The Fortress Of Crazy

Under its new premier, Alberta is fast becoming the Fortress Of Crazy. Kieran Leavitt reports that:

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she wants a “blanket amnesty” for residents charged with violating public health restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic and, in what one expert called a nod to conspiracy theories, to cut ties between the province’s health authority and the World Economic Forum.

Smith has spent much of her time in her new position as premier railing against decisions made during the pandemic, moves she was also a loud critic of as a radio host and UCP leadership contestant.

The new premier has already pledged never to lock down again, come under fire for suggesting unvaccinated people were the most discriminated-against group she’d ever seen, and promised to protect unvaccinated people under the Alberta Human Rights Act.

Smith’s latest step in ripping the provincial government away from its past record of health restrictions was delivered Friday during an internet livestream with the Western Standard just minutes after announcing her new cabinet picks.

“I believe that Alberta Health Services is the source of a lot of the problems that we’ve had,” she said.

Smith sees the World Economic Forum as the source of great evil:

“They signed some kind of partnership with the World Economic Forum right in the middle of the pandemic; we’ve gotta address that. Why in the world do we have anything to do with the World Economic Forum? That’s got to end.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what Smith was referring to, although Alberta Health Services was invited to join the WEF Global Coalition for Value in Healthcare in the summer of 2020, according to a news release from the time. The website for the coalition bills it as a global partnership where solutions can be explored for delivering better health outcomes and “innovative new approaches to person-centered health care.”

The World Economic Forum has been at the centre of conspiracy theories propelled through misinformation on the internet around a supposed “Great Reset” that would, the theories falsely assert, see global elites launch a coup to essentially take over world governments.

Lori Williams, a policy studies professor at Mount Royal University, said Smith took a day where she could have ushered in a new tone of stability after a series of headline-grabbing missteps and instead “shoots herself in the foot.”

“Rather than signalling continuity and competence, which I think her cabinet picks were meant to do, she has signalled an association with conspiracies again,” Williams said.

Smith has recently come under fire after independent journalist Justin Ling unearthed social media posts she’d made in the past dabbling in misinformation, some of which she’s already apologized for after making “ill-informed” comments about the war in Ukraine.

“She’s basically reminded anybody who might have forgotten or been willing to look in a different direction … of her inability to distinguish between credible, critically assessed information and conspiracy theories,” Williams said.

The American Disease has flourished in Alberta.

Image: The Toronto Star

An Inevitable Downfall

Henry Olsen writes that Republicans should pay attention to what just happened to Liz Truss:

Truss’s first mistake was to push a radical economic agenda she did not campaign on. Her personal views supporting a low-tax, smaller government were telegraphed years ago in her book, “Britannia Unchained.” But she did not campaign for the premiership on that agenda. She had promised some modest tax reductions and offered rhetorical backing for deregulation. But those were far short of the sweeping tax cuts she and her chancellor of the exchequer unveiled in their now-infamous mini-budget proposed in late September.

Republicans are at risk of making the same mistake if they retake control of Congress. The GOP’s midterm messaging focuses on inflation, crime and immigration, but the party is not telling the public much about what it would do to combat those ills. That might be good politics, but it also means they would have no mandate for significant departures from the status quo. Using the national debt limit next year as leverage to force significant spending cuts, including to Social Security and Medicare, as has recently been rumored, would be as politically disastrous for the GOP as Truss’s supply-side tax cuts were for the Tories.

Truss assumed that, once she became prime minister, she could do as she pleased:

Truss. . . failed by trying to push a revolution through Parliament without controlling all the levers of power. Many Conservative MPs quickly said they would oppose many of her plans, forcing her into humiliating policy U-turns that only fed the sense she was not in charge. Republican attempts to enact similar radical changes would be met with Democratic filibusters in the Senate and a presidential veto. Doing so regardless of that reality would be the political equivalent of Pickett’s Charge.

Being British, she delicately promulgated Donald Trump's position -- as expressed to the driver of his SUV -- "I'm the fuckin' president. You can't tell me what to do!"

The Greeks knew that hubris inevitably led to a leader's downfall.

amazon.ca

Truss Is Gone

That was fast. Liz Truss has resigned as prime minister of the U.K. Nick Eardley writes:

I've never seen anything like this. Let's be clear what's happened: yesterday Truss told us she was a fighter.

But the level of chaos in government, Parliament and the Conservative Party has led Truss to a point where she knows she can't continue.

What happens now is the quickest turnover of power we have seen in modern times.

This is a lightning speed change. The question is whether the Conservative Party can coalesce around a new leader and whether the party can avoid a general election.

In October we are going to have our third PM of the year.

She becomes the shortest serving prime minister in British history.

Her departure should serve as a warning to all conservatives.

Will He Be A Witness?

If there's one thing Doug Ford doesn't want to do, it's being a witness at the Emergencies Act Inquiry. Susan Delacourt writes:

Many mysterious characters drifted into Ottawa during last winter’s convoy protest. Three days into the public hearings on that event, the most mysterious actor to emerge so far is Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

In fact, two Doug Fords showed up in Ottawa on Monday. One, the in-person version, was appearing at an event with Justin Trudeau and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, talking glowingly about how well they all worked together.

To hear the premier describe it, they were as tight as the Three Musketeers when Canada’s capital and border points were under siege last February.

“Yes, I stood shoulder to shoulder with the prime minister,” Ford said on Monday about whether he supported the declaration of an emergency in February. “We’ve worked collaboratively with the mayor and the prime minister.”

But there is disagreement on that score:

Ontario, for instance, simply did not show up at proposed “tripartite” meetings with the City of Ottawa and federal government — a point that provoked frustration from mayor Watson and federal Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair, the inquiry heard.

Watson had hoped Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation might get involved in efforts to pressure truckers into ending the illegal blockade; Blair asked why he was reading in the media that Ontario viewed the tripartite committee as useless.

“I think I was disappointed that they didn’t participate,” Ottawa city manager Steve Kanellakos said during his testimony on Monday. At several points in his retelling of events over this tense time last winter, Kanellakos talked of how Ford’s government was pretty hands off, preferring to leave this mess as a police matter to sort out.

To be clear, Ford was no Pierre Poilievre:

Unlike the man who has been newly named the federal Conservative leader, Ford did not cheer on the protesters or meet with them. Surprisingly, perhaps, Ford managed to duck the wrath the convoy directed at Trudeau, even though Ontario, as much as the federal government, was responsible for the COVID measures that had the convoy folks all riled up. Still, no “F-- Ford” flags flew during the Ottawa occupation.

And, after Trudeau declared an emergency, Ford declared an emergency in Ontario. His final alliance with Trudeau has put Doug in a tight spot. He's hoping he can fly under the radar.

