At Our Worst

The Israel-Hamas War is a case of humanity operating on its worst instincts. Eric Ifill writes:

I am embarrassed by the leadership of this country who have polluted what it means to be a human being, and it’s up to us to push back at the one-sided nature of their performative empathy. Who gets to be the victims of the Israel-Hamas war is directly connected to whose aggression can be excused as legitimate.

The attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians was barbaric:

On Oct. 7, Hamas launched a co-ordinated attack against Israeli military bases and civilians living near the border of Gaza. These victims experienced a horrific chain of events including Hamas militants murdering and kidnapping many Israeli civilians. As CNN explains, “Hamas gunmen killed more than 1,400 people, including civilians and soldiers, and took 199 hostages, according to Israeli authorities.” This strike at Israel was unprecedented in scale and tactics, and has been called the worst attack on Israel since its formation. CNN concurs that “Israel has not faced its adversaries in street battles on its own territory since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.” The operation, “Al-Aqsa Storm,” as Hamas named it, was, according to the militants, “a response to what it described as Israeli attacks on women, the desecration of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the ongoing siege of Gaza.”

These are horrendous crimes that unleashed a spiral of violence from which victims will continue to suffer. There is no doubt about that.

But there are thousands of innocent victims on the other side. Note the language the Israelis are using:

This dehumanizing language paints Palestinians as sub-human, and therefore builds a narrative for their disposal. And like animals are how they are being treated.

The Palestinian residents in Gaza are under siege, and had only been given 24 hours to flee when the IDF bombed their only escape to Egypt, the Rafah Crossing. The Washington Post confirms: “Israel bombed areas of southern Gaza where it had told Palestinians to flee to ahead of an expected ground invasion, killing dozens of people.” This has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions for a people who continue to pay for crimes they did not commit. This is what is called collective punishment, and it is contrary to international humanitarian law. Médecins Sans Frontières, in its reprinting of the Practical Guide to Humanitarian Law by legal director Françoise Bouchet-Saulnier, highlighted: “International humanitarian law posits that no person may be punished for acts that he or she did not commit. It ensures that the collective punishment of a group of persons for a crime committed by an individual is also forbidden, whether in the case of prisoners of war or of any other individuals.”

There is a reason Mark Twain called us "the damn'd human race."

Image: CNN

Going Your Own Way

We live in difficult times. The Israeli-Hamas War is only the latest in a long series of crises. Susan Delacourt asks:

What happens to a government that’s constantly in crisis mode? There are a couple of obvious answers, none of them great: burnout, distraction and exhaustion. Trudeau and his government, not faring so well in the polls right now, can certainly lay some of that unpopularity at the feet of the big and controversial things they’ve had to manage. As well, there’s a real risk of a public growing weary of hearing end-of-times talk from their leaders, a crisis fatigue mentality that sets in, both within and outside government.

The answers are uncertain. But there are lessons to be learned:

In discussions with people who have been doing that crisis management, it is possible to see some ways in which each big world-shaking development has taught some lessons for dealing with future ones.

Trump’s existential threat to free trade taught the Trudeau government the value of networks abroad, using other relationships at the state level or in other countries to leverage Canada’s interests with the U.S.

Those networks came in handy when Canada had to shut its border with the U.S. during the pandemic, but also keep business and trade moving. The pandemic, in turn, forced the Trudeau government to put new programs and procedures in place quickly, with what one adviser described as “high-risk tolerance for implementation.”

So when war erupts in Eastern Europe, or now in the Middle East, Canada has some practice in putting out a suite of quick-response measures.

What you learn during constant crisis management, [an] adviser said, is that “you can’t operate in a zero-risk policy environment.” So when the next crisis comes along, the government knows there are new levers to pull, ways to speed up its notoriously slow bureaucracy.

In sum, while Trudeau’s government might have preferred to avoid the constant-crisis mode, each one has given it new ways to deal with the next one. And what should be clear by now: there will be a next one. That may be the only safe prediction to make in a world where each week brings a new crisis

 In an uncertain world, one thing is certain. Those international connections are vital. Anyone who claims you can make your own way in such a world is a fool.

