Exilian
Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter => Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza => Topic started by: dubsartur on January 01, 2022, 11:21:27 PM
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This is a placeholder for a new politics thread! This year there will be a provincial election in Ontario under their new fixed-term elections act. Federally, we have all the issues which Justin Trudeau said he wanted to deal with in 2015 and then found would annoy powerful people to actually change, plus the pandemic, extreme weather which is straining provincial resources, a protectionist United States government, a genocidal and slightly less peaceful than usual Chinese government, and the fallout from the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Edit: oh, and the latest attempt to end the culture of sexual harrassment in the Canadian Armed Forces
People who like personal politics suspect that Justin Trudeau will resign circa 2023 to give the party time to align behind and publicize a new leader, but its really not clear who would replace him other than finance minister and deputy PM Chrystia Freeland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrystia_Freeland).
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Systems collapse is politics/government-adjacent. In the last few months, many suppliers overseas stopped shipping to Canada or started charging ridiculous fees like CAD 55 for a 5 x 5 x 30 cm low-value, slow package. The destruction of local highways by flooding obviously delays things but "slow" is not the same as "not shipping at all." And yet some orders from the UK are relatively normal-priced.
Does anyone know of anything recent on the state of supply chains? Many of the ones I saw were focused on the state of ports and trucking in California, and then omicron came. The US Postal Service does not seem to have raised its rates.
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Personal politics in Alberta: the Justice Minister of Alberta has been asked to take leave after CBC reporters revealed he called Edmonton's chief of police in 2021 to discuss that he had been ticketed for distracted driving https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-minister-of-justice-jason-kenney-1.6318678 and anti-vaxer former Calgary mayoral candidate Kevin J. Johnson fled the country for Montana before being arrested by American police and sent back https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/kevin-johnston-released-bail-unlawful-at-large-calgary-edmonton-1.6319660 He is also facing jail time in Ontario.
The minister, who is black, says he called because he was concerned that he had been racially profiled.
"In the last year, (former mayoral candidate) Johnston has been convicted of hate crimes, three counts of contempt, criminal harassment of an AHS employee and causing a disturbance at a downtown Calgary mall when he refused to wear a mask."
Oh, and a woman in Ontario was abducted by unknown parties in police gear claiming to be police https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-suspects-who-abducted-woman-in-wasaga-beach-ont-claimed-to-be-police-2/
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The federal government is requiring truckers who wish to enter Canada to provide proof of vaccination against COVID. The Tories are up in arms about this and a convoy of trucks (https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/first-reading-the-giant-trucker-protest-ottawa-is-strenuously-ignoring) is heading to Ottawa to protest all vaccine mandates and all restrictions on the access of unvaccinated people to public spaces.
A group of four migrants froze to death after crossing into Canada on foot in a heavy storm to evade the Safe Third Country Agreement which sends migrants who appear at official border crossings back to the United States.
Jordan Peterson finally retired from the University of Toronto and opened the new phase of his career with two opinion pieces in Canada's farther-right national daily the National Post. One complained that about the sinister wokes at the University of Toronto and presented his retirement with emeritus status as the result of persecution, the other came out hardcore against public health measures. I quote excerpts to give the flavour:
"I spent more than three hours on the phone this weekend trying to get through to the online security department of one of Canada’s major banks. ... This all occurred after my patience had already been exhausted in the aftermath of trying to fly in Canada. ... because I am an entitled Westerner, accustomed to my privileges, I got whiny about it. ... We’ve demolished two Christmas seasons in a row. Life is short. These are rare occasions. We’re stopping kids from attending school. We’re sowing mistrust in our institutions in a seriously dangerous manner. We’re frightening people to make them comply. ... I was recently in Nashville, Tennessee. No lockdowns. No masks. No COVID regulations to speak of. People are going about their lives. Why can that be the case in Tennessee (and in other U.S. states, such as Florida) when there are curfews (curfews!) in Quebec, two years after the pandemic started, with a vaccination rate of nearly 80 per cent? (The rate of death from COVID per million Tennesseers is more than four times the rate of death from COVID in my part of Canada- ed.)
... hiding behind our masks, afraid to send our children (who are in no danger more serious than risk of the flu) to school, charging university students full tuition for tenth-rate online “education,” pitting family member against family member over vaccine policy and, most seriously, compromising the great economic engine upon which our health also depends? ... Enough masks. Enough social gathering limitations. Enough restaurant closures. Enough undermining of social trust. Make the bloody vaccines available to those who want them. Quit using force to ensure compliance on the part of those who don’t. ... Set a date. Open the damn country back up, before we wreck something we can’t fix.
He is scheduled to give a talk in Tennessee in March.
BC's capacity to track the COVID pandemic except as cases in hospital and RNA in sewage has collapsed over the past few weeks due to the explosion in cases of Omicron.
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I'm sure JBP's retirement was entirely down to persecution by the woke far left Maoists of Toronto and absolutely nothing to do with his own health issues caused by benzodiazepine addiction.
I watched a clip of him on JRE earlier today and good lord has he lost the plot. He always had a talent for spouting nonsense when it came to religion and philosophy but he claimed that "the bible was literally the only book" in western culture and thus that every book since has derived from the bible and that somehow this makes the bible not merely true, but the basis or essence of truth.
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I'm sure JBP's retirement was entirely down to persecution by the woke far left Maoists of Toronto and absolutely nothing to do with his own health issues caused by benzodiazepine addiction.
And despite the hit from the period when he was in a coma in Europe, I am pretty sure he makes much more giving angry speeches and peddling advice by the hour than as a tenured professor. And he avoids pesky ethical restrictions and work responsibilities. For example, at one point the university noticed that he was posting videos of his university lectures on his subscription social media, and asked questions about "have you looked at the part of your contract which forbids that?"