Image: The Toronto Star

A World That No Longer Exists

Liz Truss has only been Prime Minister of Britain for a short time. But she's already headed for the exit. Owen Jones writes:

No one can deny that Liz Truss was a dire front person for her own economic policies, offering a demeanour that had all the reassurance of a random stranger plucked off the street to become your local school’s headteacher. Having turned her own citizens into lab rats for an experiment brewed in the boardrooms of opaquely funded rightwing thinktanks, she has now been barred from the lab itself. Buried by the very “markets” she once fetishised, the prime minister is terminally wounded, fronting policies that, just days ago, she would have savaged as coming from the “anti-growth coalition”. Demanding the removal of Truss is something of an abstract question because, in any meaningful sense, she is no longer in power.

But no one should lay the blame for her demise solely at her feet:

We must not let the Conservative party blame this all on Truss, anoint her successor, and then regroup and reset, as if everything is back to normal.

The rehabilitation of monsters – or, at least, the lack of accountability for villains – is one of the reasons our country is in its present disarray. The Tory knack for reinvention depends on it, which is why they’ve so far survived overseeing what is, by many measures, the most ruinous time in office of any government in living memory. Let’s not forget what happened to Theresa May, who – after carelessly disposing of the Tories’ parliamentary majority – was condemned to remain in office by her own party, in the hope she’d absorb the political mortar fire otherwise directed at the Conservatives as a whole. When that purpose had been served, May could be safely discarded, with Boris Johnson heralded as the leader of a fresh new government that was innocent of the sins of his predecessor.

You can also see it as George Osborne is interviewed on Channel 4’s flagship political programme in the capacity of witness, rather than an accused in the dock. No single politician is more guilty for the burning skip that British society has become: his ideologically charged austerity is at the root of the longest squeeze in wages of modern times, fuelling the discontent that proved pivotal in the triumph of leave in the 2016 referendum. He tuts now at economic policies recklessly defying market rules, as though it wasn’t under his economic stewardship that Britain’s AAA-rated debt status wasn’t stripped away.

But more consequentially, observe our new de facto prime minister, Jeremy Hunt. One political commentator declared that “listening to Hunt in interviews this morning [was] like reaching calm blue sea after weeks in a force 10 storm”. It is difficult not to conclude that for many self-described moderates, politics is all about vibe, not about substance: a politician’s record matters less than the reassurance offered by their presentation skills. Hunt himself conceded that, as health secretary, he was too slow to boost the NHS workforce: a euphemistic revision of how he ignored severe NHS staff shortages, which left us underprepared for the pandemic. Given he agitated for corporation tax to be slashed to an even lower level than Truss had dreamed of, how can he credibly argue he will offer a meaningful alternative to Trussonomics? His new “economic advisory council” is comprised of fund managers and bankers – two of the few groups in society who can claim to have profited from the last dismal few years.

In Britain and around the world, conservatives are ill-equipped to handle the problems we face. That's because they live in a world that no longer exists.

Image: CNN

Can He Do It?

Michael Harris writes that Pierre Poilievre won't bring Justin Trudeau down:

“I don’t see any signs of traction for Pierre Poilievre.”

These words were spoken on background by a senior Liberal who is less than enamoured with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. With a long history in the party running back to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, he is critical of the way in which the current prime minister has shunned veterans in the party, dissolved the Liberal caucus in the Senate, and chose not to consult old hands. They have seen a thing or two in their time, and still believe they have something to contribute.

And recent polls seem to bear out his assessment:

Canadians don’t seem to think that being a far-right attack-dog confers the credentials to be prime minister. Even with painful inflation, and a PM with obvious baggage after three terms in power, Canadians in the Nanos Research poll gave Trudeau a huge lead over Poilievre. If only Trudeau and Poilievre appeared on the ballot, 46 per cent of respondents would choose Trudeau as PM and just 30 per cent the new Conservative leader.

Nik Nanos rightly observes that the incumbent always does better in these polls, because they already have the position and are “a better known commodity.” But the fact is, Poilievre has been in politics longer than Justin Trudeau. And he is very well known from his long record both in and out of government: supporter of Stephen Harper’s Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, rabid anti-vaxxer, and champion of the infamous siege of Ottawa that masqueraded under the name of the Freedom Convoy. For Poilievre, the occupation of Ottawa by a mob was just another opportunity for a selfie.

And the Nanos Research poll revealed another key weakness in Poilievre’s attempt to appeal to Canadians, other than the ones who downed the Kool-Aid inside the circled wagons of the recent CPC leadership race. When it comes to women voters, Trudeau leaves Poilievre in his vapour trail, with a stunning 52 per cent favouring the PM, against just 22 per cent for Poilievre. Those are not only losing numbers for Poilievre in the all-important suburban areas, but just about everywhere else.

As predicted by those who know him best, Poilievre has not moderated his right-wing messaging. In what appears to be a spiteful response to some key MPs who didn’t support his leadership, Poilievre dropped two of his strongest members from his shadow cabinet: Ed Fast and Michelle Rempel Garner.

And the CPC’s new civil liberties critic is none other than Ontario MP Marilyn Gladu. Gladu was an early and vociferous opponent of the Trudeau government’s masking and vaccination mandates. Like Alberta’s new premier, Gladu seems to think that it is more important to have the right to say no to a prudent public health measure than it is to save thousands of lives during a deadly pandemic. Talk about looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

At the next election, Justin will have been in office for close to ten years. He'll be well beyond his best before date. We'll see what the future holds.

Image: The Hill Times

What's Wrong With White Americans?

 

A  majority of white Americans back the Republican Party. Perry Bacon writes:

A clear majority of White Americans keeps backing the Republican Party over the Democratic Party, even though the Republican Party is embracing terrible and at times antidemocratic policies and rhetoric. The alliance between Republicans and White Americans is by far the most important and problematic dynamic in American politics today.

Non-Hispanic White Americans were about 85 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, much larger than the 59 percent of the U.S. population overall in that demographic. That was similar to 2016, when White voters were about 88 percent of Trump backers. It is very likely that White Americans will be more than 80 percent of those who back Republican candidates in this fall’s elections.

Eighty-five percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 were White, even though they make up only 59 percent of the U.S. population.

The Republican Party is the preferred choice of White people who describe themselves as evangelical Christians (whom Trump won by 69 points in 2020), White people in rural areas (Trump by 43 points), White people in the South (29 points), White men (17), White Catholics (15), White Protestants who don’t describe themselves as evangelicals (14), White people in the Midwest (13), White women (7) and White people who live in the suburbs (4). (These numbers come from post-election surveys and analysis from the Pew Research Center, the Cooperative Election Study and Eastern Illinois University professor Ryan Burge.)

 That White Vote is problematic:

Being the party of White Americans has given and will continue to give the Republicans two huge advantages. First, White Americans are about 72 percent of the U.S. electorate, about 13 percentage points more than their share in the overall population. White adults are more likely than Asian and Hispanic adults to be citizens (not recent immigrants) and therefore are eligible to vote. The median age for a White American is higher than that for Asian, Black or Latino Americans, and older Americans tend to vote at higher rates. If the electorate mirrored the country’s actual demographics and those groups voted as they did in 2020, Trump would have won only about 44 percent of the national vote, three points less than his 47 percent two years ago.

