Canadian Politics 2020

[dubsartur]

Also, I think it was in 1952 that the old Liberal-Conservative two-party system imported from Ontario collapsed in British Columbia.  It never recovered.  Since then the province has been dominated by local parties which sometimes share a name with a federal one, like Social Credit under W.A.C. "Wacky" Bennett and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ancestor of the NDP, which was originally a Western Canadian party like the Greens and the Reform Party and the Saskatchewan Party and the Wild Rose Party).  It was sometime in the 1990s that the SoCreds collapsed and capital lined up behind the BC Liberals.

I am not the best person to speak about BC politics because it was all so remote from me growing up.  The BC Liberals were in the business of keeping house prices high, money flowing from resource industries (and former crown corporations) to foreign companies and their investors, and the health care system working without high taxes.  The NDP were for keeping unionized work-forces happy and ensuring that some of the money from chopping down all the woods and digging up all the ore went to workers.  Both were pretty good at keeping their friends' wallets full.  Those are not issues which get a student or junior software developer excited, especially given the other things that were happening in the 2000s. 

A positive aspect of West Canadian politics is that even in places which have the same party form government for 30 or 40 years, the party system still keeps shifting.  Sometimes its easier to align a coalition behind a new party than reform an existing party.  The fluidity of parties (well, Liste) in Austria was familiar to me.

Former CBC announcer Kai Nagata says that this documentary on socialist Harry Rankin's run for Mayor of Vancouver in 1986 against future BC Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell is good but I have not seen it yet https://rankinfilefilm.com/

And thanks to a Freedom of Information request, we now know that the BC Civil Service was aware that the Site C dam was sited on unstable ground in May 2019, and that SNC Lavalin, the Québec company which wrote a bill and demanded that the federal Liberals pass it to shield them from punishment for paying bribes to the Ghadaffi family, is a major contractor.

[dubsartur]

Canada has a federal system where health care is a provincial responsibility and many provinces have trouble meeting expenses.  Some provinces (the small rural Atlantic ones) have the pandemic under control (single digit new diagnoses per day), in others (Ontario, Quebec) it is exploding (a thousand to thousands of new cases a day), most are in between.  This is creating two kinds of tension.  If some provinces impose another lockdown order, they will call for federal grants to subsidize wages and rent payments but the whole country will have to pay for it.  And people whose provinces are handling the epidemic especially badly, like Annamie Paul the head of the GPC and this doctor in Toronto, are calling for a coordinated national coronavirus strategy.  Cynics would note that the federal government does not have a high level of expertise on health care, and that the same people would not be calling for this if Andrew Scheer were Prime Minister.

There are also tens of thousands of elderly Canadians planning to take winter vacations in warm parts of the United States which makes no sense to me at all.  If a lot of them get sick, US hospitals can't handle them (or their health insurance has a "no covid" clause), and they have to be evacuated that will also be a lot of trouble.

This is linked to the collapse of the media, because as there are fewer sources of local news and fewer things which everyone in a city reads or hears at least once a week, its harder to communicate local messages and give people a clear sense of the situation in their community so that together they come to a consensus on policies and implement them.

After the recount, the recount in the West Vancouver-Sea to Sky provincial riding changed the result from BC Liberal 41 votes ahead to BC Liberal 60 votes ahead.  So congratulations to the painstaking work at elections BC that keeps margins of error so small during a pandemic!

Here are the official BC and Austrian case numbers for COVID-19 as of 18 November 2020.  Both have the gradual rise in July and August to something similar to the original pandemic which was serious enough for us to shut down the border and the economy, then the explosion from September onwards.




Oh, and CPC head Erin O'Toole has come out swinging against the government of China, defeating the government on a non-binding motion to announce a plan to fight Chinese state-sponsored harassment and interference against Canadians within 30 days.  That is likely to be a winner because most Canadians are less friendly to the government of China than their government is, because it lines up with Trumpist policy in the United States, and because its easy to talk tough about a country with 40 times your country's population and 5 or 10 times your country's GDP run by people who play by communist rules when you are not in charge of turning words into deeds.

[dubsartur]

The federal Liberals have come out with the latest edition of St. Augustine's climate change policy: "let me reduce our emissions, oh lord, after at least two elections."  Whether Liberal or Conservative, Canadian governments have been doing this since the 1990s, each helping the other to implement two faces of a very similar policy (the Liberals always declare that the Tories are worse and the Liberals are the only party which can keep them out of power, and the Tories always warn about job-destroying liberals).

Québec is back on a stay-at-home order.  The premier announced that he could allow a short period of social contacts in December, and chose 24 to 27 December.  When asked why he picked those particular days and whether Jews could meet their families for hanukka, he said that he picked days which would satisfy most Québequois.  This brings up one of the dead horses of Québec poliitcs since the  Quiet Revolution against the Catholic Church in the 1960s, their policy of secularism (laïcité), its important and wordily explained philosophical differences from the Anglo tradition, and xenophobia.
Oh, and the families of the victims of the Portapique massacre are still fighting to get a sufficiently powerful inquiry into why the RCMP took 13 hours to tell locals that there was someone in a fake police car and uniform roaming around shooting people.  Several lives would have been saved if people knew to stay home.

