Exilian
Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter => Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza => Topic started by: dubsartur on March 06, 2020, 07:31:15 PM
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So after a couple of very eventful years, Canadian politics are in a sleepy phase. Newly goateed Justin Trudeau seems to have realized that he does not actually know what he wants to do after his advisors talked him out of his pledges from 2015, the Conservative leadership race is just getting started (Aron Seal seems to have dropped out because he could not secure his first 1,000 nominations by members by 27 February, party stalwarts Peter Mackay and Erin O'Toole are the only candidates who have already passed all stages of the application process), Canada is caught between the USA and China after the USA thought it would be a good idea to charge a Huawei executive while she was passing through Canada and have her extradited south of the border, and Coronavirus is keeping people at home and indoors.
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In university affairs, many Canadian universities have relied heavily on recruiting students from South and East Asia, because in most provinces they are allowed to charge foreign undergraduates something close to the cost of instruction and because the population of Canada is ageing. Some tiny (<10,000 students enrolled) universities and colleges like Cape Breton University (http://higheredstrategy.com/cape-breton-you-have-to-be-kidding-me/) have a majority of international students. So if there are major reductions in international travel due to fears of coronavirus/US-Iranian or US-Chinese tensions, that may hit them.
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This coronavirus is such a joke. 14 people in all the US have died and people are going nuts. Meanwhile over 16,000, that's sixteen thousand, have died from the flu so far this season and no one cares. Where's that joker meme when you need it.
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Indeed, when your base standard for a plague is "a third of the population dies," a possible 2% fatality rate looks a bit quaint.
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With coronavirus my understanding is that the issues are:
- We may have lost the chance to prevent it from becoming endemic.
- National health services have mostly been made too 'efficient' to be able to handle a double-digit percentage of the population going down with something infectious and life-threatening at the same time
- The political establishment lacks the will to impose effective quarantine measures soon enough, and rising movements just want to throw furriners into camps not listen to a bunch of MDs and epidemiologists go on and on about vectors and "a 2014 article in JID"
- it could mutate into something nastier, this is a new disease and we don't know how it will behave
It has spread very rapidly in South Korea and Italy which are not as poor or as badly governed as China.
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Also, before the 20th century the height of treatment for most contagious diseases was bed rest and basic nursing. When someone stumbled onto something that actually worked, they could not prove it and they could not spread it so a little while later a new fad took over, much like alternative medicine and diets today. It took until the 19th century to go from miasma theory to germ theory.
If you took away the respirators and the unlimited supply of clean water and healthy nutritious food, COVID-19 would have a much higher fatality rate than 2-4%. And we don't have enough respirators, hospital beds, etc. for the whole population. Canadian politicians and commentators are very much stuck in 'social conflict' thinking and don't know how to deal with issues that don't care about how they feel like climate change or epidemic disease (or a mugger).
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The Ontario Liberal Party now has an elected leader: Steven Del Duca (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Del_Duca). His biography is out of central casting (age 47, law degree, advisor to former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty, MP 2012-2018 and Minister of Transportation under Katherine Wynne 2014-2018) but he won solidly so party members must think he is a good choice.
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I still kinda want to understand what makes the Can-liberals tick better than I do at the moment. But I don't have the energy to wade into political theorising at the moment, even the blogposts on "what actually is liberalism" and "what is radical liberalism" that I really want to write to have something to point people at when they incessantly tell me that my political philosophy is a contradiction in terms.
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The relationship between federal and provincial parties is complicated too. It might be pretty close in Ontario, but in BC the Liberals are the party of capital and not very interested in the kinds of social policy that get a Justin Trudeau out of bed in the morning. Ujjal Dosanjh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ujjal_Dosanjh) who is interested in those kinds of issues held offices as a BC NDP cabinet minister and premier and a Federal Liberal MP.
Sophie Trudeau has tested positive for COVID-19 after a trip to the UK, Justin Trudeau is self-isolating.
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On Monday 16 March mirror universe Justin Trudeau has banned entry to Canada except for Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and "at this time, Americans." There is talk of financial aid to workers and businesses and of invoking the Emergencies Act which is the 1988 successor of the War Measures Act which was last invoked by Trudeau the Elder in the 1970 Front de libération du Québec crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Crisis). Meanwhile the Health Minister of British Columbia, next door to Washington State and already having some differences with Ottawa over pipelines, states that "we remain concerned that access to visitors from the United States continues to be allowed."
Premier of Ontario Rob Ford has declared a state of emergency and various First Nations leaders are requesting that people not travel into their communities due to limited resources.
Edit: Jason Kenny has declared a state of emergency on Tuesday the 17th too. BC, Alberta, and Ontario are the three provinces with the highest rates of confirmed cases.
Edit: BC declared a state of emergency on Wednesday the 18th.
The province of Alberta is considering decriminalizing drunk driving and replacing the criminal charges with fines.
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How open actually is the US/Can border across much of its length? Is e.g. commuting across it something anyone actually does, or would it be far too much of a faff to be remotely sensible?
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How open actually is the US/Can border across much of its length? Is e.g. commuting across it something anyone actually does, or would it be far too much of a faff to be remotely sensible?