Second, the electoral college and the Senate give outsize power to less populated states — which in America today tend to be disproportionately White.

And history shows that White Americans have traditionally chosen the Republican Party:

The alliance between White Americans and the Republican Party has existed for decades. The last time a Democratic presidential candidate won the majority of White voters was in 1964, a year before Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act. The Republican Party spent much of the next three decades courting White Americans, in part, by casting Democrats as too tied to the causes of minorities, particularly Black people and Latino immigrants.

So it’s no accident that Republicans are winning the majority of White voters. It is in many ways the result of a successful strategy. It’s not that Trumpism brought White voters as a bloc to the Republican Party (they were already voting Republican) — but rather that it hasn’t scared many of them off.

So, you have to ask, What's wrong with White Americans?

Image: vox.com

Wooden-Headedness

Danielle Smith's first week on the job did not bode well for her future. Gary Mason writes:

At what point do Albertans begin to wonder – what just happened?

I’m referring to the new Premier, who has been foisted upon them by members of the United Conservative Party (largely from rural parts of the province) who thought Danielle Smith would make a perfectly fine head of government.

Maybe not so much.

As first days on the job go, Ms. Smith’s was pretty much a disaster. At a news conference on Tuesday, after her swearing-in ceremony, Jason Kenney’s successor was going on about one of her pet subjects: the terrible abuse and prejudice endured by the poor souls who chose not to get vaccinated during the pandemic.

She detailed the many things these saintly folks weren’t allowed to do over the past couple of years – enter hockey rinks, hop on planes, go to jobs, cross borders – and described them as having “been the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime.”

You could hear jaws hitting the floor across the country.

How could someone who is supposed to be the leader of a population that includes Indigenous people, members of the LBGTQ community and immigrants from any number of countries – in other words, people who truly understand what discrimination is – compare the lived experiences of these groups with those who chose not to get vaccinated?

It was not just tone-deaf, but profoundly hurtful.

Lost in all the sound and fury was Smith's attempt to soften her Alberta Sovereignty Act:

The act, as she envisioned it during the leadership race, would empower her government to ignore federal edicts deemed not to be in Alberta’s best interests. These edicts, she indicated at the time, included rulings of the Supreme Court.

At her news conference, however, the new Premier said that the province would, in fact, adhere to all rulings of the Supreme Court.

This course reversal isn’t a complete surprise, as her proposed act has been universally panned and derided as unconstitutional folly tantamount to a separatist document (the criticism even came from people in her own party).

You have to wonder:

She quickly made it known, for instance, that Deena Hinshaw, the province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, would not have her contract renewed. To be sure, Dr. Hinshaw is a sacrificial lamb, a gift to the anti-vaxxers who blamed her for the restrictions put in place during the pandemic.

But there will not be any “lockdowns” on Ms. Smith’s watch. She’s promised that. Even if, one is to presume, another wave of COVID-19 threatens to buckle the province’s hospital system, as it has several times over the past couple of years. Mr. Kenney’s downfall, in fact, was precipitated by his decision to end lockdowns in the summer of 2021 and declare the pandemic over, leading to an avalanche of new cases.

What is it they say about those who ignore history being doomed to repeat it?

The American historian Barbara Tuchman called it "wooden-headedness."

Image: The Globe And Mail

He Must Be Indicted

Yesterday's hearing in Washington provided a lot of new information. Dana Milbank catalogs it:

Trump adviser Steve Bannon, before the election, declared that Trump is “going to declare victory, and that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. … So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm.”

Trump friend and longtime adviser Roger Stone, before the election, said that regardless of the outcome, “the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. No, we won. F--- you. … We’ll have to start smashing pumpkins, if you know what I mean.”

Trump, knowing privately that he had lost, signed an order on Nov. 11 requiring the immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Somalia.

Trump, acknowledging defeat, told Meadows (according to video testimony from former Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson): “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, in video testimony, testified about Trump introducing her to lawyer John Eastman, who tried to enlist the RNC’s help with his fake-elector scheme.

Nancy Pelosi, in newly released video, pleaded for help from the Pentagon, the Virginia governor and the attorney general. She reacted in horror to the violence and talked with Vice President Mike Pence about “defecation” and defilement of the House floor.

Donald Trump's attempted coup met the textbook definition of sedition. He was at the centre of it. There won't be any indictments until after the election, now three weeks away. But, after the election, he must be indicted -- for sedition and for his theft of government documents.

If there's any justice, he'll will spend the rest of his natural life in jail.

Image: salon.com

The Second Jones Verdict

Joanna Slater reports in the Washington Post that:

A Connecticut jury ordered Infowars founder Alex Jones to pay $965 million in damages to the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook shooting for the suffering caused by years of lies that the massacre was a hoax.

Wednesday’s verdict marks the largest award to date in a multipronged legal battle by the families to hold Jones responsible for circulating falsehoods about the 2012 mass shooting, in which 20 children and six educators were killed in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Jones has been spewing lies for a long time:

Within hours of the shooting, Jones was telling his audience that it was staged as a pretext for confiscating guns. Within days, he began to suggest that grieving parents were actors. In the years that followed, he repeatedly said the massacre was faked.

The families testified during the trial that the lies spread by Jones led to harassment and threats by conspiracy theorists who have accused them of faking their own children’s deaths. They described feeling unsafe in their homes and hypervigilant in public. Some of the families moved away from Newtown.

The largest single award of $120 million went to Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, was killed in the shooting. Jones spent years mocking Parker as an actor. The plaintiffs also included an FBI agent who responded to the shooting. He was awarded $90 million in damages.

After the unanimous verdict was announced, the family members gathered outside the courthouse and thanked the jury.

“The truth matters,” said Erica Lafferty, the daughter of Sandy Hook Elementary Principal Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, who was killed at the school. “Those who profit off other people’s pain and trauma will pay for what they’ve done.”

This was the second verdict against Jones:

In August, a jury in a different case in Texas said Jones must pay nearly $50 million to the parents of Jesse Lewis, a 6-year-old killed at Sandy Hook. The actual payout, however, will be far smaller because of state limits on such awards.

That's over one billion dollars. And there are more trials coming.

The truth matters. And this kind of lying must be expensive -- very expensive.

Image: bloomberg.com

A Tough Time

Canada is a big country, and it's always been difficult to govern. There has always been a tug-of-war between the federal government and the provinces. But the road ahead will be very problematic. Susan Delacourt writes:

It was Pierre Trudeau, father of the current prime minister, who famously said many decades ago that Ottawa should be more than a “head waiter to the provinces” when it came to constitutional matters and national government.

Now, roughly 40 years later, his son is contending with an array of provinces who would like to see the federal government even further demoted — to a busboy, perhaps.

In the 2022 version of constitutional drama in this country, provinces are looking at the supreme law of the land as a pick-and-choose buffet of authority, which premiers can select or reject as they like.