.Images: United Nations Development

Wisdom In That Notion

Taking her inspiration from Rene Levesque, Danielle Smith suggests that Alberta should separate from Canada. Max Fawcett writes that -- for the rest of Canada -- that might be a good idea:

On Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada will rule on the constitutionality of the Impact Assessment Act that was triggered by a reference case filed by the Alberta government in 2020. While the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled the federal legislation — better known as the former Bill C-69, or as conservatives like to call it, the “No More Pipelines Act” — intruded on provincial jurisdiction over the development of natural resources, the Supreme Court is expected to view the federal government’s appeal of that decision more favourably. If it upholds the constitutionality of the Impact Assessment Act, as most legal scholars expect, we’re going to see a nuclear-grade meltdown coming out of Alberta.

It’s a safe bet people like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her various proxies in the local media will start by going after the court, which they’ve long complained has a supposedly Liberal bias. Never mind, of course, that its chief justice was appointed by one Stephen Harper — for them, this will be another opportunity to undermine its legitimacy and politicize its judgments. That’s especially true given that Russell Brown, the most Alberta-friendly of the nine Supreme Court justices, stepped down from the bench earlier this summer after the Canadian Judicial Council began looking into his disreputable conduct during a recent vacation. Let the conspiracy theories begin.

It’s an even safer bet the Alberta separatist movement will use the decision to add fuel to its long-simmering fire. Witness Take Back Alberta’s David Parker, who tweeted recently, “Alberta will not obey Ottawa’s draconian climate virtue signalling. If they attempt to enforce it, we will separate. If you don’t believe that is possible, just watch us.”

Separatism -- whether it emanates in Quebec or Alberta -- has always been a pipedream:

The notion Alberta would be better off on its own ignores everything from basic geopolitical realities to the historical example of Quebec, never mind the risks associated with being heavily dependent on fossil fuels right as the world is transitioning away from them. But after years of being a very vocal critic of the movement and its obvious blind spots, I’m starting to have some pro-separation arguments of my own.

An independent Alberta, for example, would put an end to the tiresome and tedious debates around equalization, most of which are informed by a fundamental misunderstanding of how the program actually works. This has been a cottage industry in Alberta for years now, one that’s aided and abetted by politicians and pundits who profit from the confusion. Without them around to chum the waters, the rest of Canada would have more time and opportunity to talk about issues that actually matter.

An independent Alberta would also be forced to bear the full brunt of the global energy transition, one that it has about as much control over as you might over a passing locomotive. For Canada, this would almost certainly be a very good thing. After benefiting from Alberta’s resource-driven wealth and the surplus contributions they’ve made to the federal income tax and social security systems, the country would be free of any downside associated with the global transition away from burning fossil fuels. And the more than $200 billion in unreclaimed environmental liabilities which the oil and gas industry is supposed to pay for and the Alberta government seems utterly uninterested in collecting? That would be an independent Alberta’s problem — and it would be one of many.

No longer would the rest of Canada have a province, and a substantial subset of its population, that’s actively working against its shared interests and priorities on climate change. The citizens of an independent Alberta would also benefit since its political leaders would no longer be able to blame Ottawa and the federal government for all of their woes. As masters of their own destiny, they would suddenly be accountable for their choices and the consequences that flowed from them.

This alone might be enough to deter any provincial or federal conservative politician from taking the idea of separation too seriously. They’ve been dining out for more than 40 years now on a sense of victimhood and injustice perpetrated by shadowy eastern elites, which they use to distract the public from their own political failings. To give up that familiar crutch would mean they’d finally, for the first time, have to stand entirely on their own merits. They, more than anyone else, might prefer to keep the status quo intact.

In the end, Quebecers decided to stick with the devil they knew. There is wisdom in that notion.

Image: The National Post

The Party Is A Fraud

The Republican Party can't do anything right. Ruy Teixeira writes:

What is with the Republican Party? At a moment when they seem to have so much going for them, Republicans again are working overtime to throw it all away.

