No Sweetness And Light

Pierre Poilievre wants an election. He sent a letter to Jagmeet Singh this week, suggesting he should bring the Trudeau government down. Susan Delacourt suggests that Singh may be worried about Doug Ford:

Pierre Poilievre and Doug Ford don’t have a lot in common, except maybe their desire to hold elections early. 

Yes, they are conservatives and chances are that the many Ontarians who have voted for Ford are likely leaning toward voting for the federal Conservatives when the next election comes.

Both leaders in their own ways would call themselves populists, too.

But that’s where Ford and Poilievre have very different approaches. Ford is what many would call a happy populist — a guy who just wants everyone to vote for him, whether that requires giving out his phone number or shovelling someone’s vehicle out of a snowbank.

Delacourt suggests that Poilievre is worried about an election in Ontario:

As my colleagues at Queen’s Park have been reporting for months now, there’s a very good chance Ontarians will be voting in a provincial election before then.

"Sources say Ford is worried that if, as polls suggest, Pierre Poilievre wins an election expected in October 2025, there would be reduced transfer payments to the provinces, a scrapping of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s electric-vehicle strategy that is a cornerstone of Ontario economic policy and other slashed spending that would hurt the Progressive Conservatives,” Queen’s Park Bureau Chief Robert Benzie wrote in May.

Poilievre hasn’t said publicly how he feels about an Ontario vote possibly upstaging the Conservatives’ much-anticipated romp to victory. The fact that Ford sees a Poilievre victory as not great for Ontario, however, is fascinating and further underlines that there are serious tensions between the Ford and Poilievre brands of conservatism.

What remains to be seen is whether an early Ontario election could harm Poilievre’s chances. For instance, what if Ontarians use a provincial election as their chance to vent at Trudeau and get some of the anti-Liberal sentiment we keep hearing about? What if Ontarians decide that as long as Ford remains premier, they might as well have a prime minister with whom he has a good working relationship?

Maybe that’s one of the reasons Poilievre was out there this week, agitating for Canada to go to the polls this fall, not next fall.

It's not all sweetness and light among Conservatives.

Image: reddit

Standard Operating Procedure

On the Right, lying has become standard operating procedure. Jim Stanford writes:

The PR flacks working in the Conservative Party’s media war room are nothing if not zealous. They regularly issue inflammatory, offensive, and often just-plain-false statements and social media posts.

As part of their broader strategy to discredit conventional journalism, the Conservatives’ spinners don’t hesitate to post fake news. And usually their misleading missives evade significant blowback. The more inflammatory the better, in their books: their main purpose is to harvest names and digital contact information from people who sign a petition, or take some other token act of digital resistance, against the Trudeau regime.

Occasionally the mainstream political and journalism worlds pay more sustained and crucial attention to this propaganda. For example, the party’s recent nationalistic ‘Our Home’ video had to be pulled after it was found to contain bizarre stock footage—including Russian fighter jets, a Venezuelan sunset, and Ukrainian schoolchildren.

They have a standard menu of lies:

Of course, complaints about the economy, inflation, and taxes are a mainstay of Conservative rage-farming. But in this arena, too, the adolescent overreach of their war room can get them into trouble. An example is a recent ‘X’ post from leader Pierre Poilievre, trying to exploit a recent Statistics Canada report that showed a decline in median real household incomes in Canada in 2022.

The post claimed that in 2022 prices were rising ‘3 times faster’ than incomes, that ‘wages’ lagged far behind inflation (2.5 per cent versus 6.8 per cent), and that as a result Canadians suffered a ‘pay cut’ of 4.3 per cent. The post was illustrated with a striking high-contrast graph that conveyed a sense of emergency in living standards.

But Stanford immediately spotted the ruse:

As someone who makes their living studying wages, prices, and living standards, I immediately saw that Poilievre’s post was far off-base. And so I posted my own ‘X’ thread, complete with a revised chart, to correct the record.

The first and most obvious issue was the time frame Poilievre chose. The Statistics Canada report was based on a detailed census of income tax returns, which naturally take some time to compile and analyze (hence we receive their 2022 report in mid-2024). But there is much more recent data showing up-to-date trends in wages and prices.

Indeed, within hours of Poilievre’s post, Statistics Canada released its latest data on consumer price inflation: year-over-year inflation slowed in the 12 months ending in July to 2.5 per cent. That’s the slowest in 40 months (ever since inflation first accelerated after the end of COVID lockdowns in 2021), and well within the Bank of Canada’s target range for inflation (they aim for 2 per cent, plus-or-minus 1 percentage point).