In the past few weeks, the spotlight has shifted to Alberta:

Alberta’s new premier, Danielle Smith, has put this cafeteria constitutionalism into the spotlight with her promised “sovereignty act.” Details are still to come; Smith was only sworn in formally on Tuesday. What we do know is that Smith is arguing that if Alberta sees its interests in conflict with federal laws, it reserves the right to resist.

On Tuesday, the same day Smith was sworn in, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe sidled up to the buffet with the release of a policy paper called “Drawing the Line,” in which the province argues it needs less of Ottawa in its life.

“We need a more autonomous approach to be a stronger province in Confederation,” the policy paper states.

Saskatchewan and Alberta have been saying for some time now that their opt-in view of federalism is far from radical and in fact, it is what Quebec has been practising with some considerable clout in this country for generations.

Smith did a round of media interviews over the weekend in which she said repeatedly that her sovereignty act would allow Alberta to be more like Quebec. Moe’s new policy paper also specifically credits Quebec with inspiration for “drawing the line.”

Canadians are sleepwalking through this crisis:

In my colleague Althia Raj’s latest podcast, devoted to the national-cohesion crisis that no one seems to be noticing, constitutional lawyer Marion Sandilands warns that pick-and-choose federalism is no way to run a united country.

In the case of Quebec, Sandilands said: “I think what we are seeing is not through a referendum, but independence bit by bit. … You know, there’s no one radical break, but I think over time, we’ll wake up one day and Quebec won’t really be a province anymore.”

And it’s spreading through other provinces too, even Ontario, where Premier Doug Ford’s government has twice now said it was willing to use the notwithstanding clause to pass laws that flew in the face of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

“I think we’re seeing tremors in the federation and in the Constitution and they’re all rooted in kind of different things, different contexts, different frustrations, different aggravations, but they have a common theme — this kind of rejection of the role of the courts,” Sandilands said.

All of this talk of sovereignty, drawing the line and unilaterally modifying the Constitution (as Quebec is proposing with its language laws) is the opposite — focused instead on where the provinces want to stage their own resistance.

As I wrote five days ago, things don't bode well for the future.

Image: pqbnews.com

It Ain't Over

Joe Biden says the pandemic is over. Millions of people agree with him. But COVID hasn't receded into the history books. Glen Pearson writes:

Covid-19 hasn’t receded into the past, and it likely never will.  The record of its effects on us has been brutal – 4.3 million cases with 45,648 deaths.  Ontario had the worst count (14,495), but every province and territory had fallen into the pandemic’s grip.  It has changed our outlook on life, perhaps forever.  How we view employment, the economy, our communities, our future, and even one another has left us unsure of how to proceed.  The old formulas no longer work, and the alternatives remain unclear.

It’s difficult to move on when new variants continue to fill our hospitals, and recent deaths are announced weekly.  Before the pandemic, we had received consistent warnings that things like Covid were not only possible but imminent.  We largely ignored those signs and blindly moved on.  We are now running the dangerous risk of adopting that attitude once more, individually, collectively, and institutionally.  While we may hope to get on with our daily pursuits, our health systems remain woefully underfunded, under-resourced, and under pressure every moment of the day while the Canadian population and its leaders continue to ignore both the potential and severity of future pandemics.

With the Canadian economy threatened by recession and two years of pandemic debts to be repaid, the funds required to bring our health systems up-to-speed will prove difficult to secure.  And with a partisan political climate more concentrated on theatrics than the efficient delivery of services, the chances of inter-party cooperation to deal with the health crisis are minimal at best.

Pandemics are not new. And experience has given us the knowledge to deal with them: 

This knowledge is second nature to us, but we have placed an increased distance between awareness of the threat and the steps necessary to reduce it.    Disease has a context, fed and manipulated by societal conditions neglected over time.  Permit social conditions to deteriorate or remain under-resourced, and the threat to human life will be inevitable.  Canada has learned this lesson well enough to lead the world in healthcare awareness.  But knowledge without action leads to eventual decline.  Failure to address the problem is to accept it, and to tolerate it is to fall prey to our lack of watchfulness.

Pandemics require societal responses. Unfortunately, we live in an age of unbridled individualism and magical thinking. And so it continues.

It ain't over.

Image: tvo.org

The Trumpification Of Canadian Politics

Canadian politics have become Trumpified. Michael Harris writes:

The same distemper abroad in the U.S. has already made an appearance here. No one talks much about the Freedom Convoy’s purpose in occupying Ottawa for three painful weeks. They wanted to change the government. They wanted a weird configuration of a truckers’ committee, opposition parties, and the governor general to run the show— without the untidy necessity of getting elected. They wanted to depose Justin Trudeau.

And the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada took up at least part of their cause. As Jean Charest said during the recent CPC leadership race, “You can’t be a leader of a party, and the chief legislator of the country as prime minister, and support people breaking the laws. That disqualifies you.”

Except that it didn’t. With the public endorsement of former prime minister Stephen Harper, Poilievre ran away with the Conservative leadership.

The path that Poilievre is forging is not the traditional path in Canadian politics:

Unlike his immediate predecessors—Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole—Poilievre hasn’t moved to the centre in hopes of attracting new supporters. If anything, he has moved solidly to the right. He showed that when he supported the private member’s bill of Kelly Block, a social conservative from rural Saskatchewan. Block wanted a change to the Criminal Code to protect the “conscience rights” of health professionals.

If this bill had passed, (it didn’t) it would have made it an offence to intimidate or fire a health-care worker who refused to provide a medically assisted death or make a referral.

Just two problems with that approach. First, as reported by The Globe and Mail, there is nothing in the current legislation that forces medical professionals to take part in a medically assisted death. And second, the Court of Appeal in Ontario has already ruled that allowing doctors to opt out of making referrals would in fact stigmatize patients and restrict their access to legal medical services.

In the U.S., Trump and his MAGA movement have placed themselves above the law, demonized their opponents, declared war on the media, and promised to free Americans from oppressive government. Here’s Poilievre in his own words: “The Liberals want to stop me from becoming prime minister because they know I will get rid of their gatekeepers, defund the CBC, abolish mandates, and make Canada the freest country on Earth so you can take back control of your life.”

Sounds a lot like Donald Trump, doesn't it?

Image: twitter

An Old Cautionary Tale

If you want to know how far the Republican Party has devolved, take a look at what's happening in the state of Georgia. Maureen Dowd writes:

Once, there were limits, things that could disqualify you from office, especially in the party that claimed a special relationship with Jesus.

But those limits don’t exist anymore.

Conservatives have sacrificed any claim to principle. In an unholy transaction, they stuck with Trump because there was a Supreme Court seat and they were willing to tolerate his moral void in order to hijack the court. They didn’t care how he treated women as long as he gave them the opportunity to rip away rights from women. They wanted to impose their warped morality, a “Handmaid’s Tale” world, on the rest of us.

Christian-right leaders made clear that, no matter what Trump said or did to women, he was preferable to Hillary Clinton, who supported abortion rights.