And Andrew Wilkinson, head of the BC Liberal party, has resigned as party leader.  He remains interim leader and Member of the Legislative Assembly.

The grandfather and granddaughter handcuffed while trying to open an account with their Indian Status Cards at BMO are launching  a human rights complaint.

[Jubal]

I tried doing a quiz on remembering the Canadian provinces yesterday. I got most of them - the exceptions were the Northern Territory, Newfoundland and Labrador, and New Brunswick, the last of which I really should have got as it's mentioned in the song Cousin Jack, so I know the name well I just forget it's in Canada and is a province level unit. I also went and did this for a bunch of other countries - I only got about five of the Indian states (including forgetting the name of Kashmir, embarrassingly), was on a total non-starter with most places (I was totally lost trying to do France). The only places I got 100% scores for were Austria and the USA, which says something about my world alignment I guess.

[dubsartur]

I feel naughty and journalistic, but to continue the story of the Portapique mass shooting ...

Lisa Diana Banfield, who was in a common-law relationship with the murderer and resigned claims to his estate, has now sued it.  Presumably this is a technical legal move and her lawyer told her that she would be more likely to keep something if she was a plaintiff than a defendant.

She has also been accused of helping the murderer obtain .40 S&W handgun cartridges and .223 Remington (very similar to 5.56×45mm NATO) long gun cartridges in the month before the crime. 

A briefing to Justin Trudeau revealed that he used two long guns, a M-4 carbine ("Colt Law Enforcement Carbine”) and a Ruger mini-14, and two handguns, a Glock and a Ruger P89, and probably magazines with a capacity more than ten rounds.  The Mini-14 was obtained in Canada, the carbine was bought in California, the handguns smuggled from Maine.  There are at least three stories here about the American-guns-for-Canadian-pot trade, the spread of American tacticool culture amongst the Canadian middle class and police and corrections officers (a while ago, .40 S&W was the new cool cartridge in American police circles), and the disconnect between most MPs and gun culture (the briefing seems to assume that Trudeau does not know what a magazine is).  Quite a few of the American shooters offering seminars come to Canada every so often, and Canadians can read the same magazines and watch the same shows even if they can only play with handguns and most semiautomatic rifles at the range. 

The restrictions on firearm and ammunition storage and the ownership and transportation of handguns and high-capacity semiautomatic rifles from 20 to 25 years ago definitely reduced suicides and probably criminal shootings, but further harm reduction would require thought and expertise.

And the Liberals say they will fail to meet their deadline to give every First Nations community potable water (at the last election, 67 had "boil water" advisories, so the water was not safe for drinking; about a dozen will probably still have the same warning in spring 2021).  Canada is probably the country with the most plentiful supply of fresh water relative to population in the world.  This is a pledge which they will almost certainly fulfill, just late.

[dubsartur]

In documents released on a Freedom of Information request, $705,000 in cash was recovered from the house of the Portapique murderer.  This may or may not include his $475k withdrawal from Brinks a few days before his crime.

A friend of the murderer in Maine says that he took two Glock handguns from the friend's house a few years ago, and that the friend gave the murderer a Ruger handgun in exchange for some housework.  The murderer seems to have obtained two long guns from a gun shop and a gun show (the later described as a "AR" which would fit the Ruger rifle or the M-4 carbine used in the crimes) in Maine in April 2019 and driven one long gun back across the border.  Its possible that the gun show purchase was a "straw purchase" (party A provides the money, party B makes the purchase and provides proof of their right to purchase a firearm then hands it over to party A).

It was once very common for criminals in the United States to obtain guns by stealing people's unlocked "self-defense" weapons during breakins.  Guns are compact and easy to fence.  That is one reason why Canada requires firearms to be stored in locked safes separately from their ammunition (others are reducing suicides and accidents).  But as long as US handgun laws are so liberal, it will always be straightforward for criminals in Canada to obtain handguns. 

There was a series of 13 armed RCMP raids in the Halifax area on Wednesday 9 December.

December 17th is the international day to end violence against sex workers.  In that spirit, its worth saying that Canada still has Stephen Harper's "Swedish model" policy which was probably intended to let the Tories look like they were doing something then fail at the first court challenge.  The federal Liberals have not showed much interest in decriminalization or any other policy which is less dangerous and oppressive to sex-trade workers.

Also worth saying: Canadian police and Old Media are repeating a propaganda program from south of the border about "human trafficing."  This is being introduced because it seems a way to further the same patriarchal, authoritarian agenda without bringing up memories of the problems with earlier anti-prostitution campaigns and begging the question "why is what two consenting adults do in private anybody else's business?"  Its related to the global campaign against private communication and private electronic payments, which often use child pornography, terrorism, and intimate images shared without permission as stalking horses.