Meanwhile, labour market data released by Statistics Canada a few days earlier had confirmed that wages are growing at a strong clip: up 5.2 per cent in the same 12-month period. This made for an easy update to Poilievre’s chart:

Unlike the Conservatives, I listed the statistical sources used in the graph. Needless to say, my chart tells a very different story: hourly wages (measured by the labour force survey) have grown twice as fast as prices (measured by the CPI) in the last year. Real ‘pay,’ adjusted for inflation, has increased strongly: up 2.6 per cent in one year.

Justin is well past his best before date. But do we really want to replace him with Poilievre?

Image: X

Will It Happen Here?

American politics has been radically reformed. Could it happen here? John Delacourt writes:

It was just a few weeks ago that the prospects for progressive governments in North America were trending in a similar downward direction. And perilously so. If there were wake-up calls necessary for just how bad it might be for both President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau, both parties received them at full volume. Biden’s barely coherent June 27 debate performance against an unhinged but resurgent Donald Trump sent the Democrats’ campaign into a tailspin.

As for Trudeau’s Liberals, the results of the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election three days earlier, a loss in what had been a Liberal stronghold, seemed to confirm what the dreadful poll numbers had been signaling for months. In both instances, party faithful were compelled to go through that ritual of ensuring message discipline was strictly observed, and that the most, um, colourful responses to these five-alarm incidents stayed behind closed doors as much as possible.

The Liberals have not responded as the Democrats did:

Nobody within the Liberal party seemed to have thought through what kind of process answer could at least serve to put this brush fire out (one regular outlier from Liberal caucus messaging, Nathan Erskine Smith, offered one by way of a kind of a plebiscite involving all party members, but that went nowhere quickly). The official response in the aftermath of Toronto-St. Paul’s seemed to be something about listening to constituents and disaffected former Liberal voters and then … reflecting. Those were the outputs; outcomes TBD.

It's hard to be the incumbent after COVID:

Incumbency is more than just a stigma; it’s emerged as the fundamental challenge of governments that bear the scars and road miles of the pandemic years. Biden’s fragility only made his presence on the campaign more evocative of those before-times. Trump’s maundering incoherence has served to transfer that dark lockdown mantle onto his padded shoulders. Rishi Sunak could not put up much of a fight against it in the UK; no bold campaign platform or strategic foregrounding of any star players were going to scrub away the brand corrosion the party accumulated, both during and since Johnson’s time as PM.

Liberals can't simply hand the baton off to the Deputy Prime Minister. Breathing new life into the party will be much more complicated.

Image: The Japan Times

Passing The Baton

Joe Biden has passed the baton to Kamala Harris. Jennifer Rubin writes:

Even before Biden entered the hall, the affection for him bubbled to the surface. A surprise, early appearance from Vice President Kamala Harris with an early shout out to Biden got the crowd roaring and chanting. Later, Hillary Clinton — who got her own rapturous welcome — paid him tribute; again chants rippled over the audience. (Clinton’s speech was the most uplifting, defiant and emotional of the night.)

Biden’s speech itself was less important than the response to it and him, the content less memorable than the emotion. He turned to the crowd after embracing his daughter with tears in his eyes. He let the applause wash over him, luxuriating in the gratitude and the chant “Thank you, Joe.” He tried several times to start, only to be interrupted by more applause and chanting.

He saluted his rock, Jill Biden, generating more cheers and starting another round of “We love Joe.”

Monday’s appearance was the last consequential speech of Biden’s presidency, the final opportunity for a large national audience to see and hear from him. Given that he has devoted more than a half-century to public service, the emotion of the moment, the bittersweetness of the circumstances, could not be lost on anyone.

I became a teacher because I believed in the potential of the next generation. I have seen several generations in my seventy-seven years. Not every generation lives up to its potential. But one thing is true. Kamala Harris faces the most decrepit member of my generation. J.D. Vance is a member of the generation that follows Harris.

Now is the time we need the best from Harris' generation. Here's hoping they succeed.

Image: The Independent

What You Really Really Want

There is a growing fatalism setting in about the next election. Dale Smith writes:

If you listen to Canadian political commentary, a certain kind of fatalism has sunk in: a Pierre Poilievre and Conservative Party of Canada victory is inevitable in the next election, and nothing is going to matter over the next year-and-a-bit until the next federal election is scheduled. This is possibly the worst of all possible instincts to harbour, and a sign that our media spends way too much time huffing the horse-race poll numbers that they treat as gospel, which is also why Poilievre keeps pushing for an early election, so that he can come in on a sweeping victory. But this sense of inevitability should be fought, particularly among marginalized Canadians who know that a Poilievre-led government is going to be a very big problem for them, and for their rights. 