Now the Republicans are running Herschel Walker in Georgia, a man who:

demonstrates no qualifications for serving in the Senate. His sole credential is that he was once excellent at carrying a football.

Story after story has emerged about reprehensible behavior and lies concerning women and children, and about falsifying his personal history.

The Daily Beast asserted that while Walker wants to completely ban abortion, even in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother, comparing it to murder, he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009. Walker has called the story “a flat-out lie,” but The Beast talked to the unnamed woman and checked her financial records. She said she was just sick of the hypocrisy. Even his conservative influencer son, Christian, disparaged his father’s “lies” on Twitter.

On Friday, The Times published a story confirming The Daily Beast’s reporting, and in a startling development added that in 2011, Herschel pressured the same woman to have another abortion. They ended their relationship when she refused; she had their son, now 10.

There’s more: His ex-wife claimed he pointed a pistol at her head and told her he was going to blow her brains out; he has four children with four different women, but hadn’t publicly acknowledged three of them. His 10-year-old was one of those hidden.

Yet the Republicans are sticking by Walker:

Privately, some Republicans are mortified by the Walker spiral, but they’re going to brazen it out for the win.

Dana Loesch, the right-wing radio host, was blunt: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”

It's an old story -- and an old cautionary tale.

Image: The New York Times

Things Do Not Bode Well

A constitutional crisis is brewing. Andrew Coyne writes:

As of this week we will have not one but two provincial governments in this country formally committed to act in defiance of the Constitution, legitimate federal authority and the rule of law.

François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government in Quebec is the first. Returned to power with an increased majority after a campaign filled with appalling attacks on immigrants, Mr. Legault will be looking to build on the signature policies of his first four years – Bill 21, imposing an effective hiring bar on observant members of religious minorities across much of the public sector, and Bill 96, which broadly outlaws the use of English in either the public or the private sector.

Still, Mr. Legault is the soul of legality compared with what we may expect from Danielle Smith as leader of the United Conservative Party and premier of Alberta. Where Mr. Legault at least pretended to rewrite the Constitution, Ms. Smith would openly repudiate it; where Mr. Legault’s government took the trouble to preserve its bills from the Charter’s reach by means of the notwithstanding clause – itself a part of the Charter – Ms. Smith’s would excuse itself altogether from federal authority, on the strength of nothing more than its own legislative say-so.

We have yet to see the precise wording of that bill, the preposterous Alberta Sovereignty Act, but as advertised it would pretend to empower the province to ignore any federal law it chose – after a “free vote” of the legislature, speaking of fig-leafs – and to defy any federal court ruling that went against it. Companion legislation would assert the right to replace all federally appointed judges with provincial appointees, to expel the RCMP in favour of a provincial police force, and to collect the tax from the province’s businesses and public employees that they now send to the feds.

It’s nonsense, of course: utterly, vapidly unconstitutional. So is Bill 96. And so both will be found in good time by the Supreme Court of Canada. But whereas the Legault government would probably yield before an inclement Supreme Court ruling – even the Parti Québécois accepted the court’s jurisdiction in the secession reference – the Smith government would more or less be bound to defy a court finding that the Alberta Sovereignty Act was ultra vires the Constitution: The whole premise of the law, after all, is to free the province from such constraints.

Mr. Legault has more demands up his sleeve: for full control of immigration, for example, or for more money for health care with even fewer strings attached. The immigration file is particularly fraught: The Legault government aims to reduce immigration to the province, even as immigration to Canada has soared. Over time, that promises to further reduce Quebec’s already dwindling share of the population, and with it the province’s influence. No problem: Mr. Legault has a solution. Quebec must be guaranteed its current share of the seats in the House of Commons, in perpetuity – as befits its status as a “nation.”

Things do not bode well for the future.

Image: psychologytoday.com

Poilievre The Misogynist

The more we see and hear of Pierre Poilievre, the more there is to dislike. Alex Boutilier reports that:

Pierre Poilievre’s official YouTube videos included a hidden tag appealing to misogynistic online movements that Canada’s intelligence agencies view as a danger.

A Global News analysis of 50 of Poilievre’s most recent YouTube videos showed that they included a tag — hidden from viewers, but not from the videos’ publisher — used by a misogynistic online movement. The tag helps promote Poilievre’s videos among those circles, and signals to YouTube what users might be interested in the Conservative leader’s messaging.

The tag, #mgtow, is an acronym for “Men Going Their Own Way” — a mostly-online movement comprised of anti-feminists who attempt to cut women completely out of their lives. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the movement overlaps with more aggressive forms of “male supremacy.”

It’s difficult to quantify the size of the movement, and its overlap with other forms of misogyny both online and in the real world. But online spaces connected to the “manosphere” have proliferated in recent years.

Global News verified the tag was used on the videos using publicly-available software and checked it against the video’s source code.

Within hours of Global News sending a detailed list of questions to Poilievre’s office, the tag disappeared.

Poilievre’s office said the Conservative leader was unaware the embedded tags existed “and therefore was unaware they were used for uploads on his YouTube channel over the last” four and a half years.

Unaware? Welcome to Poilievre's Conservative Party of Canada.

Image: Global News

Toppling The Regime

Marjorie Taylor Greene is no intellectual giant. But she knows what she's doing. These days she has taken to calling Joe Biden's government a "regime." Greg Sargent writes:

No U.S. lawmaker rhapsodizes about political violence as enthusiastically as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. On Saturday, the Georgia Republican raged: “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.” After the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Greene suggested the United States is embroiled in “civil war.”

The term “regime” is a mainstay of Greene’s political vocabulary, and right-wing authoritarian nationalists in Congress and the media are using it more and more prominently. Understanding the term is essential to grasping what’s happening with today’s MAGA-fied right and why some experts fear we may be hurtling toward rising political violence and instability.

Greene is on the leading edge of this trend. After the Mar-a-Lago search, she suggested that only “countries during civil war” typically see such “rogue” behavior by the state. Soon after, the term “regime” quickly became central to the right’s Mar-a-Lago narrative as a way to express that thought.

The January 6th insurrection failed. But Greene is a sign that another insurrection is coming:

It’s telling that all the “regime” talk exploded after the Mar-a-Lago incident. After all, the search was authorized by a judge who saw probable cause to believe that three federal statutes may have been violated. It ended up recovering reams of classified documents that Trump hoarded, after his own lawyers suggested to investigators that none remained.

To call this the work of the Biden “regime” is really to say that the act of applying the law to Trump will be treated as fundamentally illegitimate. When Greene claims this is the stuff of civil wars and rogue regimes, she really means that holding Trump accountable to the law should be regarded by his supporters as an act of war.

What's going on?

Conservatism scholar Joshua Tait explains how this works in his etymology of the “regime” term for the Bulwark. The word, Tait notes, is meant to invoke a sense that a range of U.S. institutions — the administrative state, the media, universities, etc. — have been irredeemably captured by the left, creating a “regime” that in some vague sense exercises hidden but tyrannical control.