I am trying to find the words for how big this is but just one bridge between Detroit and Windsor ON carries half a billion dollars of trade a day (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/the-canada-u-s-border-by-the-numbers-1.999207) and several hundred thousand people cross the border on a normal day (ignoring things like the library that was accidentally built with the entrance in one country and the loans desk in another, or all the surprisingly heavy kayaks which pass between San Juan Island and Vancouver Island and return half an hour later). Ontario and BC are probably the most integrated provinces, there are not so many in the prairies and the Maritimes are next to very rural parts of the United States (but if you live in one of those parts, crossing into Quebec to get drunk on your 18th birthday or visiting the hardware store in Maine is a big deal). There are people who commute daily or on the weekend, nations with a US half and a Canadian half ... and "nobody can defend this border so we have to learn to live with each other" has been British and then Canadian policy since 1815.
And there are a few bits of the USA which are only accessible by land from Canada: Alaska is the most famous, but there are also ones like Point Roberts, Washington (https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=point+roberts%2C+WA&polygon_geojson=1&viewbox=) and the Northwest Angle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Angle) of Minnesota.
I think that "at this time" is code for "my ministers tell me they need a few days to figure out how to do this without ending automobile production north of Mexico three days later."
Edit: And yes, later on the 17th "Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the talks" report that "Canada and the United States are finalizing a deal to close their shared border to non-essential travel — an extraordinary measure designed to slow the spread of COVID-19."
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The Conservative leadership race is facing serious hurdles given that the basic activity of an internal party election is sending people door to door and around ballrooms gathering signatures and donations. They are down to four candidates and one possible and people inside the party are talking in public about changing the rules.
The border closure is looking a bit sinister: refugee claimnants will no longer be allowed to cross into Canada outside of official border crossings (and can't use official crossings because of the Safe Third Country Agreement with the USA and (quoth the Ceeb (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-march21-covid19-1.5505540)) "there will be exceptions for some foreign nationals coming to Canada to work, study or live permanently.
The exemptions include seasonal agricultural workers, fish and seafood workers, caregivers and all other temporary foreign workers, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).
But IRCC warns that people planning to come to Canada under these exceptions should not travel immediately. The government will announce when the exemptions are formally in place, which is expected some time next week.
Travel exemptions also include international students who already held a study permit or had been approved for one when travel restrictions kicked in on March 18."
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The Conservative leadership race is facing serious hurdles given that the basic activity of an internal party election is sending people door to door and around ballrooms gathering signatures and donations.
This is fascinating to me - in the UK, I'd increasingly assume that the vast majority of campaigning for a party leadership campaign was mailshots and online activism. There's almost nowhere that has a high enough density of party members that door to door work would be a good use of your activists' time.
And yes, I'm afraid that many of these borders won't get back to being as open as they used to be for some time :(
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A big part of campaigning for a party leader in Canada is just trying to get new members for the party, most of whom will lose interest within a year (the Samara Centre for Democracy reports have some details). This time the Conservatives are trying to crack down on that by requiring a percentage of votes to be people who were already members at the start of campaigning and carefully not mentioning the police investigations into how Jason Kenny became leader of one of Alberta's conservative parties then took over the other.
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Yes, that's a very different expectation set - the only leadership campaign in my lifetime in a UK political party to have included a major membership rise was that of Corbyn for the Labour party, and that was very controversial - the expectation here is that member recruitment isn't even really the leader's priority, and that leadership elections are conducted between the pre-existing members of the party.
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On 26 March the CPC suspended the leadership context despite Peter MacKay pointing out the Canada held national elections while we were fighting the Krauts and Stornoway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stornoway_(residence)) would be a great place to self-isolate. They will reconsider the decision on 1 May.
The Liberal minority government tried to grant itself unlimited powers to tax and spend without parliamentary oversight until December 2021, after media protests the opposition parties admitted that that might not be a good idea. One rogue Conservative MP (https://scottreid.ca/why-i-am-in-the-house-today/) attended the bare minimum quorum (with 2 metre social distancing ...) against the wishes of his whip to deny unanimous approval to the final bill.
I would say that Trudeau is handling this pretty well because he knows he doesn't know anything about epidemiology, and because for whatever reason this situation does not run into a contradiction in his ideology in the way that all the things he promised in 2015 ran head on into "but I don't want to bother anyone with power."
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Something light: former prime minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull released an autobiography, and he and his ghost writer chose Justin Trudeau as their person to tell scandalous anecdotes about, mostly related to the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull
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Details continue to emerge about the spree killing in rural Nova Scotia during the stay-at-home order by a gunman disguised as a RCMP officer with a variety of vehicles disguised as RCMP vehicles. Local journalists do not have a lot of resources.
Justin Trudeau has responded characteristically: rather than working to make our current systems for managing and tracking firearms more effective and work harder with border control and US local police to slow the trade in US handguns for Canadian weed, or even finish implementing the bill his government passed in 2019 (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-gun-control-c71-not-enacted-1.5543032), he wants to ban more semi-automatic rifles. At present there is not really data to say where most firearms used in assault and murder in Canada come from, but gun crime tends to be related to organized crime or domestic violence (Canada does have firearms storage regulations which reduced the rates of accidents, suicide, impulse crime, and housebreakers picking up some firearms with the video console and the jewelry box).
And since you can import a semi-automatic handgun and a box of 50 cartridges for the price of importing a kilo or two of narcotics, and hundreds of tons of controlled substances cross the border every year ... But banning certain weapons sounds good on TV, institutional reforms take longer and are harder to explain.
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And humh, the accused murderer was banned from owning firearms for life in 2002, and a neighbour says she reported him to the police for stockpiling firearms and beating his spouse (https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/a-nightmarish-crisis-and-the-mistakes-that-may-have-been-made-by-the-rcmp/) but was brushed off. While tracking down the suspect in his RCMP disguise, one group of officers shot up a fire-hall because an officer from another unit was standing next to it and they decided that the officer was the suspect.