By the numbers, this should be their moment. President Biden is scraping the proverbial bottom in polls that measure his approval rating. A recent NBC News poll found that voters prefer Republicans to handle the economy by a shocking 21 points, the largest lead for the GOP in over 30 years. Similar margins hold for Republicans on border security (30 points), handling crime (26 points) and immigration (18 points). Democrats have only a 2-point lead over Republicans on “looking out for the middle class” — a measure that has historically yielded double-digit leads for the Democrats.

The party has shifted its appeal to the working class -- particularly under Donald Trump:

Initially, Republicans were able to take advantage of the breakup of postwar Democratic voting blocs by promulgating an anti-welfare, anti-tax agenda that, along with an aggressive cultural conservatism, appealed to many working-class voters.

But that sales pitch will only get you so far:

Working-class voters, as many of their communities continued to deteriorate, lost faith that lower taxes and less government were really the solution to their problems — however much those principles might appeal to business supporters of the GOP. It was Trump’s genius to break with orthodox Republican economics, particularly on trade, entitlements, deficits and corporate priorities. In other words, he leaned into the working-class tilt of the GOP instead of simply exploiting it when it overlapped with standard GOP priorities.

For decades, the Republicans were known as the party of wealth and privilege. The pitch changed, but the policies didn't:

The economy under Trump did perform well until the pandemic hit — better in wage and income terms than it has under Biden — and working-class voters give Trump credit for that. But in terms of policy, he did very little. The big economic policy achievement of his presidency was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which was unpopular with working-class voters and provided them with little direct benefit.

In part, this reflects the fact that Trump is not interested in policy issues and knows little about them. But it also highlights the lack of unity in Republican ranks about how to appeal to working-class voters. Some Republicans want to stick to traditional GOP approaches (such as cutting taxes on the wealthy); some want to press the accelerator on economic nationalism; some want a pro-worker industrial policy that breaks decisively with the legacy of Reaganism.

But there is no agreement. You can see it in the dueling manifestoes of the Freedom Conservatives and National Conservatives, who disagree about how strong a role government should play in supplementing and regulating the free market. You can see it in the complete lack of a party platform when Trump ran in 2020, which could well be replicated in 2024. And you can see it in the shambolic debates among the Republican presidential candidates that have been held so far this year — and the shenanigans of the Republican House last week, which now have left it leaderless.

The lack of a policy center leads Republicans to over-index on cultural issues, especially anything connected to “wokeness,” to the point where they seem extreme even when Democrats have adopted clearly unpopular positions. That obsessive focus on culture limits Republicans’ ability to capitalize on working-class economic discontent. The culture wars will get you only so far.

Put simply, the party isn't delivering for its voters. Republicans, like their leader, are a massive fraud.

Image: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post

The Times They Are A-Changin'

The new speaker in the House of Commons is a black man -- Greg Fergus. He'll have his hands full -- because he'll have to deal with Pierre Poilievre. Susan Delacourt writes:

Poilievre welcomed Fergus’s election with a partisan slam against the Liberal government — standard fare for the Conservative leader, but unusual on ceremonial occasions in the Commons.

“Common wisdom, our common resources, our common heritage and our common future is determined by the people elected to serve in this place,” Poilievre said after lambasting the “excessively powerful and costly” Liberal government, then pivoting over to his newest political slogan.

“We must always do it with common sense, the common sense of the common people, united for our common home: your home, my home, our house. Let us bring it home.”

It was a demonstration of what Fergus will be up against as he assumes the referee’s job in a highly polarized chamber, where personal antagonism has been running rampant on all sides and no one can resist a partisan swipe.

All sides could do better. But the Conservatives specialize in this kind of rhetoric:

Just last week, Poilievre’s deputy leader, Thornhill MP Melissa Lantsman, refused to comply with an order from the chair to withdraw the word “disgrace,” which she had hurled at Liberal House Leader Karina Gould.

