Author Topic: Canadian Politics 2020  (Read 11221 times)

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #30 on: July 23, 2020, 10:31:38 AM »
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
« Last Edit: July 23, 2020, 10:38:54 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #31 on: August 19, 2020, 08:14:57 AM »
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.

Jubal

  • Megadux
    Executive Officer
  • Posts: 35492
  • Karma: 140
  • Awards Awarded for oustanding services to Exilian!
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #32 on: August 19, 2020, 10:08:20 AM »
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.
The duke, the wanderer, the philosopher, the mariner, the warrior, the strategist, the storyteller, the wizard, the wayfarer...

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #33 on: August 19, 2020, 03:00:33 PM »
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.

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #34 on: August 24, 2020, 01:27:33 PM »
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.

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #35 on: August 28, 2020, 11:10:17 AM »
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 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!"

Jubal

  • Megadux
    Executive Officer
  • Posts: 35492
  • Karma: 140
  • Awards Awarded for oustanding services to Exilian!
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #36 on: August 28, 2020, 03:45:15 PM »
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.
The duke, the wanderer, the philosopher, the mariner, the warrior, the strategist, the storyteller, the wizard, the wayfarer...

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #37 on: August 28, 2020, 10:35:19 PM »
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."
« Last Edit: August 28, 2020, 10:56:36 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #38 on: September 10, 2020, 09:46:53 AM »
We Charity is ending its operations in Canada.  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 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).

Glaurung

  • Sakellarios
    Financial Officer
  • Posts: 7077
  • Karma: 20
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #39 on: September 10, 2020, 10:12:36 AM »
That sounds quite reminiscent of the 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.

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #40 on: September 10, 2020, 03:23:31 PM »
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.

DeepCandle Games

  • RPG author and big nerd
  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 390
  • Karma: 0
  • Aspiring TTRPG Writer
    • View Profile
    • My Ko-Fi Shop-front!
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #41 on: September 11, 2020, 01:27:19 AM »
Interesting topic - I didn't realize Canadian bureaucracy was this contested
I write many projects focused around RPGs and rules expansions!

If you'd like to support me you can buy (or download for free) my finished work from https://ko-fi.com/nanoteq_rpg or play-test them with me on my discord!

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #42 on: September 11, 2020, 05:54:24 PM »
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 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.

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #43 on: September 11, 2020, 11:25:25 PM »
In BC politics, the main news is more traditional: the pandemic (a local tradition!), 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), 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. 
« Last Edit: September 11, 2020, 11:30:52 PM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

  • Citizens
    Voting Member
  • Posts: 1029
  • Karma: 4
    • View Profile
    • Awards
Re: Canadian Politics 2020
« Reply #44 on: September 15, 2020, 10:28:09 AM »
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).

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."
« Last Edit: September 15, 2020, 10:34:51 PM by dubsartur »