The RCMP are the only police force in most parts of rural Canada, and they have long-standing issues with competence, racism, and sexism which a series of directors and governments have been unable to solve. So again, its easier to pass a new law than to make the ones which already exist effective.
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And by 20 April the police submitted a document where "multiple witnesses" said that the accused murderer had boasted to them about having multiple firearms https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/mass-killing-nova-scotia-search-warrant-1.5575059 That often happens in Canada: information just does not jump all the hoops in the bureaucracy to trigger action.
Meanwhile Canada has announced that it will resume issuing export permits to sell Light Armoured Vehicle armoured cars to Saudi Arabia. They have promised us that they will not use them to commit human-rights abuses and that the videos from religious minorities in their kingdom and Houthis in Yemen are fake news and anyways the factory that makes them is in a strategic riding ::)
What Ensaf Haidar (the wife of Raif Badawi) and Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun and other less famous Saudi refugees in Canada think about this I do not know.
Edit: Oh wow, back in 2011 they had a tip saying that he had caches of handguns and long guns at two specific locations and was talking about killing cops. Again, murder and arson are very illegal in Canada and it was illegal for the shooter to own any firearm made after 1898, but laws are not magic spells, you have to actually set up systems to enforce them and carry those systems out.
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Former BC Green Party leader and current independent MLA Andrew Weaver just tweeted that his two colleagues were not willing to back his threat to reject a confidence vote and go back to the polls over a NDP plan to develop BC's liquid natural gas industry https://www.politicstoday.news/british-columbia-today/weaver-says-green-mlas-were-afraid-to-stand-up-to-ndp-over-lng
Twitter makes everyone stupid and he or a close family member are suffering a very serious health problem which he does not want to talk about (between the lines, his decision to become an independent seems to have been that he can't promise to be at the legislature whenever the Green party needs his vote).
Meanwhile in Alberta, Jason Kenney just withdrew a policy against developing open-pit coal mines in environmentally sensitive areas (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-coal-policy-rescinded-mine-development-environmental-concern-1.5578902), and declared that fossil fuels are an essential industry but checking whether orphan wells are leaking or birds are drowning in tailings ponds is not.
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Prominent Conservative Party of Canada member Stockwell Day has stepped down from some positions with large Canadian businesses and media corporations after seeming to deny that there is such a thing as structural racism in Canada. Columnist Rex Murphy also has egg on his face and may be considerably less prominent in the future.
A Liberal MP was charged in early April with breaking and entering, harassment, and assault https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/marwan-tabbara-charged-1.5600249
And Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou's first attempt to have the proceedings to extradite her to the USA thrown out was rejected, and the BC supreme court suddenly decided that due to very serious technical reasons other parts of the case could not be completed in fall 2020 as planned and might have to extend until, for example, the last week of January 2021
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I note meanwhile that Trudeau is enjoying a significant poll bounce at the moment, like other leaders during Coronavirus, indeed somewhat better than that of most of his Anglosphere counterparts. The Liberals' maintenance of a vague atmosphere of competence (at least to the external viewer) seems to have its own rewards in this sort of situation I guess.
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Yes, 4000 years of history tell us that situations like this boost support in the state unless they monumentally screw up. I don't know if any heads of state will bring things to the point that they have to throw themselves off the cliff to restore fertility to the land, but some sure seem to be trying hard to restore the Old Ways.
Meanwhile, there is a lot of talk about cases of police in Canada killing a woman named Chantel Moore during a wellness check called by a friend, throwing a woman named Regis Korchinski-Paquet off her high-rise balcony in Toronto after being called in by family concerned about her mental health (police say she fell), stepping back into their car to calmly drive it into an angry drunk in Nunavut (there is video), and the courts dropping all charges against the people arrested by police in with long guns and baclavas for defending Wetsuweten territory (so if they were unarmed, and committing no crime, why did the police violate firearms safety 001 by pointing a firearm at something they did not intend to shoot?)
Edit: other political consequences of the current situation ... premier Legault in Quebec (high infection rate, collapse of care for old people in assisted living facilities) and premier Jason Kenney in Alberta (blatant support for the oil industry and attacks on public-sector workers and environmental monitoring during a recession) are in trouble, while premier Doug Ford in Ontario has roused from his political deathbed by doing the obvious things (putting together a team of MDs and PhDs, having them create a simple and clear policy and going on TV to look serious and explain it, splashing lots of money around ... this kind of thing was not his strength before but I guess either the polls or the coronavirus statistics sobered him up).
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Yes, I'd seen some stuff about Doug Ford doing a good job, which from what I'd heard about Doug Ford was a surprise to me.
And yes - I think the interesting thing to compare is not whether crises boost support for incumbents, it's by how much they boost it and for how long. The UK conservatives saw a much smaller bounce when the crisis started and are now at significantly worse levels than that, for example. The Austrian conservatives saw a modest bump in support, while the German conservatives got a much more significant bounce. Trudeau's bump seems to be toward the bigger end of the spectrum and isn't obviously collapsing as the crisis goes on.
How much does implicit or explicit comparison with the US as main neighbour influence Canadian views on these sorts of international issues do you think?
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I think that comparisons with the USA are a big factor in all Canadian federal politics these days. One of the big barriers the Conservatives would have to overcome to form government is all the people looking south of the border and saying "Trudeau may not be perfect but he's better than that."