I watched a clip of him on JRE earlier today and good lord has he lost the plot. He always had a talent for spouting nonsense when it came to religion and philosophy but he claimed that "the bible was literally the only book" in western culture and thus that every book since has derived from the bible and that somehow this makes the bible not merely true, but the basis or essence of truth.
It seems like this is a structural issue in the rich Anglo countries. Remember the New Atheists and the rationalists? They tended to make howlers about philosophy (is-ought fallacy denialism, naturalistic fallacy denialism) and the history of religion (19th century writers of angry speeches as the best sources for the history of the Catholic church). And Steven Pinker has written nonsense about history too. So there are quite a few educated people professing about humanities topics without bothering to learn what actual professionals think or how they work.
Petersen's ideas about Christianity have a creepy "noble lie" smell. He won't say that he is Christian, but he wants society to be Christian.
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The story of the frozen migrants is even stranger and sadder, because it appears they were resident in Canada and trying to enter the United States. How could being in the United States rather than Canada be worth risking your children's lives for in 2022?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/border-crossing-bodies-found-frozen-family-identified-1.6329959
And it turns out that the requirement that truckers entering the USA be vaccinated against COVID (just like people entering countries often have to show other vaccinations to enter) was imposed by the Biden administration (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign-truckers-will-be-required-to-be-fully-vaccinated-to-enter-us-starting-saturday) and covers both Canada and Mexico. So just what the convoy to Ottawa thinks they will achieve is not clear to me..
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Conservative MPs have voted to removed Erin O'Toole as leader of the party after only 18 months in office https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-erin-otoole-loses-conservative-party-leadership-vote/ One of the paradoxes of Canadian politics is that the Tories retain more of the 20th century tradition of MP independence (https://stuartparker.ca/why-the-coverage-of-the-trucker-protest-should-worry-all-canadians/) than the other big federal parties. In general they are authoritarian, but not so much within their caucus.
The old media continue to obsessively cover the truck protests and imply that they are something like the tiki-torch brigade in Charlottesville NC
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O'Toole was, if I recall, tacking a bit more centrist. Does this defeat mean that the Can-Cons are likely to veer right in how they present themselves?
That is an interesting difference, though - the UK Tories are generally the best of the parties at maintaining discipline in the ranks (with the possible exception at Westminster of the SNP, who are very disciplined too AFAICT). If UK Conservatives start breaking ranks in large numbers, it's a sign that the party is probably about to go into a major internal crisis.
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O'Toole was, if I recall, tacking a bit more centrist. Does this defeat mean that the Can-Cons are likely to veer right in how they present themselves?
That is an interesting difference, though - the UK Tories are generally the best of the parties at maintaining discipline in the ranks (with the possible exception at Westminster of the SNP, who are very disciplined too AFAICT). If UK Conservatives start breaking ranks in large numbers, it's a sign that the party is probably about to go into a major internal crisis.
O'Toole did a classic "appeal to the base to get nominated, then tack to the centre to try to win an election." Parts of the Conservative base seemed quite upset that he did not push their pet causes.
The social conservative part of the Conservative base seems angry, as does the part influenced by US right-wing politics. The problem is that "abortion, LGBT ideology, oppressive lockdowns, and liberty-destroying passports for abortion-tainted vaccines" (as a spokesman for the Campaign Life Coalition (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/otoole-leadership-vote-1.6336336) describes them) are pretty popular in Canada. Likewise, their opposition to putting a price on GHG emissions puts the Conservative core membership outside the Canadian mainstream. I don't know anything about their interim leader Candice Bergen.
Canada has an affordable-housing crisis which is easy to blame on scary foreigners (the problem is that older Canadians who tend to own homes vote and write letters, so any policy to drive down housing prices faces heavy opposition). Just like in other countries there is some unsettlement about the new ideas about gender and race which are being pushed by the Toronto media. Old Media and the liberals have been using division about pandemic policy. Its easy to present vaccines as a simple fix, then present the unvaccinated as the causes of everyone's troubles and not fellow Canadians who have often been misled by some very sophisticated, unscrupulous people. The federal Liberal and CBC message on the truck protests has been that they are all far-right extremists who can never be spoken to, rather than a mix of ordinary right-wing activists and a few very hateful people. This may drive some people who disagree with the Liberals on pandemic policy farther right.
(OTOH, the truckers who wave banners saying "F**** Trudeau" are also confused about the difference between activism and clickbait - like him or not, Trudeau is in charge of the government whose policy they want to change).
I think a harder-right version of the federal Conservatives would focus on blaming the troubles of renters and resource workers on someone who does not vote in Canada, on opposing state action to shore up indigenous and visual minority rights, on opposing the idea of gender as identity, and on talking about how public health policy should be based on individual freedom. But it really depends on who they chose as leader and which of that leader's gambits seem to get traction.
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If UK Conservatives start breaking ranks in large numbers, it's a sign that the party is probably about to go into a major internal crisis.
Fingers crossed
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We are definitely watching when Boris will get tossed out. Anyone who replaces him will be an ugly person too, but at least he will be out of Number 10.
One issue for the Conservative leadership contest in Canada is that the last one was in 2020, then there was the election in 2021. Because Canada restricts political donations, and its hard to hold the traditional face-to-face events in a Canadian winter during the COVID pandemic, some potential candidates may have trouble raising funds.