As Tait writes, in this formulation, Trump is the tribune of “the people” — selectively defined — who is waging war on their behalf against this disguised tyranny. The “regime” has fought back with more oppression, which proves the truth of the original formulation in a conveniently self-reinforcing loop.

“What do people ultimately do to regimes?” Tait asks rhetorically. “They topple them.” To call the legitimately elected Biden administration “the regime,” Tait argues, “is an implicit call to overthrow it.”

Steven Levitsky, a scholar of democratic breakdown, sees this as roughly analogous to Latin American countries in which the concerted delegitimization of elected governments was followed by coups.

“To call a democratically elected government a ‘regime’ is to deliberately undermine its legitimacy and justify authoritarian and violent acts against it,” Levitsky tells me.

The mainstreaming of the term among Republicans bodes badly for what’s to come, Levitsky warns. This comes after a large swath of Republicans went all in with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and then with placing him beyond accountability for the mob’s coup attempt, and as political violence is increasingly glorified in GOP politics.

Now the term “regime” is being employed strategically to justify the further abandonment of democracy, Levitsky notes: “This is clear evidence that a big sector of the party is now on authoritarian terrain.”

It's tempting to see Taylor Greene as an airhead -- because, in some ways, she is. But she is also very dangerous.

Image: Time Magazine

Legault's Victory

The Quebec election confirms that things have changed since we lived there. Forty years ago, the battlelines were between the Liberals and the Parti-Quebecois. Now four provincial parties duke it out. Chantal Hebert writes:

Until 2018, the Quebec Liberals and Parti Québécois played the leading roles in the debate over the province’s political future. On Monday, both recorded historically low scores in the popular vote.

The Liberals were essentially shut out of francophone Quebec. The PQ — with a mere three seats including that of leader Paul St-Pierre-Plamondon — will have to struggle to make itself heard in the provincial legislature.

The reason Legault won handily is the same reason our elections are contentious across the country -- the first past the post voting system:

The discrepancies are significant. The system inflated Legault’s victory. With almost the same vote share, the Liberals held on to the role of Official Opposition with 20-plus seats while the Conservatives — subject to a recount — won none.

But when it comes to the prospects of electoral reform, the Quebec proponents of a more proportional system are flogging a dead horse, one that is well on the way to the glue factory.

With the CAQ and Liberals both beneficiaries of the current system, unicorns will surround the legislature before the issue of electoral reform is live again within its walls.

More so than any policy, it is the CAQ’s positioning as a haven for federalists and sovereignists willing to focus on a common nationalist agenda that left the other parties fighting for crumbs in Monday’s election.

As the election demonstrated, none of Legault’s rivals holds enough cards to offer Quebecers a comprehensive alternative government, and irreconcilable differences stand in the way of any substantial alliance between any combination of them.

So what does the future hold?

Legault will not push sovereignty, but he will push the sovereignty of the French language -- which will mean further restricting the language rights of Quebec's anglophones and allophones -- those whose first language is neither French nor English.

And there are other battles on the horizon:

A showdown between the provinces and federal government on health-care funding is looming. Trudeau wants more input on where the money would be spent. But the prime minister could end up in a tug of war with Quebec and Ontario over the introduction of more private input in the public system.

On the environment, Legault wants the federal government to take a pass at assessing his government’s major infrastructure projects. Those include a controversial tunnel to link the Quebec south shore with the downtown core of the provincial capital, and the building of more dams to increase the province’s hydro output.

On the CAQ’s contention it should have total control over immigration to the province and against the backdrop of the party’s record on minority rights, the two governments seem headed for a major collision.

And then, of course, they will likely fight each other in the Supreme Court over bills on secularism and language.

So don't expect a detent between Quebec City and  Ottawa.

Image: The Toronto Star

Tax Fairness?

A recent report highlights how little Canada's biggest corporations are paying in taxes. Fares Alghoul writes:

Canada’s largest corporations are making record profits and paying income tax at record-low rates, according to a new report from the non-profit Canadians for Tax Fairness.

The report found an “enormous increase” in the gap between what corporations would pay at the corporate rate stipulated in the tax code and what they actually paid. That gap grew to $30 billion in 2021 — an amount the organization says represents an “unexplained loss” to the country.

The report analyzed the profits and taxes paid by 123 of the country’s largest corporations with a market capitalization of $2 billion or more over the past five years. It found the annual tax gap in the three years before the pandemic averaged $13.5 billion, but that amount more than doubled — to $30 billion — in 2021.

“This was due to record high profitability combined with corporations pushing their effective tax rates down to record lows,” the report’s author, DT Cochrane, told the Star.

Amid inflation, growing deficits and a looming recession, “obviously this lost public money is concerning,” Cochrane said. “This unexplained loss of $30 billion could not come at a worse time.”

Obviously, something is terribly wrong. We've had forty years of trickle-down economics. After the financial collapse of 2008, you would think that we would have learned a lesson. 

Obviously not.

Image: Michael Roberts Blog

The March Backward

If you thought that the U.S. Supreme Court's last session was horrific, Ruth Marcus writes that you ain't seen nothin' yet:

Nothing in the behavior of the court’s emboldened majority suggests any inclination to pull back on the throttle. The Supreme Court is master of its docket, which means that it controls what cases it will hear, subject to the agreement of four justices. Already, with its calendar only partly filled, the justices have once again piled onto their agenda cases that embroil the court in some of the most inflammatory issues confronting the nation — and more are on the way.

Last term, in addition to overruling Roe v. Wade, the conservative majority expanded gun rights, imposed severe new constraints on the power of regulatory agencies and further dismantled the wall of separation between church and state.

The court is marching on toward fresh territory, taking on race, gay rights and the fundamental structures of democracy — this even as the shock waves of the abortion ruling reverberate through our politics and lower courts grapple with a transformed legal regime. And there’s every indication that the court intends to adopt changes nearly as substantial — and as long sought by conservatives — as those of last term.

The conservative justices are in a hurry:

In assembling its cases for the term, the conservative wing has at times displayed an unseemly haste — prodded by conservative activists who have seized on the opportunities presented by a court open to their efforts to reshape the law. The court reached out to decide a dispute about when the Clean Water Act applies to wetlands, even as the Environmental Protection Agency rewrites its rules on that very issue. It agreed to hear a wedding website designer’s complaint that Colorado’s law barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation violates her free speech rights to oppose same-sex marriage, even though Colorado authorities have not filed any complaint against her. It took the marquee case of the term — the constitutionality of affirmative action programs at colleges and universities — although the law in this area has been settled and there is no division among the lower courts.

“They’re impatient,” Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus said of the conservative justices, especially the longest-serving, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. “They’ve spent a lot of time waiting for this majority to happen, and they don’t plan to waste it.”

They're doing this even as a majority of Americans see the court as a political weapon:

If the majority insists on its current and hurried path, it risks deepening the very questions about the court’s legitimacy that have tormented the justices — divisions reflected in the bellicosity of their written work and that have erupted, in recent weeks, into their public debate. At a moment of extreme and increasing national division, change of such velocity and breadth is unhealthy not only for the court but also for a nation being asked to abide by its rulings.