Ontario has big problems (high infection rates, conditions inside assisted living facilities breaking down and needing the military called in) but Doug Ford seems to be doing the basic things you expect a premier to do in a pandemic whereas earlier his style of governing was chaotic. He started out very unpopular so it was easier to rise than fall.
On the current situation, Anglo-Canadian police and corrections officers borrow a lot of their culture from the USA, especially the ones who see themselves as warriors. And I will be interested to see how much the protest movement focuses on specifically Canadian problems around the RCMP and harrasment of indigenous people, versus the US-oriented Black Lives Matter. There were two cases in recent years where young indigenous men were shot dead by civilians while committing property crimes (sleeping in a stolen vehicle, trying to steal a car parked in a locked garage) and the shooters were found not guilty.
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The Conservative leadership race continues with a four-way debate in French.
It turns out that the shooter in Nova Scotia withdrew half a million dollars in cash from Brink's / CIBC Intria on 30 March before committing his crimes on 18 and 19 April. Governments have strongly discouraged large cash transactions for decades as part of the War on Drugs, so if you want to do them it helps to have connections, and Macleans is investigating (https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-nova-scotia-shooter-case-has-hallmarks-of-an-undercover-operation/) the possibility that the shooter was working with an intelligence organization such as the RCMP. In the west of Canada, many First Nations believe there are serial killers who are either associated with local police or who the local police ignore as long as its only indigenous people who disappear; its also well known that spouse abusers in rich countries cultivate relationships with the police to use their databases to track down their ex-partners, or just have any phone calls from neighbours handled discreetly.
I hope that some of my colleagues will be brave enough to talk about slavery in what became British Columbia in the 19th century (quite a few of the peoples around the Salish Sea enjoyed raiding their neighbours and hauling anyone that they could catch back to work for them). The history of the British Empire, war, peace, and slavery is complicated.
Oh, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was expelled from the House of Commons for calling a Bloc MP whip failed to support an anti-racism bill racist. I have not read the text of the bill so I have no further comments except that in Canadian and USA political discourse, calling someone racist is seen as more shocking than some racialized killings.
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Parliament has been meeting quite irregularly since the 2019 election, the opposition has not been very effective, and our Fearless Leader's support in the polls is jumping. Just to add to the fun, an "armed" active-duty Canadian Forces reservist just burst through the gates around Rideau Hall (https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/public-asked-to-avoid-sussex-drive-due-to-police-operation) by ramming them with a black truck at 6.40 am on 2
or 3 July. He was apprehended by the RCMP at 8.30 am after the crash disabled his vehicle. (So there were almost two hours of "dialogue" between break-in and arrest).
Its wonderful how some kinds of people can be peacefully apprehended while carrying a weapon and committing violent crime within earshot of the Prime Minister and Governor General, while other kinds of people get tossed to the ground or run over by the same police force for being insufficiently submissive, isn't it?
Edit: the suspect now faces 21 different firearms charges, including possessing a restricted or prohibited weapon, and one witness thought he was carrying a long gun. I would expect someone in his position who had not been preparing to commit a crime for some time to have a semiautomatic rifle with plenty of 5-round magazines, and possibly a pistol or revolver with a capacity of up to 10 rounds (but transporting that would get much more attention from police if he was stopped on the long drive from northern Manitoba).
Edit: and oh wow, now they say he was carrying four loaded firearms, including a M-14 with a high-capacity magazine (probably a standard-issue 20 round mag from the USA) and uttered a threat against the prime minister. A battle rifle is no joke, even in semi-automatic only and with mostly 10-round magazines. Assassination has not been a part of Canadian politics since Thomas D'Arcy McGee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_D%27Arcy_McGee) and the Chilcotin War, but now two prime ministers in a row have been attacked by lone gunmen.
Edit: and yep, he had "a Norinco M-14," a "high standard revolver" (High Standard seems to be a manufacturer (https://www.genitron.com/Articles/post/high-standard-revolvers)), and two non-restricted shotguns (that could mean break-open, could be pump-actions with a significant magazine capacity, what was available probably depended on the local hunting laws). As a Canadian Ranger he would have been issued with a Short Magazine Lee-Enfield or a similar bolt-action rifle. And he started posting a lot of pandemic conspiracy theories in March.
The one high-capacity magazine is significant, anyone can make something which goes bang but reliable magazines to feed rapid fire are hard, so banning them is an effective means of harm reduction. And the charge sheet includes uttering threats of death or bodily harm (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3ezg3/armed-military-member-corey-hurren-who-stormed-gate-threatened-justin-trudeau-police-say).
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On the topic of whether politicians have fairly fixed personalities and interests or respond to events: the Trudeau government is in trouble for giving a $19.5 million contract to WE Charity / Free the Children (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WE_Charity) which paid $350,000 to two of the Trudeau family for speaking between 2016 and 2020; Sophie Trudeau, the prime minister's wife, is a prominent volunteer with the organization.
Edit: in fact, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau was tested positive for the new coronavirus after attending a We Charity event in the UK on 4 March (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/fears-grow-sophie-gregoire-trudeau-picked-up-virus-on-london-trip). Canadaland, which was the first news agency to obtain receipts for the payments by the charity to Trudeau, keep saying "$900 million contract", but the contract was to process $900 million in grants not to be paid that much.
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The 2004 Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the USA (stating that people who have arrived in one country cannot seek asylum or refugee status in the other) has just been ruled contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by a federal court https://globalnews.ca/news/7207018/safe-third-country-what-happens-next/ Pierre Trudeau has the charter added to the constitution. The agreement will remain in force for six months which is (checks) 22 January.