One confusing issue is that the truck protests coincide with many Canadian provinces rushing to end public health measures. I doubt that the anti-maskers will get what they want, but the anti-vaxxers may well see an end of the requirement of proof of vaccination to attend many kinds of events. These changes seem to be a mix of evidence-based (its not clear that being vaccinated makes you less likely to transmit Omicron), ideological (SAVE THE ECONOMY - ENDEMIC ENDEMIC ENDEMIC), and political (everyone has their own folk model of COVID, and their own preferences about which activities are worth the risk).
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Three responses to the truck protest in Ottawa: interim CPC leader Candice Bergen asks the protestors to leave, flailing Alberta premier and former anti-gay-rights campaigner Jason Kenny 'accidentally' compared the unvaccinated to stigmatized AIDS patients in the 1980s, and the police chief of Ottawa seems to have given up on controlling the protest. (He wants the government to call in the Canadian Armed Forces).
At the end of January, the death rate from COVID in my province was about 1 per 100,000 per week. In the USA it was more like 4 per 100,000!
So far, the only declared candidate for CPC chief is Pierre Poilievre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Poilievre). He grew up in Saskatchewan and went to the University of Calgary, so he may lean "Reform" over "Progressive Conservative."
The inquiry into the mass shooting at Portapique will start in late February.
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Because of the police's abdication of responsibility to enforce the law or clear out the protestors, residents of Ottawa have started to form their own blockades against motorcades heading to the protests. The following writeup is from a web magazine with a red star in its logo, so YMMV:
a group of dog-walkers and moms organized themselves on social media and then set up a blockade at Riverside and Bank Streets, one of the major routes into the parliamentary precinct from the main highway. It started with about 20 people before 9am, and by noon there were more than 200 people blocking a line of flag-flying pickup trucks that stretched back hundreds of metres. Many of the participants were white-haired seniors, and many of them were women. Another human blockade set up in front of police headquarters on Elgin Street, stopping traffic coming off the highway there.
I got to Riverside after 2pm and by then there were about a thousand of us blocking the road, swarming in amongst the stopped traffic, blasting dance music through a portable PA, and generally feeling like finally we were starting to take something back. I’m told that the police initially tried to negotiate with the blockade to allow the trucks to pass, and when nobody would budge, said to them: “If you don’t move, how does this end?” As you can imagine, after having gone through two and half weeks of far-right hooligans dug in on Parliament Hill, and literally everybody in the country asking that very question, this did not go over super well with my neighbours. Nobody budged and the crowd continued to swell as word spread.
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Sometime after 4pm, after being caught in the blockade for more than seven hours and with the sun starting to set, we began to allow the pickup trucks to leave one by one, on condition that they surrender their flags and jerry cans and remove the convoy decals from their vehicles.
One thing I don't understand is why the Ottawa police don't have the capacity to hotwire a truck? Or why its so hard to just arrest the truck owners, take their keys, and move the trucks out of downtown at their own expense. The number of big trucks is not huge, most of the protestors' vehicles are pickup trucks. The response to this protest has been much more peaceful and hands-off than the response to protests by First Nations and environmentalists in BC, or the treatment of reporters trying to document those protests and the police response.
Edit: on 14 February 2022, Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-prime-minister-trudeau-to-discuss-ending-trucker-blockades-with-first/). So far he does not plan to deploy the military. So we are about to see whether the RCMP can crush a protest of righty whities with the same enthusiasm they use against lefties and First Nations.
The RCMP have arrested a group at the border blockade in Alberta who they say were equipped with body armour, long guns, and illegal high-capacity magazines.
Edit: Four of the group have been charged with conspiracy to commit murder (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-protest-charges-laid-court-appearance-bail-1.6352482) aside from their firearms charges. So the RCMP's story is that something very worrisome was planned.
Edit: in his statement on the arrests in Alberta (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-protest-blockade-arrests-rcmp-monday-1.6351112), Premier Jason Kenney has a take on why the police have been slow to act:
Let's be clear: there have been tens of thousands of Canadians involved in various protests in the past several weeks, and I am sure that the vast majority of them are law-abiding and peaceful Canadians. But we now know, at Coutts, following an exhaustive investigation from the RCMP, is that there is, at least in that case, a small cell of people who wanted to take this in a very dangerous and dark direction. ... There's been a lot of efforts to politicize the situation at Coutts, demanding immediate enforcement over the recent days. I understand that expectation, but it was important for the government to work with the RCM to avoid further inflaming the situation until they could address the security risk posed by that potentially violent cell group. This is deeply concerning and I think it should send a message to all the other folks who were not aware of that cell.
Edit: on 15 February, Ottawa's chief of police announced his resignment (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/sloly-ottawa-resigns-behaviour-leadership-1.6352295).
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By Sunday 20 February, the truck protest outside the house of parliament in Ottawa seems to have melted away (CBC (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/downtown-ottawa-streets-protests-police-1.6358396)). Only 191 people were arrested, whereas about 1200 people have been arrested so far in the Fairy Creek logging protest. Police had to be brought from as far as Vancouver! The secretive camp in a parking lot remains but is smaller. The vote on Monday 21 February (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergencies-act-debate-sunday-1.6358810) confirming the invocation of the federal Emergencies Act is almost sure to pass (Liberals and NDP in favour, Tories and Bloc against)
In a classic case of crank magnetism or grifters seeking a new grift, Jordan Peterson is speaking at something called the 2022 bitcoin conference https://coinsnews.com/jordan-peterson-has-been-confirmed-as-a-speaker-at-the-2022-bitcoin-conference (https://coinsnews.com/jordan-peterson-has-been-confirmed-as-a-speaker-at-the-2022-bitcoin-conference)
An indigenous nation in BC says that their GoFundMe to build a longhouse on wheels was shut down after crowdfunding accounts and bank accounts (!) associated with the truck protests were frozen https://nitter.net/git_hetxwit/status/1494495062029266947#m (https://nitter.net/git_hetxwit/status/1494495062029266947#m)
Edit: Oh, and on 22 Feb, People's Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier plead not guilty to violating COVID protections at rallies in Manitoba in 2021 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/maxime-bernier-to-plead-not-guilty-to-covid-19-charges-1.6360363
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Former Quebec premier Jean Charest has announced his candidacy for Conservative Party of Canada leadership. He will probably present a moderate and Canadian conservatism, whereas current front-runner Pierre Poilievre pushes the Overton Window (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-the-tory-leadership-is-poilievres-to-lose-unless-the-party-broadens/) of Canadian politics with ideas that are fermenting in the US right. But because the CPC has a strong base in the prairies, its going to be hard for a very Quebecois person to compete with someone who grew up in SK and got a degree from the University of Calgary to network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Poilievre).