But voters are befuddled. They like a lot of what Justin Trudeau has done. But they're tired of him:

Saying you like the Liberals’ plan but can’t vote for Trudeau won’t help you keep those Liberal plans alive. There was polling earlier this summer that found that people said they were willing to vote for Poilievre, but they also wanted all of the services that the Liberals (and, to a lesser extent, the NDP) have provided, like child care and dental care. You can’t have both. As much as he can claim to have a coherent ideology, Poilievre has internalized the so-called teachings of crypto bros on YouTube, and thinks that massive spending cuts in order to achieve a notional balanced budget is the way to a prosperous economy (mostly because from all appearances, he doesn’t understand monetary or fiscal policy). That’s going to mean a lot of painful cuts to services. A simple change in government also won’t fix most of the problems that we’re dealing with, such as the housing shortage or the affordability crunch, because many of those problems are structural in nature. No amount of empty slogans will fix those issues, and would in fact be made worse with an austerity agenda.

Things could -- as has recently happened in the United States -- change radically. But that kind of change is rare. Canadians will have to decide what -- like the Spice Girls sang -- they really really want.

Image: The Financial Post

Knowing When To Go

It's not easy figuring out when it's time to go. Joe Biden didn't want to leave. Michael Harris writes:

Like a lot of people who don’t know when to call it a day, Biden was whistling past the graveyard. Power is too hard to get to voluntarily give up, especially when you are at the pinnacle. But after a disastrous and terribly revealing debate performance, Americans saw for themselves just how diminished a figure their president had become.  

So did major donors to the Democrats, as well as members of Biden’s own party, including elected officials. Nevertheless, it looked like Biden was going to follow the example of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The great jurist and women’s rights advocate rebuffed overtures to retire while Barack Obama was still president. Those requests began in 2012, when Ginsburg had already had bouts of pancreatic cancer. The pressure intensified in 2015, just before the presidential election.  

Instead of taking a “safe retirement,” as her Democratic colleagues urged her to do, Ginsburg chose to continue on in the Supreme Court  

Ginsberg's refusal has led to a Supreme Court which is hellbent on restoring a monarchy. Donald Trump intends to be that monarch. But, because Biden was able to grasp the importance of that moment, it's beginning to look like Donald won't sit on a throne. Instead, he'll sit behind bars.

Image: The Daily Beast

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

We live in The Age Of Disinformation. That disinformation has found a comfortable home on the Right. Linda McQuaig writes:

If we end up with Pierre Poilievre as prime minister, it will be partly because of all the groundwork done by right-wing think tanks in distorting the public debate over taxes.

Most notably, the Fraser Institute, generously funded by wealthy interests, has been using its ample resources for decades to turn Canadians into tax-haters, to disconnect taxes in the public’s mind from all the benefits, services, programs and infrastructure that taxes provide. 

Key to promoting this anti-tax agenda has been grossly exaggerating the actual tax burden on Canadians.

So, for instance, a new report from the Fraser Institute last week proclaimed that the tax bill paid by Canadians has increased by 2,705 per cent since 1961.

Now, there’s a mind-bending number. But it’s also a meaningless number, in that it fails to take into account inflation and the real increase in Canadian incomes over the past 63 years.

When these two factors are taken into account, we discover that taxes have increased 28% in 63 years:

Now, we could have a reasonable debate about whether a 28 per cent increase in the tax rate over six decades is too high. But we should start by acknowledging that government today provides a lot more benefits than it did in 1961 — most notably, universal health coverage and old age pensions — major programs that have become essential to the well-being and financial security of Canadians.

The Fraser Institute’s new report also claims that the average Canadian family pays total taxes of $46,988, which it says amounts to an average tax rate of 43 per cent.

But don’t be fooled by that word “average.” In doing its calculations, the Fraser report lumps all Canadians together — including rich Canadians, whose incomes and taxes distort the picture. (Although effective tax rates on the very rich are lower than on most Canadians, they receive a disproportionately large amount of the nation’s income and so pay more tax.)

As the old joke goes: if Bill Gates walks into a bar crowded with homeless people, the average net worth might rise to, say, $500 million. This “average” could lead us to believe that the people in the bar are very prosperous when, in fact, they’re all penniless, except Bill Gates who has $130 billion.

In The Age of Disinformation, the sources of information are of paramount importance. Mr. Poilievre's sources can't be believed. Neither can he.

Mark Twain was right. There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.

Image: Paul Daly The Canadian Press

On The Edge

The world is on a knife's edge. Michael Harris writes:

With the assassination of the political leader of Hamas in Tehran, Iran is vowing revenge against Israel.  No one knows what that will look like.  

Another missile and drone attack on Israel itself like the one last April, an assault on Israeli shipping, or an indirect strike at Israeli assets outside the country. It could get very personal—civilians, diplomats, politicians, no one knows.