And the institution which was offered a contract to administer $900 million in spending on volunteers was the WE Charity Foundation, est. January 2018 to hold WE Charity's real estate. It has the same phone number and address as WE Charity, which might be why the prime minister said the contract was with WE Charity. So in their wisdom the government gave the contract to a holding company with no assets and no experience in the area :o
Edit: The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, BC Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, and BC Premier John Horgan have asked the federal government to decriminalize possession of small amounts of controlled substances
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In another example of the world ceasing to make sense, federal minister of finance Bill Morneau has resigned as cabinet minister and Liberal member of parliament and Justin Trudeau has prorogued parliament until September. This was one of Stephen Harper's favourite tricks (one which triggered a constitutional crisis) and low and suspicious minds suspect its related to the three parlimentary investigations into his relationship with WE Charity. The committees investigating them can't meet while parliament is suspended.
The Bloc Quebecois had threatened to vote against the next confidence vote unless a group of Liberal officials resigned.
There are also allegations that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman attempted to have a dissident intelligence official murdered in Canada last year just days after the Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.
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The depressing thing is that the current Canadian situation looks comparatively good from an ethics perspective compared to current practice in the UK - someone actually resigned from something over a bad thing! Meanwhile in my home country the entire HE section has been put into absolute meltdown after a major legal, ethical, and practical scandal over using an algorithm to edit students' final school grades which massively inflated the grades for private schools, and the minister responsible is still in post.
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I saw a bit about that in the Guardian but was not able to follow the details except that people were being assigned grades based on their location and type of school.
Macleans has a good piece on a strange kind of political writing we get in Ontario (where Macleans is based).
what made Fotheringham the most-read columnist in English Canada for more than 25 years was his knack for making his readers feel like he was letting them in on the most closely-held secrets of the trade. As if, somehow, for the price of an issue of Maclean’s, you were getting the real skinny on how power worked in Canada. ...
But what was at least as important was that Fotheringham brought a hefty dose of horse sense to his writing. So he’d get big things right that other writers were getting wrong. That 1973 piece about Quebec politics carried the headline “Don’t Count (Parti Québécois leader) René (Lévesque) Out,” precisely when a lot of observers outside Quebec were doing just that. ...
But after a careful read of 30 years’ worth of Fotheringham columns, I can’t see evidence that he had favourites. Well, he did have one: he liked Brian Mulroney early. But when Muldoon became Prime Minister, Fotheringham was so aghast at having his guy in power that he took an assignment in Washington for several years.
Q: So he was a Tory then?
Not even. I think he just found Mulroney personally charming. Otherwise he didn’t much care which side was in power, as long as he could be ahead of his colleagues in reporting the league standings. On ideological fights—or, perish the thought, on policy debates—Fotheringham took no position. I suspect any discussion of the ends of politics bored him. Or he mistrusted claims about ends. Whatever a politician might think he was trying to do, to Fotheringham what he was really trying to do was win. And he greatly preferred discussing tactics to strategy.
So you have people who refuse to engage in federal or provincial politics, but claim the right to earn a generous living on the basis of being experts in federal or provincial politics. I am trying to imagine how that would work in any other trade like writing or hockey or carpentry: the Don Cherry types tend to be former competitors. And they don't always show that they understand that saying "X is rising in the polls" makes them rise and "Y is scandalous and unacceptable" makes it scandalous.
I read some of that stuff back in my teens when I was looking for people to explain the rules of my society, but gradually gave it up as I realized that they might all be frauds pretending to know things they could not be bothered to learn.
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Erin O'Toole has been announced winner of the Conservative Party of Canada leadership contest, giving punsters fun they have been denied since a John Tory being Mayor of Toronto got old and the Conservative Reform Alliance Party saw the first posters with their acronym and held an emergency meeting to change their name.
The CPC are so far from my own circles that I don't have anything else intelligent to say.
The machines opening the sealed ballots tore several thousand of them.
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The pandemic and ongoing issues between settlers and First Nations are bringing a lot of Canadian racism into public which used to be confined to boozy evenings and the deeper crevices of people's heads.
There has been an right-wing online smear campaign against Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam, MD which is doing well in DuckDuckGo. She was born in the British colony of Hong Kong, grew up in the UK and emigrated to Canada towards the end of her medical education.
Last April, one of the CPC leadership candidates (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tam-sloan-china-caucus-apology-ontario-1.5550103) asked whether she was "for Canada or for China. Dr. Tam must go! Canada must remain sovereign over decisions, the UN, the WHO and Chinese Communist propaganda must never again have a say over Canada's public health!"
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I saw some attack on the Canadian government being retweeted somewhere on Twitter, something to do with "deals with the CCP for vaccines" or some such. I don't know enough about Canadian politics right now to know what it was about and haven't had time to read more unfortunately.
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I saw some attack on the Canadian government being retweeted somewhere on Twitter, something to do with "deals with the CCP for vaccines" or some such. I don't know enough about Canadian politics right now to know what it was about and haven't had time to read more unfortunately.
I have not heard that one, but I would guess it is part of the global conspiratorial movement blaming the pandemic on a foreign other, usually the WHO or China. I don't know what makes people become Freie Denker Querdenker in Germany, but in Canada I would think it is mostly people to whom the ways we know of controlling this pandemic are ideologically unacceptable (running big deficits to pay people to sit at home, wearing masks and washing hands and avoiding gatherings to protect our neighbours, focusing on protecting the most vulnerable not let the Market or God choose winners and punish losers, working cooperatively through international organizations, one day possibly another mandatory vaccine - and of course some people want the State to track all of our movements and all of our contacts in the name of infection control). Or people who are scared and want someone to blame.