In further signs that many Canadian police are not living in the same world I am, the Vancouver Police Department released a military-style recruitment video (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/concerns-remain-after-vancouver-police-recruitment-video-deleted-1.6372001) with long guns, rappelling, etc.
Smart crooks in Canada commit fraud and other white-collar crime (very unlikely to be seriously punished in Canada) but below that are drugs and real estate in city centres. One of those colourful characters just got murdered in Edmonton (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fatal-shooting-shah-landlord-home-1.6384363).
Edit: on Tuesday 15 March, former Wildrose Party leader Brian Jean was elected to the provincial legislature of Alberta as a United Conservative Party candidate in a by-election. Since he thinks UCP head Jason Kenney should resign (and ran against him for head of the party shortly after it was founded), expect fireworks.
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Pro Jubali: the federal Liberals and NDP have signed a Confidence and Supply agreement (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-singh-how-it-will-work-1.6393710). The list of priorities is very Canadian. And a local Communist party (which is a party in the same sense that neighbourhood ten-year-olds and the Montreal Canadiens are both hockey teams) gets tangled in a knot about the Russian invasion of Ukraine https://www.cheknews.ca/local-communist-party-organizes-ukraine-rally-calling-on-end-to-war-992819/
Edit: oh, and the next Ontario election will probably be in May or June. Rob Ford may not be tossed out of office for mishandling the pandemic.
Edit: ouch, Alberta premier Jason Kenney told his caucus staff "I will not let this mainstream conservative party become an agent for extreme, hateful, intolerant, bigoted and crazy views. Sorry to be so blunt with you but you need to understand what the stakes are here. The lunatics are trying to take over the asylum. And I'm not going to let them." (The UCP was Kenney's creation so what does that say about him?) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/kenney-recording-ucp-alberta-leadership-review-staff-1.6396647
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Updates on earlier stories: the police officers who arrested a 56 year old man and his 12 year old granddaughter for trying to open a bank account while indigenous have been suspended (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/police-suspended-heiltsuk-man-granddaughter-handcuffed-bmo-1.6410405) (without pay?) and some RCMP officers resigned after the Portapique massacre (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/rcmp-emergency-response-team-lead-points-out-challenges-1.6411155)
Edit: also, more testimony on how two RCMP officers at Portapique ended up shooting at a local fire fighter while he was on the phone with the RCMP (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-man-mistaken-for-nova-scotia-mass-killer-recalls-shot-like-a-sonic/)
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Here is a weird human one: one of the Canadian forces generals accused of sexual misconduct with subordinates has resigned and says he is headed to Ukraine to help their armed forces (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-military-officer-retires-heads-to-ukraine-amid-sex-misconduct/). That is an alternative to "spending more time with his family."
Most armed forces have a "moral turptitude" clause in their expectations of recruits don't they? They often have to accept some less than ideal recruits.
Macleans has a long piece on a notorious illegal fisher in BC (https://www.macleans.ca/longforms/the-hunt-for-b-c-s-most-notorious-fisherman/).
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Welp, Alberta premier Jason Kenney has resigned (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-premier-jason-kenney-resigns-as-ucp-leader-1.6457221) after only getting 51% support among party members in a leadership review. The man who would be Prime Minister is a one-term premier!
More skeevy things are coming out about RCMP behaviour before, during, and after the Portapique massacre (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/2011-tip-gunman-truro-police-foipop-1.6451236) (but not the underlying cause for the RCMP's strange behaviour).
And a hospital infection control officer, Dr. Jennifer Grant of UBC, has joined the Urgency of Normal anti-infection-control propaganda outfit (https://www.urgencyofnormal.com/our-team) We did not go back to pooping in the drinking water after cholera or doing surgery with unwashed hands after Semelweiss #urgencyOfFecalNormal
Canada's strong response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is encouraging, but also typical of Canadian foreign policy this century: Canadian governments are glad to send troops or weapons into any local war the US supports, as long as not too many Canadians will die, but not interested in learning about the local situation or making long-term plans. Their world is very provincial even though Canadian is cosmopolitan. Canadians have fought in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq (after the expulsion of the Americans), and Syria and none of those turned out great. Ukraine is pretty safe for us, but if say China attacked Taiwan a Liberal or Tory government might do something foolish.
I wonder if Prince Charles' trip to Canada is preparation for Liz's death? Reinforce monarchist sentiment in advance?
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I wonder if Prince Charles' trip to Canada is preparation for Liz's death? Reinforce monarchist sentiment in advance?
I'd expect that's part of it, at least: I'm sure all royal visits to Commonwealth countries include promoting "The Firm" as an important element, and even if this one was planned some time ago it will still have been in the knowledge that the Queen wouldn't be around for much longer. Also, Charles will want to renew personal contacts with the current generation of national and provincial leaders.
