer1921

Filed under: Europe, Food, Health, History, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 5 Mar 2021

This season there is a major breakthrough in combatting one of humanity’s oldest diseases, but a deadly famine also strikes Soviet Russia. Will the international community come to the fledgling state’s aid?

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory​

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations:
– Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…​

Sources:
Some images from the Library of Congress
Albert Calmette. Photograph, 1930. Credit: Wellcome Collection
World health : the magazine of the World Health Organization Credit: Wellcome Collection Hannokarlhuber https://www.hanno-karlhuber.at/galeri…​
https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/…​
art of Atlit-Yam from Hanay
Photo by J P Davidson https://flickr.com/photos/50616401@N0…​

From the Noun Project:
– people by Gregor Cresnar
– Earth by RF_Design
– sick By Adrien Coquet, FR
– Man by Milinda Courey

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound and ODJB
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree
– “Dark Shadow” – Etienne Roussel
– “Brighter Days Will Come” – Oakwood Station
– “Just Like Old Times” – Jackie Martin

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com​.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
3 days ago
As usual this episode sees the balance of dark and light that is so typical of the interwar period. Famine in Russia and the first fast-food chain in America; the turning of the tide against TB and tragic Hollywood scandal.

So a mixture of serious and fun. Regular viewers will know that our comment section is the same, running from intense debate to long-running memes. In this episode Indy mentions the first ice-cream candy bar, so to encourage things to stay on the light-hearted side why don’t you comment below telling us what’s your favourite candy bar or fast-food joint?

February 11, 2021

“… the entire Canadian constitution boiled down to the government saying, essentially, ‘trust us'”

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

Andrew Potter on the interesting and almost certainly unCanadian notion that the Prime Minister actually accept responsibility for things that happen on his watch:

Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien speaking at the “No to the war in Iraq: 10 years later” colloquium, 15 March 2013.
Detail of a photo by Gopmtl1 via Wikimedia Commons.

The late UBC law professor Wesley Pue once remarked that the entire Canadian constitution boiled down to the government saying, essentially, “trust us.” He was speaking in the wake of the release of the Hughes Report into the APEC affair.

A refresher: In 1997 it was Canada’s turn to host the annual APEC summit, a free trade and cooperation gabfest for countries in the Pacific Rim. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien decided to hold the meeting on the campus of UBC. Given that it is probably one of the most gorgeous pieces of real estate in the country, Chrétien probably thought he was being a good host. But some UBC students objected to the presence of Indonesian dictator Suharto at their school, and so they marched, held up signs, blocked campus roads and exits, chanted slogans, the usual student protest stuff.

Chrétien was clearly embarrassed, and orders went out from the PMO to clear the roads. The Mounties started telling students their campus was now a “Charter-free zone,” arresting a bunch of them. In a notorious incident captured by CBC cameras, RCMP Staff Sgt. Hugh Stewart walked amongst the students hosing them down with pepper spray. (Asked about the incident at a press conference, Chrétien made a joke.)

The only proper investigation into the affair was led by commissioner Ted Hughes, who issued his report in the summer of 2001. Hughes found that the RCMP had behaved by turns incompetently and unprofessionally and that they had systematically violated the Charter rights of the students. Further, Hughes found that they had done so under direction from the PMO — in particular at the behest of its director of operations, Jean Carle. While Chrétien himself escaped direct censure (Hughes could find no evidence that Carle had acted on Chrétien’s explicit orders), Pue pointed out that the fundamental principle of responsible government requires that the prime minister accept responsibility for what happened. Yet Chrétien did not. He neither accepted personal responsibility, nor did he throw Carle under the bus. Instead, what happened was typically Canadian: the matter simply went away.

The APEC affair serves as a useful reminder of a fundamental truth about our system of government. As Pue noted, there are virtually no effective parliamentary or legal checks on a prime minister’s authority, and as a result it is pretty much impossible to hold our executive branch to account. We need to just trust them.