The Conservative Party of Canada and the CCP have a complicated relationship, where their policies touch the two parties are pretty close but the nationalistic and individual-liberties wings of the conservative movement sometimes want to take a swing at China. And right now saying "China is our enemy" can be a way to say "we should get closer to our American allies."
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We Charity is ending its operations in Canada (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/we-charity-winding-down-operations-1.5717899). I think there will be some reportable material as it unwinds its complex corporate structure, because like some other charities theirs seems to have some hands which money stick to. A group called Charity Intelligence (https://www.canadalandshow.com/we-charity-was-in-financial-trouble-before-covid-says-charity-watchdog/) says that their financial statements look more like a company being asset stripped than a charity's: a lot of transactions backed by short-term loans, and things where the charity takes on the debts associated with a project but a for-profit or an individual holds the assets (and most of the Canadian and US boards of directors of WE Charity resigned shortly before the scandal hit the news).
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That sounds quite reminiscent of the Kids Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_Company) case in the UK - a charity run by a charismatic individual, but poorly managed and entirely dependent on substantial government funding. At least Kids Company doesn't seem to have had any significant assets to be stripped; it just collapsed because the government finally stopped paying it.
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I did not know about that one! I think the Kielburger brothers are charismatic outgoing types who like to get out on stage and shaking hands with celebrities and politicians.
This is an old problem, the Merchant of Prato left careful instructions in his will to prevent his charity being taken over by the church and the money diverted to pay for some bishop's second mistress. In the Before Times there was all that talk about effective altruism.
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Interesting topic - I didn't realize Canadian bureaucracy was this contested
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This is definitely an unusual scandal, whereas SNC Lavalin was a paint-by-numbers Liberal scandal (and with a few details changed it would have been a classic Conservative scandal). The only surprises were that Justin Trudeau was involved and that SNC Lavelin actually wrote a bill which they wanted the government to pass.
Canadaland is one of the very small, web-distribution-only journalism outfits which are appearing, they do a mix of investigative reporting and snark about the Ontario media from a nonpartisan lefty perspective. They got ahold of a tape of a call in 2017 where someone at We's Kenyan operations (Free the Children) is frustrated about trouble making payments to Kenyan officials and about corruption investigations (https://www.canadalandshow.com/crime-and-fraud-at-we-charity-in-kenya/) and tells one of the Kielburgers "No. No, because, you know, right now, honestly, if I had a gun, I would shoot the motherportugaler dead, right now. ... Honestly, I could call my guys tonight and take care of this guy. I’m not even joking. He’s not going to jeopardize my life, your life, a lot of people’s lives." The Kielburgers' current line is that the conversation was part of an investigation of the local agent, but they kept him in office for eight months after the call in which he said he was committing "criminal offenses," and it sure sounds like if accountants had a look at their Kenyan operations' books they would have concerns.
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In BC politics, the main news is more traditional: the pandemic (a local tradition! (http://www.web.uvic.ca/vv/student/smallpox/overview/index.html)), poverty and lack of services in Vancouver leading to people peeing in public at night (toilet politics are so important around the Salish Sea that they have even spawned jolly cartoon mascots (https://sarahmarchildon.blogspot.com/2006/07/so-long-mr-floatie-well-miss-crap-out.html)), cost overruns at the multi-billion dollar Site C dam on the Peace River which would be built on unstable slate, and the premier threatening to break his Confidence and Supply Agreement and call a snap election because the leader of the Green Party had changed and the agreement did not mention a pandemic.
Canadian journalists love to speculate about non-majority governments failing, because most of them have an unshakable faith that the rightful state of things is for the two biggest parties in a jurisdiction to bat power back and forth like tennis players while the journalists give wittty commentary.
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The BC Green party now has a new leader, MLA Sonia Furstenau. I don't know anything about her. Each stage of the two-stage vote involved about 2,500 ballots.
There is a lot of speculation about Erin O'Toole based on his early statements. I would need to track the originals down. He is an advocate of a formal alliance between the UK and the old white dominions (CANZUK (https://erinotoole.ca/platform/canzuk/)).
Edit: And oh wow, pioneering (and increasingly hipster) Canadian outdoor store Mountain Equipment Co-Op has handed itself over to a Los Angeles finance firm due to trouble obtaining loans. They were founded in 1971 and have 22 stores. "“After careful consideration of all viable options, the Board made this difficult decision,” said MEC’s Board Chair Judi Richardson. “Despite significant progress on a thoughtful turnaround strategy undertaken by new leadership, no strategy could have anticipated or overcome the impact of the global pandemic on our business."
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The Premier of BC has broken the Confidence and Supply Agreement with the Greens and called an election for 24 October. Presumably, he hopes to win a majority for his own party rather than the "majority of one" which his NDP plus the Greens have. Neither of the two opposition parties in the legislature (the BC Liberal party of capital and the BC Greens) are happy, the next election was supposed to be in October 2021 according to a fixed election date law and the Confidence and Supply Agreement
With the pandemic and ongoing revelations of the prospects of the Site C dam project, we live in interesting times.
Edit: Oh, and a Canadian citizen with extensive ties to the USA (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pascale-ferrier-ricin-court-1.5733618) has been arrested at a Cdn-US border crossing on charges of mailing ricin-laced letters to the President of the United States. I am not sure which direction she was crossing in, but Can to USA seems more plausible.