I imagine they're hoping it goes better than William and Kate in the Caribbean...
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Finally some more Canadian policy news:
Quebec has passed its bill requiring immigrants to the province to interact with provincial institutions in French after only six months of residence. This is naturally producing a counter-reaction from indigenous and visible minority groups.
Indy news outlets object to the latest bill to subsidize old media (https://www.capitaldaily.ca/news/canada-bill-c18-online-news-act) on the grounds that its just a handout to old media and excludes online-first outfits.
The federal government wants to ban the import or sale of new handguns and buy back a list of long guns. As I have said before, the problem is that most firearms used in attacks on strangers in Canada seem to be illegal imports from the USA. The government is not very good at tracking and identifying them. Its not clear to me that a handgun ban would have the desired effects, but it would spoil the fun of shooters and collectors. And enumerating badness ("these 1500 models of firearms are Prohibited") is always a failure compared to enumerating goodness ("all firearms firing brass cartridges manufactured in 1898 and before are Permitted"). When we limited magazine capacity, which does seem to have been effective policy, we said "magazines with a capacity of more than ten rounds are Prohibited" not "the following magazines are prohibited: Glock A4 12-round, Glock A4 15-round, ..."
There is an Ontario provincial election on 3 June. So far it looks like Doug Ford will survive his terrible handling of the pandemic because under First Past the Post, a party with 35-40% support can beat 60-65% support for the two main opposition parties.
Edit: oh, and BC received an exemption from the law criminalizing small amounts of drug possession (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/opioid-crisis-bc-canada-1.6471878). As I think I have said, tainted drugs are killing more people in BC than COVID.
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Welp, another Canadian election returns the status quo ante comitionem. A Conservative government under Doug Ford in Ontario with the NDP as the second largest party (their leader won her seat but is stepping down, the Liberal leader did not win a seat). Ontario and Quebec handled the COVID pandemic almost as incompetently as the US and UK. People in Ontario says he and his party followed the modern Canadian Conservative playbook of avoiding reporters and debates as much as possible in favour of photo-opps and scripted public statements.
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Am I right in thinking that Ontario's progressive wing probably suffers especially from the lack of preference voting or proportionality? I've heard a lot of vote splitting grumbling from Canadians in that respect.
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Am I right in thinking that Ontario's progressive wing probably suffers especially from the lack of preference voting or proportionality? I've heard a lot of vote splitting grumbling from Canadians in that respect.
First Past the Post creates many problems for people who want Anyone But Conservative, and it encourages the Liberals and Conservatives to aim at pleasing 40% of voters regardless what the rest of the country thinks. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Ontario_general_election) gives 40% Conservative (83 seats), 24% NDP (31 seats), 24% Liberal (8 seats), 6% Green (1 seat).
Edit: FPTP also encourages similar parties to fight over the same ridings, rather than expand their support across the province or nation.
Only 43% of elegible voters voted. Part of the problem may have been that everyone is exhausted.
Former Conservative Party of Canada leadership candidate Derek Sloan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Sloan) tried his luck in Ontario and failed to win a seat. I have talked about him before.
I don't know much about the Ontario Liberals and whether they are a party of the establishment with vaguely universitied urban lefty sentiments like the federal Liberals.
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Macleans has a profile of Liberal cabinet minister Anita Anand (https://www.macleans.ca/longforms/how-anita-anand-became-the-trudeau-governments-all-round-fixer/). A juicy bit and one of interest to Jubal:
when Oakville Liberals gathered at a local banquet hall that June to vote, Anand emerged as the nominee. The general election was in mid-October, so that summer and fall were a blur of maps, driveways and doors to be knocked. Because Anand is a talker, canvassing became a delicate ballet, as aides tried to move her along at the doors while the rest of the team was waiting halfway down the street. She ended up beating the Conservative candidate by seven percentage points.
Soon after the election, she was summoned to a meeting with some of the transition team advising the second-term Trudeau government. They wanted to know about any skeletons lurking in closets, so she knew they were vetting her for something. A week later, she pulled into a parking garage at Toronto Pearson International Airport in her husband’s pickup truck, a coat thrown hastily over the dishevelled clothes she’d been wearing at home when her son called to say his car battery had died. They’d connected the jumper cables and she was sitting in the truck, with her son hollering at her to start the engine, when her phone rang with a call from the PMO switchboard. First she screamed, then she answered. They told her to be in Ottawa to meet with the Prime Minister the next morning.
Anand walked into the room a jangle of nerves; she had met Trudeau a few times, but didn’t know him in any real way. When he told her he wanted her to be the minister of public services and procurement, she gathered herself and responded, “I would be so honoured,” just as she’d rehearsed in case she was rattled in the moment. “On my way out I shed a little tear,” she says. “And then I had to go find out what public services and procurement was.”
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When she’s had her way with the speech, she and her team rehearse media questions. Her press secretary, Daniel Minden, does an eerily perfect imitation of the default journalist tone of a snotty teenager who’s just caught you sneaking into the house drunk. In response, Anand rhymes off the talking points and line items from the week-old budget that she’s still committing to memory.
Her previous career was as a law professor, so not particularly helpful in preparing to buy the government's stuff, but if your vision of government is a flock of appointees doing the work while MPs come and go as figureheads without authority to make decisions (shrugs) She seems to have done all right. And the federal Liberals have a problem of disrespecting people (including Parliament!), and letting them know they disrespect them, while verbally denying it because that would be uncouth.
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Yes, I guess the specialist vs democratic choice-maker in government is an issue in democracies way back to Athens. But the attempt to square that circle by not having the minister make any choices or be a specialist is a bit of an overly Humphrey Appleby brand of problem-solving.