Nearly 80 years ago, Judge Learned Hand observed that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” By contrast, “this is a court that is very convinced of its righteousness,” said Stanford Law School professor Pamela S. Karlan. “This is a court on which there are a number of justices who are very eager to push the law in directions they prefer, and they don’t think to themselves, ‘We should go slow on these things.’ ”

Put simply, the conservative march backward continues -- with the Supreme Court leading the way.

Image: nature.com

Can He Beat The Odds?

The trucker's convoy is still here. And, Darrell Bricker writes, they're not going anywhere:

The so-called “freedom convoy” that blocked Parliament Hill and several Canada-U.S. border crossings may have dispersed earlier this year, but it won’t be leaving our political conversation anytime soon. At least, not if opponents of the federal Conservative Party and their new leader, Pierre Poilievre, have anything to say about it.

The most recent polling Ipsos conducted for Global News shows why.

The party most interested in reminding Canadians about ties between the convoy and Pierre Poilievre will be the Liberal Party. Why? The Liberals are in a very difficult spot. They currently trail the Conservatives in the national popular vote by five points. The Conservatives also lead the Liberals in all regions of the country west of Quebec, with a stunning seven-point lead in seat-rich Ontario. With these numbers, if an election were held tomorrow, the Conservatives would easily win a plurality of seats.

It gets worse for the Liberals.

Justin Trudeau trails Pierre Poilievre as preferred prime minister by about the same amount as the Liberal Party trails the Conservative Party on vote. Most worrying for the prime minister is how high his negatives are. Canadians who strongly disapprove of Trudeau outnumber those who strongly approve of him by a ratio of four-to-one. These negatives are also well ahead of those of Poilievre, who remains largely unknown to a significant number of Canadians.

Trudeau’s relationship with Canadians has gone through the full cycle of Ds: darling, to disappointment, to dislike. This situation will be difficult to reverse, even for a gifted politician like Trudeau.

Further on leadership, two data points jump out of the polling on how Canadians view Trudeau and Poilievre. Trudeau leads Poilievre by 16 points on which federal leader is most likely to “be in over his head.” This is astounding given that Trudeau has been prime minister for seven years and Canadians barely know Poilievre.

As worrying for the Liberals is that Poilievre and Trudeau are separated by only two points on which leader is most likely to have a hidden agenda. In the past, this issue has proven to be an Achilles Heel for the Conservatives. Not so much for the new Conservative leader.

If the Liberals can’t count on their governing record or the strength of their leader to provide them with an advantage going into the next election, then what about their strengths on policy? Unfortunately, there isn’t much for them to work with here either.

We asked Canadians about which issues they are most focused on for the next election. The top five that came back are: health care, the economy, housing, inflation/interest rates, and taxes. Unfortunately for the Liberals, the Conservatives lead on all these issues with the exception of health care, where there is a three-way tie. Even on the sixth issue, climate, a signature issue for the Liberals, the Liberals are tied with the NDP. In other words, the policy door is closed for the Liberals too.

So, things don't look good for the Liberals. However,

the poll shows Poilievre’s support of the protesters is a potential vulnerability available for the Liberals to exploit. The Liberals are too good at running effective, disciplined, and ruthless election campaigns to miss it.

Ipsos asked Canadians the following question: “As you know, Pierre Poilievre, the new leader of the Conservative Party, expressed his support for the freedom convoy protests that occurred in Ottawa and at border crossings last year. Are you more or less likely to vote for the Conservative Party because of his stance on this issue?”

Seventeen per cent of Canadians told us they would be more likely to vote for the Conservatives because of Poilievre’s support for the truckers. Conversely, 41 per cent said they would be less likely to vote for the Conservatives due to Poilievre’s position. Most importantly though, 41 per cent said Poilievre’s stance on the truckers would have no impact on their future vote.

The Liberals will not allow this much fence sitting to continue without challenge. They will push voters to pick a side. If the fence sitters split in the same ratio (roughly 2:1 to unfavourable) as those who have already made up their minds, then the Liberals will have something to work with. That’s why they will go all in on making the truck convoy and various adjacent issues the focus of their campaign. Otherwise, they can only wait for Poilievre to make a serious error or for some crisis to change their prospects. Nearly a decade in power has left the Liberals little else to work with.

Ten years is roughly the longest period voters will give any Canadian government. Time will tell if Justin can beat those odds.

Image: theglobeandmail.com

A World Of Problems

We live in a world of problems. Bob Rae writes from the United Nations:

We are meeting at a time of major disruption in the global economy, geopolitics and politics, the sustainability of the planet, global public health, the pace of technological change, and the inevitable human consequences of all of the above. The situation does not lend itself to simple bumper stickers, but we have become used, here at the UN, to referring to “a cascade of crises”, that fall into and amplify each other, and continue to have powerful consequences for the world, and inevitably for all of us.  

While I have been here as Canada’s Ambassador, this was my first UNGA high-level week, which is really ten days of nonstop speeches, side meetings, breakfasts, coffees, pull-asides, lunches, more coffees, dinners, and for the strongest among us, late night conclaves.  After two years of Zooms, FaceTimes, Webexes, MS Teams and every imaginable platform, it was all in person and in your face.  The world we faced was an even bigger mess than what we faced before the Great Distancing of March 2020.  Canada more than held its own, but it was hectic.

What is Canada's place in the world?

Canada is — by virtue of its history, geography, demography, social makeup and economy — directly implicated in the world.  We are an indigenous country, an Arctic country, a country of the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Americas, and thanks to our dramatically shifting demography because of immigration, a country that is tied to every other country, language, and history, in the world. We are a trading nation, a country whose GDP depends on our economic interdependence with the rest of the world. We are members of a multitude of alliances, agreements, and associations. There is no part of the world that is far away or remote from us.  This is who we are.

And we cannot withdraw from the world:

Any attempt to ignore our global situation is bound to fail. The UN and multilateral agencies around the world are a critical place for us to do our business.

The most pressing problem at the moment is the war in Ukraine:

The issue for us is, how much do we care about these values and institutions? Four hundred years ago, Blaise Pascal wrote that “Justice without force is powerless, and force without justice is tyranny”.  We cannot afford to be powerless in our response to aggression.

But we face a myriad of issues:

COVID19’s effects on the global south have been serious, on both the health and economic fronts.  This will become a more serious issue this year and next, and we can expect continued pressure on global food and financial systems.

Conflict has been exacerbated, particularly in Africa, but elsewhere as well. This puts pressure on UN Peacekeeping and conflict prevention, but also on the global humanitarian situation, which is now more serious than at any point since the Second World War.  There are more displaced people, internal migrants and refugees, than even before. The challenge of responding adequately to this crisis is great.  Somalia and Pakistan are the immediate crises, but there are many others.  Our development and humanitarian budgets will be stretched, and will test our global commitment. 