Edit: Oh, and the mass shooting in Nova Scotia seems to have been triggered by anxiety about the pandemic and possible government responses (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/portapique-mass-shooting-unsealed-court-documents-1.5732994). So that is 23 more dead because of the pandemic, like all the older people who are dying because of stress or strain on the medical system. The RCMP have a public explanation of how the shooter was able to withdraw half a million dollars in $100 bills from his bank shortly before the shooting, but they are not always the most truthful witnesses.
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So I am in covid jail (house quarantine in Canada after entering the country from an infected region), and the GPC has a new leader, Annamie Paul. She is an Ontarian lawyer who is black, I know nothing about her, but I respect that she called the Liberals and Conservatives intellectually bankrupt from spending too long watching polls.
/sarcasm Someone in BC has founded an Ecosocialist Party, because obviously what we need at the moment that the old corrupt two-party system is finally cracking is even more vote splitting on the left.
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The Green Party of British Columbia has released its platform on 14 October, 30 days after Sonia Furstenau became leader. Because of the mail-in voting, with suggested deadline 17 October, many voters won't be able to flip through it before they cast their ballot.
I wish I had something else to report to amuse Jubal, but its been a cut-and-paste election. The BC Liberals tacked socialist but without much effect on the polls, and there will probably be a significant amount of strategic voting from the Greens to the NDP (reminder: party of the public-sector and resource industry unions) because people are worried about the Liberals (reminder: party of capital) getting back in or because of the disarray within the Green Party of BC. The events are mostly outdoors and socially distanced.
In another year this might have been the election where the Greens burst from 3 to more MLAs and broke the two-party system for good, because the NDP are ahead in the polls, but it does not look like that will work out.
The social and legacy media have gotten excited about the usual examples of people saying things when they did not realize there was a microphone, and with Anglo culture's problems working out rules for how sexuality should fit into different areas of life.
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Some people think that an unusual number of candidates this provincial election have been forced to withdraw or expelled from their party. The reasons have often been comic-opera ones: a (federal or provincial?) Green party election and leadership candidate tweeted in support of a BC Ecosocialist candidate in another riding and was thrown out until he pointed out that former federal party leader Elizabeth May had endorsed Jody Wilson-Raybould over the local green candidate in a federal election, a BC Liberal candidate asked whether a proposal to provide free contraception was a plan to reduce the numbers of the poor. That's not an uncommon conspiratorial take on programs to encourage family planning in poor hot countries, but someone thought it was a bridge too far in provincial politics.
A murder victim was found in a blue recycling bin in the waters off English Bay in Vancouver (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/human-remains-recycling-bin-vancouver-1.5768335), because Vancouver gangs are British Columbians goddam it!
In federal politics, a mob of settlers burned a loaded van and poisoned lobsters belonging to Mi'kmaq lobster fishers exercising their treaty right to take a moderate number of lobsters out of season. Police were present but did not intervene, which might theoretically have an acceptable explanation but looks very bad until they can provide one.
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I guess it might also be of interest that this is the first BC election in my lifetime fought without corporate, union, or foreign donations to campaigns or parties. The new government banned them in 2017 and introduced a per-vote subsidy like federal parties used to get. A lot of commentators don't seem to be noting that one reason why the BC Liberal Party is struggling could be that they are operating on 20% as much money as in previous elections (https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-finally-the-partys-over-for-no-limit-political-donations-in-b-c) while the Greens and NDP still have about half.
There have also been some attacks by the BC Liberals on BC Conservative candidates, who often get 5-10% of the vote in some ridings which might be safe Liberal seats if there was only one corporatist candidate from a big party. But that is just paint-by-numbers personal politics, and an example of the principle that infighting between factions competing for the same people is usually nastier than infighting between 'self and other.'
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Hm, yes, that sort of campaign finance stuff does make a difference. I do wonder if parts of the last decade might've been different if the Conservatives hadn't regularly been able to outspend everyone else combined. That said, the Lib Dems actually had a pretty solidly funded election last year due to attracting a lot of anti-Brexit cash, and still lost seat total thanks to appalling targeting, a bad message strategy, and relentlessly effective negative campaigning from Labour which peeled off much of the left flank of the party's potential support by polling day.
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Yes, I don't think funding is ever decisive in elections, but when you lose the opportunities to communicate your message that come from being the government in the Westminister system, and lose more of your funding sources than other campaigns lose, its another hill to climb. (Less people are paying attention and criticizing your every action, and you can talk about the wonderful things you would do without awkward questions about the less wonderful things you have been doing, but I think on the whole being the government gives advantages in spreading your message).
Federally, there is brinkmanship around confidence motions and the investigations into WE Charity and its relationship to the Trudeau family which were shut down while parliament was prorogued (investigations are run by parlimentary committees, committees only meet while parliament is in session).
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42nd provincial election day in BC! 1.1 million ballots were cast in advance or by mail, compared to 1.8 total ballots in the provincial election of 2017. For reasons I don't understand, it will take several weeks to count these other ballots; the ones cast normally are usually counted by the day after the election.
Edit: its clauses 127ff. of the Elections Act (BC) (https://www.bclaws.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96106_07#section127): final count shall begin no earlier than on the 13th day after the closing of polls, and this final count is the one which includes ballots not cast at the polls on election day.
Canadian provincial elections don't have the money thrown into publicly-available polling that some other elections do (parties do as many riding-level polls as they can, only sometimes providing the results to candidates), but I would bet on a NDP majority.