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Yes, I guess the specialist vs democratic choice-maker in government is an issue in democracies way back to Athens. But the attempt to square that circle by not having the minister make any choices or be a specialist is a bit of an overly Humphrey Appleby brand of problem-solving.
I know nothing about Anand besides this article, but her career in parliament looks like how Trudeau probably envisioned his policies around sex and race working out: appointing people who are different from him but fit smoothly into the Liberal machine. Although the interviewer noticed one difference:
Anand still misses hashing out intricate concepts with academic colleagues. That may be why she is more open by default than other prominent members of a government that has made a maddening art of centralized control and message management. The hitch comes when Anand talks about her current portfolio. On the topic of defence, she frequently slips into talking-point mode, suddenly less frank or willing to acknowledge uncertainty or conflict, falling back on a canned phrase or fact. The shift is stark, as though someone rolled down metal shutters over a storefront.
It will be interesting to see whether as she gains more experience in parliament, she grows more independent or goes along to get along.
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I think that's a problem in politics generally: whilst many important gains to be made are by having voices who are willing to bring new things to the table, in practice parties tend to promote people who are either a) easier to work with in their current systems or b) have big enough egos and personal bases to carry them up the ladder. It's especially noticeable on issues like race, and can easily end up with the people who get to the top tables either being so self-focused that they don't bring wider community issues to the table effectively, or so people-pleasing that they don't raise them either.
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The Mass Casualty Commission found that the RCMP failed to send them some pages of notes from a conference call with the RCMP Commissioner and a RCMP officer in Nova Scotia. These pages state that the Commissioner told them that their failure to release information about the weapons used by the mass shooter was harming the Trudeau government's plans for harsher gun control measures (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/darren-campbell-notes-mass-casualty-commission-disclosure-1.6498991). The government denies the allegations that they interfered politically but one of the people who was on the conference call says that the notes are correct.
In my view, police should always release precise information about firearms used in crimes. This is important for public understanding of what happened, and for deciding what policy would be wise. If most handguns used to shoot strangers in Canada are smuggled from the USA (as most experts suspect), then policy to reduce shootings should probably focus on discouraging criminals from doing that rather than say further restricting handgun ownership. Police forces in Canada are currently very ineffective at finding the origin of firearms used in crimes and sharing it.
So its very very unfortunate that we have to squeeze this information out of public institutions with FOIPOP requests or (in this case) political interference. And this story reinforces the suspicions of many gun owners in Canada that firearms policy is not being based on evidence and harm-reduction, but on pleasing ignorant people in big cities.
This is also a second way in which the RCMP appear to have mislead the public about the mass shooting in Portapique NS.
Edit: Meanwhile the NDP Premier of BC is resigning due to cancer, and the federal Green leadership contest has begun
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Tamara Lich, one of the organizers of the Ottawa convoy protest, is back in jail after a judge decided that she violated her bail by attending a celebration to receive an award.
The inquiry will not allow the victims' lawyers to cross-examine the Portapique shooter's common-law partner (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-nova-scotia-shooting-inquiry-spouse/) on the ground that she was a victim of domestic violence. Several aspects of her story are unconfirmed or hard to believe and prop up questionable stories which the RCMP is trying to tell (especially her claim that she spend all night in the freezing woods barefoot in a T-shirt and yoga pants, and only emerged on the morning to tell the police her story). We know that the RCMP lied about only learning that the shooter was disguised as a police officer on the morning after (recordings show several people telling the RCMP on the night before that a man in a police car with a police uniform is shooting people) and its possible that they leaned on her to support their timeline or she was more involved in the preparations than she wants to admit. Its obviously a difficult situation and many people who knew the couple say that she was physically abused by him.
Edit: Also, Canada accepted Germany's urgent request to return a Siemens tubine belonging to Gazprom which was being repaired in Canada by Monday 11 July. That sentence embodies a lot of things about the Russian economy, Germany's post-1989 relationship with Russia, and the gap between the Trudeau government's rhetoric and its policies. Gazprom seemed so surprised that on Wednesday they made up an excuse why they can't accept the turbine and resume supplying natural gas to Germany at the full contracted rate.
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More disfunction inside the Green Party of Canada around the kind of issues lefty people on American social media like to yell at each other about https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/green-party-president-quits-tells-members-the-dream-is-dead-1.6579335 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/green-party-leadership-1.6590602
Enough people have quit the committee for the leadership contest that its not clear if it will be able to continue.
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Is the leadership contest committee in this case the people running the contest (essentially the returning officer etc) or do they have a different function?
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Is the leadership contest committee in this case the people running the contest (essentially the returning officer etc) or do they have a different function?
AFAIK the Leadership Contest Committee was created to govern the leadership contest (it creates rules and so on). The governing body of the GPC is the federal council (https://www.greenparty.ca/en/party/structure/council).
I would imagine that they nominate the local election officials or define a procedure for choosing them.
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Right - in the LDs as the similarish system i know better, the federal board (equivalent here to the fed council) would write the election rules ahead of time, and then the returning officer is responsible for everything and for making any rulings on those roles once the election starts.
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I think they created special terms for this contest given the issues which plagued the previous leader and contest (plus COVID etc.) https://www.greenparty.ca/en/leadership-contest/rules So its not a routine bureaucratic step like raising a motion at a meeting of the federal council.
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The indigenous grandfather and granddaughter arrested for trying to open a bank account with their First Nations ID card settled their lawsuit against the Vancouver police (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/maxwell-johnson-granddaughter-human-rights-complaint-vancouver-police-1.6598580).