While the world waits to see what Iran does, the earlier assassination of a Hezbollah leader in Beirut all but guarantees that the Iran proxy group will also be seeking vengeance. Tension is already high along Israel’s northern border, and any retaliatory attack by Hezbollah could transform sporadic fighting into a full-scale war in Lebanon. 

All of this is unfolding against the backdrop of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, triggered by the mass slaughter of 1,200 innocent Israelis by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. The terror group also snatched hostages, more than 100 of whom are still being held in Gaza.

The consequences of that war have been catastrophic:

Israel’s nine-month war has killed 40,000 Gazans, many of them women and children. It has also displaced 1.9 million people and caused an estimated $20-billion in damages to homes and infrastructure. Since the IDF cut off all services in Gaza, including water, and severely limited the food supply, a humanitarian disaster is also brewing.

Not all the violence has occurred in Gaza. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in 2023, Israeli forces killed 492 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 12 children.  

Israel is also holding more than 3,000 Palestinians in “administrative detention.” These detainees are being held without charge and trial, based on secret information that they pose a threat.

The war in the Middle East never ends. But it could end us all.

Image:  Andrew Meade and photographs courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Unforgivable Folly

Forty years ago, my wife and I and our kids spent two nights in a cabin outside of Jasper, Alberta, along the shores of the Athabasca River. Today, with a third of the town burned to the ground, I am profoundly sad. Susan Riley writes:

Our forests and communities burn at accelerating rates. One day downtown Toronto is awash in flood water; the next, iconic Jasper National Park is aflame. Winter is gradually retreating. Summers are becoming unbearable in some cities, especially for the elderly and those without air conditioning. Each new year brings once-in-a-lifetime climate emergencies. A recent Sunday was the hottest ever recorded globally—until the record was smashed the next day. 

Yet we allow our fossil-fuel industry to continue polluting—to actually increase production—to make promises it has shown it has no intention of keeping, while we wait for some imagined technology that will keep the oil (and profits) flowing and emissions magically shrinking.

Our politicians, with a few laudable exceptions, are divided into two camps: they are either stout defenders of the oil and gas industry no matter what damage the sector’s greenhouse gas emissions cause, or they are rhetorically committed to addressing climate change, but maybe next decade. Or maybe 2050. Maybe when there are no trees left, and smoke season lasts six months.

There is no need to re-litigate tired arguments about the carbon tax, or engage in hand-wringing over the costs of climate adaptation. There is, instead, an increasingly desperate need for a mass movement away from fossil dependency towards the clean, green future that—so far—is mostly glimpsed on billboards. 

Yet that mass movement has not materialized:

Just recently, for instance, in a blinding irony, a handful of major oilsands producers had to evacuate non-essential workers from mine sites in the Fort McMurray, Alta., area because of encroaching wildfires—fires, it hardly needs be said, made increasingly savage as emissions from these very sites multiply and accelerate the climate crisis. 

But if the immense fire that partly destroyed the city of Fort McMurray in 2016—a world-renowned event thanks to John Vaillant’s brilliant reporting in his award-winning book, Fire Weather—if that didn’t slow the pace of oil production, what will it take? Does the Alberta government care, for instance, that the scenic Rocky Mountain town of Jasper had to be evacuated last week as wildfires encroached? Does no other sector of that province’s economy—tourism, ranching, farming—count for anything in the face of the immense power of the oil industry?

Apparently not. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith declared herself “frightened and stressed” by the Jasper blaze, but she and many others are still living the dream: a booming oil and gas sector, big paycheques and bigger cars, and, well, if climate change is a problem, Canada is a tiny part of it. You would think it would be harder, every year, to ignore the inferno burning on the doorstep of the Edmonton provincial legislature, but denial is the easier and more lucrative course.

The federal government, meanwhile, looks on fretfully, tries to “work with the industry,” continues to offer loan guarantees—the latest worth $19-billion—to the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which, now that it is finally finished, will triple the amount of crude oil transported from Alberta to Vancouver harbour, and on to other places to be refined.

It bought the pipeline, of course, to win favour in Alberta, watched costs balloon to $34-billion, chipped in a $17-billion loan guarantee when construction got complicated, quietly tossed in that extra $19-billion a few weeks ago and—as NDP MP Charlie Angus says—is now “trying to cut some kind of backroom deal to create a front company” to take the embarrassing asset off its hands.

Even more cynically, it is primed to unload at least some of the pipeline on Indigenous groups, having set aside $5-billion in budget 2024 in loan guarantees for bands interested in investing in “natural resource” projects. Let them deal with the financial risk, the political heat, and—if the oil era ends expeditiously—a costly white elephant. 

This is unforgivable folly.

Image: Cpl. Marc-André Leclerc, DND Canada