[…]

It’s worth rehearsing all of this because we are going through a rather extended “just trust us” phase in Ottawa. After shuttering parliament last spring, ostensibly to focus their energies on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals spent the summer dreaming of “building back better” while fighting a ferocious rearguard action to keep MPs from finding out the truth about payments to Trudeau’s family by a charity. Trudeau has since spent the better part of the last six months governing by press conference from the front steps of his cottage, but even as the extreme levels of federal spending continue, and even as scandals and reports of gross mismanagement pile up, the Liberals have been brazenly testing the waters for a spring election.

February 7, 2021

Former Liberal MP dishes on Justin Trudeau in her new book

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

When I moved out of Whitby, the local Member of Parliament was Liberal Celina Caesar-Chavannes. She was, we thought, a high-profile person who’d probably be quickly moved into a junior cabinet position, as Justin Trudeau sets a very high value on being seen to be supportive of women and minorities. As she quickly discovered, however, with Trudeau it’s very much the “being seen” part that matters to him and almost nothing in the way of actually being supportive:

[After a kerfuffle with opposition MP Maxime Bernier] she said she didn’t hear from most of her Liberal colleagues or the prime minister until a #hereforCelina hashtag campaign started weeks later, in response to a column that accused her of “seeing racism everywhere.” When she later confronted Trudeau about the lack of support, she said he told her, “As a strong Black woman, I didn’t think you needed help.” She said Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner was more supportive to her during that period than Trudeau.

The incident is one of many allegations of racism, tokenizing, and microaggressions Caesar-Chavannes wrote about in her new memoir Can You Hear Me Now?, which came out February 2.

[…]

Caesar-Chavannes told VICE World News her experiences of being tokenized, excluded, and undervalued led her to resign from the Liberal caucus and not run again in the 2019 election. Her decision culminated in an explosive conversation with Trudeau in February 2019, during which she alleges he complained to her about being confronted about his privilege. She said he was angry that she wanted to resign on the same day then Minister of Veterans Affairs Jody Wilson-Raybould quit her cabinet role, in the midst of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the biggest crisis the governing Liberals had faced since Trudeau’s election in 2015.

“I was met with an earful that I needed to appreciate him, that everybody talked to him about his privilege, that he’s so tired of everybody talking to him about this stuff, and that I cannot make this announcement right now,” she said. She alleges he told her “he couldn’t have two powerful women of colour leave at the same time.”

After listening to his “rant” for a while, Caesar-Chavannes said she cussed out the prime minister.

“I had to ask him, ‘Motherfucker, who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?'” she said. “I was so angry.”

She said she didn’t make out what Trudeau said after that, but it “sounded like he was crying.” She ended up delaying her resignation announcement until March 2019.

Caesar-Chavannes said the Liberal party’s treatment of Wilson-Raybould — an Indigenous woman and whistleblower — made her feel like many of her colleagues were “fake as fuck” and cemented her desire to sit as an independent.

January 22, 2021

Canada’s Governor General resigns, avoiding dragging the Queen into another Canadian political drama

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

Colby Cosh notes in Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter:

The Right Honourable Julie Payette, 29th Governor General of Canada (October 2, 2017 – January 21, 2021).

When NP Platformed saw Robert Fife’s Globe and Mail report this morning, our thought was that leaking the news of the report’s completion was an obvious political manoeuvre. (You know how a fife works: put some wind in it, and it will play a tune for you.)

Even a prime minister as callow as the current one would not want to try firing a governor general, which would require the personal intervention of the Queen. This would be a failure in itself, a blot on Canada’s copybook, even if the PM had the support of other parliamentary parties.

As hours passed, the thought naturally occurred to us: why should Payette be making anyone wait for some written report anyway? We know she has sometimes balked at most of the easily identifiable parts of her job, including travel to ceremonies and (for heaven’s sake) giving royal assent to legislation. Hired to be a dynamic female STEM mascot (for a Liberal government, sort of), she somehow degenerated, with unseemly speed, into an immured princess from a fairy tale, evidently driven half-mad by some faerie spell.