A 15 year old in Alberta with a perforated appendix had to wait 2 1/2 hours to get a hospital bed and 29 hours for surgery (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/teen-s-nightmare-hospital-wait-a-symptom-of-alberta-s-health-care-breakdown-doctors-warn-1.6599216) due to the stress which COVID is placing on the health care system. Meanwhile Canadian provinces are removing the requirement to wear a mask inside hospitals.
My understanding is that the pandemic is about as bad in Ontario as in the USA, other than a somewhat higher rate of vaccination and boostering. In my province it seems flat since spring 2022.
Leaders of the accellerationist separatist Diagolon movement were arrested in Canada (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/jeremy-mackenzie-leader-of-the-controversial-diagolon-movement-arrested-on-canada-wide-warrant-1.6599930) on charges of assault, pointing a firearm, use of a restricted weapon in a careless manner and mischief. They also talked about raping the wife of the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. Diagolon is Alaska to Florida, the movement spends a lot of time eating cannabis and talking about what a wonderful country it would be once that area was cleansed of undesirables, and is very white - the symbol for Diagolon is a white line ("where the sensible people will live") in a black field ("the places that will sink into the sea or explode"). They also talk a lot about shooting and / or hanging people.
Edit: Macleans has a long-form piece on how families and criminals moved back and forth between Canada and the USA in the late 20th century https://www.macleans.ca/longforms/my-father-was-a-criminal-how-i-found-out/
And the BC Liberal party (the party of capital, in a two-party system with the party of the public sector unions) is considering changing its name to BC United because right-wingers who watch a lot of TV or follow too much social media are angry at the Liberals https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2022/09/27/Please-Advise-BC-Liberal-Rebrand/
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COVID is exploding in some provinces but provincial governments are holding firm to their denialist positions (acquired immunity acquired immunity notbody wants to go back to home office).
Its mid-October and there has been no rain for months on the west coast of Canada. This is killing salmon and cedar trees.
Danielle Smith is now head of the United Conservative Party and premier of Alberta. Among her policies are unilaterally passing an act to remove Alberta from some areas of federal jurisdiction such as gun control, and making the unvaccinated a protected group in AB human rights law because, quoth Smith, the unvaccinated are the most discriminated against group in Canada the past 50 years (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-premier-john-horgan-calls-alberta-premier-danielle-smith-comments-unvaccinated-laughable-1.6614518) (so in Smith's words as soon as the Canadian government stopped mass kidnapping of indigenous kids into schools or foster homes, the most discriminated-against group was not visible minorities or religious minorities or gays and lesbians but people who refuse to be vaccinated; some of the restrictions such as on cross-border travel were requirements by the destination country, but never you mind).
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Is that sort of platform Smith has sufficient to win in somewhere like Alberta? Or does it actually pass the point of "slightly too wingnut for the electorate"?
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Is that sort of platform Smith has sufficient to win in somewhere like Alberta? Or does it actually pass the point of "slightly too wingnut for the electorate"?
I would take a bet at 2:1 that her UCP will lose the next election, because they are physically or ideologically incapable of dealing with the big issues AB faces such as overdependence on oil revenues and COVID-19 and because they are incumbents in hard times. In many ways, they have similar problems to the British Conservatives: a large share of the party membership has lost contact with physical and political reality, so leaders have to either satisfy them and outrage most of the electorate and nearby powers (whether Ottawa or Brussels) or use normal politics and be pulled down by members who see this as betrayal.
Electing her will raise questions among the voters who accepted the UCP as heirs to the old Progressive Conservatives who were corrupt but not so blatantly wingnutty (former premier Ralph Klein was an alcoholic and problem gambler, but AFAIK he did not invent new policies after downing five shots of whiskey and losing $7,000 at the casino)
Edit: Journalists are systematically going through Smith's public statements and newsletters from the past year and finding flirting with the idea that Ukraine just needs to be neutral to stop the Russian invasion (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/danielle-smith-apology-ukraine-remarks-1.6621165) here and sharing posts from an antisemitic blog there (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/danielle-smith-timothy-caulfield-anti-semitism-media-1.6621799). Lots of people had to reorient their thinking about Russia and Ukraine this spring and sort through competing narratives from convincing sources with agendas, but it shows that she is not great at avoiding saying things which critics can turn into soundbites, even after she was pretty sure she would be premier soon (and that she absorbs a lot of ideas from weird rightists).
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The province of BC has a new leader by default after the candidate who broke with the party establishment by opposing the establishment candidate was ruled to have violated election rules https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/10/20/With-Appadurai-Out-Can-Eby-Rest-Easy/ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/david-eby-ndp-leadership-campaign-elections-bc-1.6623522 This really does not look good, because BC is in the middle of multiple crises: floods in winter, droughts in summer, refusal to mitigate COVID-19, mass deaths of trees and salmon, tainted drugs, and unaffordable housing. To me, this is not the time for the government to say "everything we are doing is fine, this leadership contest should be a formality."
Party leadership contests in recent years have a history of irregularities which the courts and police keep at arms length from.
Another Albertan is calling Daniel Smith's faction of the UCP (foreign, irrational) Republicans rather than (native, rational) Conservatives https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/conservatives-alberta-united-conservative-party-annual-general-meeting-edmonton-1.6623529 That is an eccentric reading of the conservative movement in Canada but it does show that merging two parties into the United Conservative Party did not make factions go away or let both sides speak the same language. "conservatives and republicans no longer speak the same social language. They do not consume the same media and therefore do not have the same social frames of reference."
IIRC, there is an argument that public opinion does not exist without mass media to create it.
BC had its municipal elections this week, the local mayoral campaign was basically personality politics (the two candidates could not describe different policies they would impliment, just utter polite nothings and accuse each other of being all talk, no action or just in the race out of a desire for attention).