Climate change will require greater efforts in mitigation (lowering emissions) and adaptation. The broad crisis in development is made even worse by climate change.

Since Kyoto, we have seen some progress in reducing the pace of the increase in emissions, but have consistently missed targets both at home and globally.  The painful reality for Canada is that we are a large per capita emitter and a small global emitter.  We can’t have much credibility without taking measures that will continue to be domestically challenging.  The upcoming COP27 meeting at Sharm El Sheikh in November will focus as much on issues of adaptation and climate finance as on the reduction of global emissions.  China and Russia will use the disruptive impact of the invasion of Ukraine to point out that Western rhetoric exceeds its delivery. The most important message on climate is that it is today’s issue and today’s crisis. It is not something that happens in 2050 if we fail to meet our targets. It is a crisis of today, not of tomorrow.

Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine has its parallels in other countries taking the law into their own hands, which puts international mechanisms of accountability under great pressure to deliver.  China in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang, comes to mind as a particular challenge, but there are others.

We can no longer talk with any confidence of a “rules-based order” because the rules are being broken too often for those words to trip meaningfully off the tongue. The phrase that we have used since the Atlantic Charter was signed in Washington in January 1942, the war aims that united the Allies against the common foe, and underpinned the founding of the United Nations in 1945, is not respected by many governments. Any doubt about this has been swept away by Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the uneven response to this invasion from the rest of the world.

The world has never been an easy or languid place. It certainly isn’t now. Canada’s greatest orator, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, reminded his fellow Canadians in the debates on Confederation that “We are in the rapids, and there is no turning back”.  It shall take all our skills to keep us on an even keel. 

We are, indeed, "in the rapids."

Image: Canada Mission UN Twitter

Truth And Reconciliation Day

The history of any nation is part of the history of humanity. That means that every nation must confront its Heart of Darkness. Some nations refuse to do that. At the moment, the United States is trying not to do that. Attempts to confront history are labeled "woke."

With this newly established holiday, we are compelled to confront the dark part of our history. With each passing holiday, we will be forced to consider how far we have progressed or devolved. Let's hope we can learn from history -- and not repeat it.

Image: thestar.com

The R Word

A recession, we're told, is just around the corner. Heather Scoffield writes:

Deloitte Canada joins economists at Bank of Montreal, Desjardins and Royal Bank in seeing two straight quarters of “mild” economic contraction in our near future — perhaps as soon as the fourth quarter of 2022 which starts in October.

Don’t worry too much, we’re told. It will be painless, and it may even be good for us.

That’s wishful thinking.

Jobs, of course, are top of mind as soon as anyone mentions the R-word. Let’s not gloss over the fact that unemployment is near record lows. Canada’s labour market bounced back from the pandemic recession with surprising strength — a testimony to flexible and resilient employers and employees, as well as plentiful government support.

We are entering the downturn with a tight job market that has pulled in new workers and marginalized workers alike, buoying optimism for a more inclusive and diverse workforce over the long term.

So can it really be that bad?

There’s reason to be leery.

For one, the jobs bonanza of last year is over. Canada’s labour market has shed jobs for the past three months, and the unemployment rate rose to 5.4 per cent in August, albeit from a rock-bottom 4.9 per cent in July.

Brendon Bernard, economist at job-posting site Indeed Canada, has his hands on the day-to-day churn in hiring, and he still sees plenty of strength in the labour market. But it’s not like it was a few months ago. In May, for example, job postings were 74 per cent above their pre-pandemic levels. Nowadays, they’re 59 per cent above.

“We’re still in a job-seekers market, but there has been a momentum shift,” he says. “Things are starting to ease.”

Over at Deloitte Canada, chief economist Craig Alexander has just called a mild recession starting in the fourth quarter. He too sees a cooling of the labour market but, as long as things unfold as he expects, he is forecasting “recession with an asterisk.”

The main reason the economy is poised to shrink, he says, is because companies stocked up heavily on everything they could earlier this year in the face of supply-chain disruptions. But now, supply chains seem to be working themselves out, and companies have no reason keep their inventories high.

In other words, nothing to do with jobs.

The question is, how will governments react?

In the wake of a poorly conceived mini-budget in the United Kingdom that introduced deficit-financed tax cuts, global markets have gone into convulsions. Currencies are churning, bond markets are in turmoil and the Bank of England was pushed into “whatever-it-takes” mode, intervening in markets to counteract the damage.

In Canada, the central bank has signalled it will continue to raise interest rates even as momentum in the economy is slowing. Its attempt to crush demand so it is better in sync with supply is delicate at best, and poised to hurt many vulnerable workers at worst.

And the latest poll suggests Canadians favour Pierre Poilievre as prime minister.

Buckle your seatbelts.

Image: mpamag.com

It Can Be Devastating

We're not done with COVID. And it's not done with us. Andrew Nikifork writes:

This question demands to be top of mind: What can COVID do to our brains?

Add to a growing stack of relevant research a controversial report published last week by Nature Medicine.

It suggests that seven out of 100 COVID cases could lead to serious brain problems that may last a lifetime.

The authors, led by Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at the Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, used U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs medical records to track the brain health of 154,000 people who had tested positive for COVID.

Their conclusion, as summed up in a press release: “Those who have been infected with the virus are at increased risk of developing a range of neurological conditions in the first year after the infection.”

The lingering effects can be severe:

They include strokes. Cognitive and memory problems. Migraine headaches. Epileptic seizures. Involuntary muscle contractions. Hearing and vision abnormalities. Balance and co-ordination difficulties. Depression and anxiety. And symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease.

“We’re seeing brain problems in previously healthy individuals and those who have had mild infections,” said lead researcher Al-Aly.

“It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, female or male, or what your race is. It doesn’t matter if you smoked or not, or if you had other unhealthy habits or conditions.”

Dr. Wes Ely, an ICU doctor and expert in long COVID at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, called the results “shattering” and “insane” in a TikTok video.

The study has its critics. But, nonetheless, it raises several red flags:

Ely noted: “This VA Study is very large and even though it is 70 per cent white males who were unvaccinated, we already have data showing that vaccinated patients are still at risk for neurological and cardiological complications months after acute and mild COVID.”

Other research shows, for example, that even mild COVID infections can result in significant shrinkage of grey matter as well as lasting damage to neurons essential for sensory and motor function.

The virus can also penetrate the blood-brain barrier and ignite central nervous system inflammation. The blood-brain barrier is a sort of immunological roadblock that prevents infections in the blood from entering the brain.

A Danish study also found that risk of ischemic stroke, which blocks blood flow to the brain, was more frequent in COVID-positive patients than in those with respiratory infections.

“There have been several studies by other researchers that have shown, in mice and humans, that SARS-CoV-2 can attack the lining of the blood vessels and then trigger a stroke or seizure,” Al-Aly said in the news release. “It helps explain how someone with no risk factors could suddenly have a stroke.”

So don't throw away that mask. And don't listen to the morons who tell you that the mask is an infringement on your personal freedom.

Image: healio.com