The main job, the essence of the governor general gig, is to be above suspicion, like Caesar’s wife in the proverb. The mere whisper of abusiveness or of clownish behaviour involving public funds ought to have been enough to settle things, possibly with a convenient health excuse. (If she offers one now, it can only provoke snide laughter.) The vicereine is, in our system of government, the passage through which national honours flow from the sovereign. The mention of “honour” in connection with this Governor General was becoming mighty awkward. She should have our thanks for doing the right thing today.

December 31, 2020

Louis Armstrong and the Beginning of the Jazz Age | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! I E.08 – Summer 1920

Filed under: Economics, History, Media, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 30 Dec 2020

Louis Armstrong will be one of the greats of the American Century. But before that, others have to blaze a trail for him. No mean feat in a land of racial tension…

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Michał Zbojna
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Colorizations: Mikołaj Uchman and Spartacus Olsson

Sources:
Some images from the Library of Congress

From the Noun Project:
world by Arafat Uddin
Stamp by Made
questions by Gregor Cresnar
Money by DARAYANI
Money Bag by HAMEL KHALED
people by Florent Lenormand

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
“Epic Adventure Theme 3” – Håkan Eriksson
“You’re Trouble” – Rich in Rags
“1920s Chicago 2” – Magnus Ringblom
“It’s Not a Game” – Philip Ayers
“Weapon of Choice” – Fabien Tell
“On the Edge of Change” – Brightarm Orchestra
“For the Many STEMS INSTRUMENTS” – Jon Bjork
“Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
“Step on It” – Golden Age Radio

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

December 3, 2020

QotD: Presidential droit du seigneur

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

For a party that toots its own horn about how it’s all-in for the ladies, the Democrat Party sure has a weird way of showing it. The fact is that when the check comes for its dangerous and degenerate policies, every single time the Dem dudes dine and dash and stick the chicks with the bill.

Let’s look at some of the Dem dudes who do it, starting with the aptly named Bill Clinton. Mr. Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit was all too happy to use women as his personal playthings with varying degrees of consent, ranging from none to “I always wanted to do it in the Oval Office!” And the feminists, the media and the rest of the Democrat Party adjuncts gave him a pass. Some were willing to give him even more. The message was simple: if you are called upon to be a Clinton sex toy, kneel down then shut up for the cause.

This is a Democrat tradition. JFK, when he wasn’t tapping the help he was pimping them out to his buddies in the White House pool. His dalliance with Marilyn Monroe was one thing – she was a consenting adult who could have told him to pound sand (or something else). It’s his serial preying upon the interns and secretaries and other assorted Dem doxies in his orbit that really demonstrates the essential contempt for women that drove his satyriasis – and that (which along with its traditional racism) still drives the Democrat Party.

Oh, and speaking of driving, no discussion of the chronic Democrat abuse of women would be complete without observing that the Lion of the Senate left his booty call du jour to drown in an Oldsmobile at the bottom of a pond. And the same message we hear over and over again to protect Democrat exploiters protected Teddy Kennedy – hey Mary Jo, take one for the team.

She didn’t have much choice about taking one for the team since, in those last agonizing minutes, she couldn’t take a breath.

But hey, Teddy saved abortion, and his ceaseless campaign for a perpetual open season on troublesome fetuses makes it all worthwhile. Abortion is another of those Democrat policies that women get to pay for. The idea that it is somehow empowering or liberating for women is so much garbage. It’s empowering and liberating for men who don’t want to reap the result of their sowing.

Kurt Schlichter, “Women Always Have To Pick Up The Check For Democrats”, Townhall.com, 2020-08-30.