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It has come out that newly re-elected premier of Saskatchewan Scott Moe was a chronic unsafe driver in the 1990s (one conviction for drunk driving in 1992, one charge for impaired driving and leaving the scene of the accident in 1994, and killing a woman in an accident at 6 am in 1997 where alcohol was not mentioned but which he says he "does not remember" (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/scott-moe-sheds-light-on-fatal-1997-crash-1.4280677)). He was 18 at the time of the first conviction, but personally I do not think that anyone who gets into accidents in a motor vehicle while impaired should be in charge of anything more important than an ice-cream stand, and the Saskatchewan Party and a province with a million residents is definitely more important.
Its very hard to get around rural Canada without a car, since the settlement pattern on the prairies was isolated farms in Industrial Age sized plots not villages with cotters and yardlanders.
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If your glands are not burned out yet, tensions between former BC Green party chief Andrew Weaver and his former party reached the point that he appeared in a campaign ad for BC NDP leader John Horgan and said he supported the re-election of a BC NDP candidate in Vancouver. In a couple of interviews, he strongly hinted that he had irreconcilable disagreements with the BC Green leadership candidate who won. He presents it as having a more pragmatic approach and Furstenau having a more membership-lead one, but he also says that he threatened to withdraw his vote and bring down the government against the opposition of his party.
But his head is not clear right now due to some kind of medical crisis in his family, everyone else's head is not clear because of the pandemic / American media, and even if my glands were not burned out I have given up trying to understand these things unless I know all the people involved face to face. I won't be fooled again (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6239.msg141392#msg141392).
Local environmentalist / active democracy advocacy the Dogwood Initiative thinks that the low turnout was due to the logistics of voting in a pandemic and everyone's general troubles with executive function in the pandemic.
This time around Dogwood volunteers spoke to many people on the phones who thought they couldn’t vote because they were self-isolating, forgot to return mail-in ballots, or were reluctant to vote in person and struggled to navigate the alternatives.
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Important election results! Mike Sack has been re-elected chief of the Sipekne'katik band of the Mi’kmaq nation with 72% of the vote in a three-way race. Sipekne'katik chefs hold their office for two years between elections. Turnout was about 50% of eligible voters and 35% of members of the band.
He is public in advocating for the Mi’kmaq's treaty rights to fish.
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The important election results you have been nervously waiting for are here (https://elections.bc.ca/)! After the final count of postal and advance ballots, the result of the 2020 BC provincial election are 57 seats NDP (66% of seats, 48% of votes), two seats Green (2% of seats, 15% of votes), 28 seats Liberal (32% of seats, 34% of votes), and one in Vancouver pending recount since the Liberals are currently ahead of the Greens by 41 votes. There is a problem: given what we know about how accurate vote counts are, I don't think we can say who really won such a close race.
For the Greens to get a seat on the mainland would have been a first, but its such a close race that they will almost certainly pick one up next election. My MP is now a nondescript NDP person whom I can't find much about.
Police are asking for members of the public who knew or saw the victims of the Whiskey Creek Massacre and anyone else in the area to come forward. Northern Vancouver island has a significant biker gang movement and a sizeable population living in the woods in tents, trailers, and home-made camps. Many of them are dependent on the biker gangs' products.
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Gosh. I don't think I'd realised the Conservatives were that nonexistent in BC.
Also, election results sites with no maps make me sad :(
One of the few things I think the US does well with its elections that other countries should replicate is ensuring all the results are available to quite a granular ward/local level for all kinds of elections.
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Maps https://elections.bc.ca/resources/maps/provincial-maps/ The one with results by party is not up yet, but keep in mind that some ridings in BC are the size of Ireland (and covered with boreal forests, fijords, and high mountains) while you can walk across others in an hour. There is no practical way of mapping that on our earth ("acres don't vote, people do"): I think that a schematic map like a subway map or the Peutinger table would be more useful.
Edit: http://www.election-atlas.ca/bc/ uses Elections BC and Elections Canada data
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Using inset sections can deal with that, or simply a zoomable map with the wonders of the internet - but yes, electoral maps with some sort of population size modifier or hex system can be very helpful for showing the actual political state of affairs.
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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 (https://thenarwhal.ca/site-c-dam-geotechnical-problems-bc-government-foi-docs/) 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.
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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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annamie_Paul) the head of the GPC and this doctor in Toronto (https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.5803690/you-don-t-copy-the-losers-says-doctor-pushing-covid-zero-strategy-1.5805367), 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 (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/recount-affirms-b-c-liberal-narrowly-beats-green-in-west-vancouver-sea-to-sky-1.5805984) 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.
(https://bookandsword.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/screenshot_2020-11-18-british-columbia-covid-19-dashboard.png)
(https://bookandsword.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/screenshot_2020-11-18-ages-dashboard-covid19.png?w=440)
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 (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-mps-vote-to-urge-action-on-chinese-state-interference-and-huawei-5g/). 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.
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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 (https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/nova-scotia-shooting-13-deadly-hours) 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 (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bmo-human-rights-complaint-1.5812525).
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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.
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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 (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/spouse-portapique-gunman-lisa-banfield-charges-ammunition-1.5828411) in the month before the crime.
A briefing to Justin Trudeau (https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/new-documents-detail-the-guns-all-illegally-obtained-used-by-canadas-worst-mass-murderer) 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.
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In documents released on a Freedom of Information request, (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/mass-shooting-investigation-search-warrants-1.5845128) $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 (https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/rcmp-arrest-a-number-of-people-at-13-halifax-area-sites-but-remain-tight-lipped-on-operation-1.5225511) 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.