Edit 2022-10-26: oh, and the police who arrested the First nations grandfather and granddaughter for opening a bank account refused to attend the apology feast so the nation says they can't accept the apology https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/heiltsuk-reject-apology-call-out-vancouver-police-chief-adam-palmer-for-denying-vpd-racism-1.6628452
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Right now there are two big issues in Canada. Doug Ford the premier of Ontario is about to invoke the Notwithstanding Clause in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/bill-28-ontario-education-strike-1.6639027) to force school workers back to work before waiting for the case to move through the courts or a strike to begin. And since January the government has raised interest rates from 0.25% to 3.75% (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/freeland-fall-economic-update-1.6638275) to counter inflation. The problem is that if there are actual shortages of fuel, food, labour, etc. due to the war and the COVID pandemic, hiking interest rates can't change that , but it does make life much harder for people with a mortgage or small businesses which need loans. They are gambling that most of the rise in prices is due to it being easy to borrow more money and bid higher, rather than an aging and COVID-riddled population, the removal of Russian oil and gas and Ukrainian grain from the world market, etc. etc. etc. Other measures to reduce inflation such as higher taxes for forced savings are taboo to the federal Liberals and Conservatives.
Edit: oh, and a fixer says he was hired in 2019 to entrap then Calgary mayor Nenshi into accepting kickbacks https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/mayor-nenshi-calgary-alleged-plot-1.6636091 This story was broken by the online-first outlet Canadaland which does some investigative reporting and a lot of blathering about what one reporter said another reporter said.
Edit: Wow! After 55,000 education workers striked the Ontario government agreed to repeal the back-to-work legislation which invoked the notwithstanding clause as soon as the legislature resumes https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cupe-strike-labour-board-ruling-expected-1.6642824
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Three trivial things in Canadian politics and one potential policy one. The BC Liberal Party members (= party of capital) voted to rename themselves BC United (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-liberal-name-change-1.6653464) although it still has to be confirmed at their convention. If they change their name then no provincial party will be allowed to call themselves the Liberals for some time. MP Elizabeth May became joint leader of the Green Party of Canada (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/green-party-leadership-race-results-1.6657717) with a 32 year old black man named Jonathan Pedneault. And after swindlers stole or lost the assets of the FTX crypto exchange in the Bahamas, the federal Liberals have started to point out that the new Tory leader was boosting cryptocurrency just last year.
And doctors and public health officials in BC and Ontario have started to say out loud that letting COVID, RSV, and influenza roam free was not a bad idea and that effective masks would help. They are not yet talking about air quality in the papers and the offical policy is still to remove public health measures one by one (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mandatory-self-isolation-covid-rules-dropped-bc-1.6657946) rather than update them to what we know in 2022. Hospitalizations and excess deaths have not significantly declined since the last vaccinations in spring 2022 per the BC CDC and the BC COVID-19 modelling group (https://covid19.research.ubc.ca/research/bc-covid-19-modelling-group).
I see lots of people still wearing cloth masks or dental masks or uncovering their noses, and that is a failure of education or availability. Anyone willing to mask should be in a N95 or higher mask or respirator in public indoor spaces.
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What wing (if any) of the Canadian Greens does May represent? Are there clear internal political factions with organising bodies, or is it a more loose field?
Vienna continues with FFP2 masks on public transport but little else in place: maybe ten percent of people mask up in shops.
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What wing (if any) of the Canadian Greens does May represent? Are there clear internal political factions with organising bodies, or is it a more loose field?
Vienna continues with FFP2 masks on public transport but little else in place: maybe ten percent of people mask up in shops.
The federal Greens have never had more than 3 MPs, and for most of this century Elizabeth May was both their only MP and the party leader. She has distanced herself from the shambles in the federal leadership. OTOH, Canadian parties have become vehicles to glorify the Leader and for a long time she was not just the leader but the only MP. Its hard to decide whether the party seemed focused around her because talking about the Leader is all journalists know how to do, or because she liked attention. So if you want to be an anti-Mayist you can say that she was secretly orchestrating the chaos from behind the scenes to get back in the spotlight.
I don't think it would be possible to get a neutral view on the shambles inside the federal leadership because anyone who is close enough is friends with some of the parties or associates themselves with one of the factions (and there are confidentiality requirements). Recent Green platforms have had some contradictory things or things which seem poorly thought out.
BC was one of the homes of the world Green movement, and one source of conflict is how to get the party seats outside of its base in BC. That is a circular problem since a party will reflect the interests of its voters and especially those voters with MPs. They used to have a MP in Nova Scotia and I think they have one in Ontario.
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Another example of the system working in Canada: a Liberal MP makes some amendments to their draft disarmament bill, pretty much anyone who has thought about firearms policy points out big problems, and the amendments are revised after a few government spokespersons say blatantly untrue things about them https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c21-sporting-guns-1.6673730
As I have said, gun control law in Canada has to address that there are some very rural people who rely on firearms for food or pest control, and that drug gangs in the cities smuggle handguns form the USA. Current laws seems to work pretty well but the problem is enforcement: someone has to actually track down where a handgun from a crime scene came from, or respond to the report that someone convicted of domestic violence has obtained a firearm. Just banning more specific weapons seems easier.
And in Alberta people think Danielle Smith's Sovereignty Act would give the cabinet almost dictatorial powers https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/danielle-smith-rejects-suggestion-that-bill-giving-cabinet-sweeping-powers-was-a-mistake-1.6676484 (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/danielle-smith-rejects-suggestion-that-bill-giving-cabinet-sweeping-powers-was-a-mistake-1.6676484) In Canada, the powers of different levels of government are quite well defined. Again, the government is revising the bill in response to criticism.