October 11, 2020

QotD: Britain’s National Health Service cult

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The NHS has not served the nation well, if international comparison is the criterion by which it should be judged. For example, when the NHS was founded (when British healthcare was among the best rather than the worst in Europe) the population of France had a life expectancy six years lower than that of Britain; it is now two years higher. The health of the population in Spain improved more under Franco than that of the British under the NHS in the same years. Of course, there are determinants of life expectancy other than healthcare systems, but at the very least the comparisons do not suggest any particular virtue to the NHS.

Survival from many serious illnesses such as cancer, heart attacks and strokes is lower in Britain than in most European countries. Publicity is sometimes given to these statistics but they are not immediately apparent to patients or their relatives, and in any case the NHS is immune to criticism because its deficiencies are assumed to be departures from its essential goodness or the result of inadequate funding.

No number of scandals, such as that of Mid Staffs in which hundreds of patients were neglected to a degree that often defied belief, all in plain sight of a large bureaucracy supposedly devoted to ensuring the quality of patient care, can dent faith in the NHS. Staff committed, and management connived at, acts of cruelty that would have made Mrs Gamp blush. Mr Cameron’s government, anxious not to seem an enemy of the NHS, which would have been politically damaging, swept the scandal under the carpet.

A system whose justification for its nationalisation of healthcare was egalitarianism has failed even in the matter of equality. If anything, the difference between the health of the richest and poorest sections of the population has increased rather than decreased under the NHS.

The gap between the life expectancy of unskilled workers and that of the upper echelons, which had been stable for decades before the foundation of the NHS, began to widen afterwards and is now far wider than it ever was. Again, there are reasons for inequality in health other than the deficiencies of healthcare, the prevalence of smoking and obesity, for example; but if systems are to be judged by their effects, the NHS has failed in its initial goal.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.

September 13, 2020

Are the Kielburgers fleeing before the real story breaks?

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

Ted Campbell listened to an Evan Solomon radio report recently and spells out the key points:

The Kielburgers, he notes are neither newcomers nor naifs. Mark Kielburger is a Rhodes Scholar and Craig Kielburger has, he say, “been rubbing shoulders with politicians since he was 12 years old.” They have, Mr Solomon says, been selling the “halo effect” to politicians and other celebrities, a list which he tells us includes Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Erin O’Toole and the “halo effect” says, in effect, if you come out and make us look good then we, being a famous, big-league charity will make you look good, too. It’s all part of an astute marketing plan.

But then Evan Solomon gets to the real question: if Tylenol, he says, can survive a scandal in which people died then why are the Kielburgers reacting so dramatically to what is, really, on the surface, a minor league scandal? So the Kielburgers paid Margaret Trudeau a few hundred thousand dollars to make a few charity appearances, is that such a big deal? I mean the Trudeaus are wealthy, aren’t they? They can’t be bought, can they? Well, most if us don’t have million dollar plus trust funds and most of us didn’t earn $450,000 in speaking fees in a year, but the Trudeau family is unlikely to have just forgotten about $250,000 in speaking fees paid to Margaret Trudeau. Bill Morneau may have forgotten about owning a villa in France, but unlike the Trudeaus, Mr Morneau is rich … really rich. So are the Kielburgers. The commercial property part of their WE empire, alone, is worth $50 Million. Could a few thousands dollars per appearance (she made 28 over four years, about one every couple of months) paid to Margaret Trudeau really threaten the entire WE empire?

[…]

My guess, and that’s all it is, is that there is real fear in the WE boardrooms and in WE’s legal department that Prime Minister Trudeau might be guilty of something more than just conflict of interest. Someone like Pierre Poilievre or the Lobbying Commissioner, for example, might think that further, deeper investigations are needed and those questions might lead investigators to look more deeply into why and how Justin Trudeau and the Kielburger brothers, themselves, cooked up the idea of WE Charity running a multi-hundred-million-dollar government programme and then trying to cover-up the whole thing.

Might those questions be enough to bring Justin Trudeau down?

Might those questions be enough to threaten the Kielburgers’ fortunes, even their freedom?

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