Poilievre, who casts himself as a crusader against “gatekeepers,” has also bristled when warned the rules don’t allow him to refer to another MP’s absence in the House. Despite that long-standing convention, Poilievre regularly and repeatedly mentions it when Trudeau is away from the chamber.

Fergus has pledged to improve things:

“Words matter. Symbols matter. This, I know,” Fergus said in his pre-election address to fellow MPs. “As your Speaker, I will restore, and quickly bring back the honour to this chamber.”

That will not be an easy job. But new people bring new perspectives. The Speaker is a black man. And the new premier of Manitoba is from Canada's First Nations. The times they are a-changin'.

Image: Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Walking the Walk

Pierre Poilievre claims he's a friend of the working man. But he doesn't like workers when they're on a picket line. Linda McQuaig writes:

The Conservative leader fumes relentlessly about today’s “affordability” crisis, and he correctly points out that workers are struggling to pay for groceries, rent, mortgages, etc.

Yet he seems confused about what actions workers should take to ease their affordability problems — other than voting for him.

In fact, the proven most effective way for workers to increase their pay and improve their working conditions hasn’t been to vote Conservative but rather to join a union and, when necessary, go on strike.

Still, despite the success of unions in increasing their workers’ pay — unionized workers in Canada have received on average about $5 more per hour than non-unionized workers over the past decade — Poilievre has never seen much merit in unions. Indeed, he’s sided with corporate interests that have persistently acted to suppress unions.

In 2012, when Poilievre was a young parliamentary secretary, he pushed hard for Canada to adopt notorious “right-to-work” laws, which are favoured by corporations because they undermine unions. Barack Obama famously described them as being about “the right to work for less.”

Back then, the bespectacled Poilievre was a far-right political gadfly. His support for “right-to-work” laws — which originated in the U.S. South to weaken unions and their efforts to promote a cross-racial brotherhood of workers — was regarded as too extreme by even the staunchly anti-labour Harper government.

Today, the smoothed-down, done-over Poilievre is less overtly waging class war on behalf of the corporate elite. Instead of focusing on crushing unions, he now presents himself as battling the more neutral-sounding “affordability crisis.”

That's quite a contrast with Joe Biden, who last week joined a picket line in Michigan. Poilievre has a hard time talking the talk. And he's incapable of walking the walk.

Image: France 24

 

The Road To Hell

Canada and Canadians are deeply embarrassed. The applause a former Nazi received in the House of Commons has left us all red-faced. Michael Harris writes:

Yesterday Justin Trudeau apologized for unwittingly honouring a former Nazi in Canada’s Parliament.

He apologized to the Jewish community, the Ukrainians, the Roma and everyone else who suffered from the scourge of Adolf Hitler and his mad-dog fascism. But it was a day late and strangely hollow. 

Harris is usually supportive of Trudeau. But not this time:

Justin Trudeau’s no-show in Parliament on the day House Speaker Anthony Rota resigned in disgrace, is the story here. It marks a new low in the PM’s political career, even though he took every question in question period today.

Instead of standing up to the barrage of insults, demands and denunciations that he knew was coming, he sent House leader Karina Gould into the fray to take the heat. In a voice sometimes reduced to a whisper, Gould did her best to take one for the team.

Gould admitted that honouring someone in Parliament who had fought with an SS unit against the Russians in the Second World War was shameful and unforgivable.

There is a story behind how the 98 year old Ukrainian got to the House of Commons:

Hunka’s own son was the person who contacted the Speaker’s constituency office to suggest that his father should be invited to Parliament for Zelenskyy’s speech.

For one thing, Hunka was Ukrainian-born. For another, he had fought the Russians as a teenager. On paper, it must have looked good — widely separated generations standing up to the Russian Bear. Except, of course, for the Nazi thing.

The law of unintended consequences claimed a few more victims. Hunka’s son wangled the invitation to Parliament during Zelenskyy’s visit to garner praise for his father’s war record, and to show common cause with the embattled Ukrainian president.

Instead, Hunka has now been outed as a Nazi collaborator, who was part of a unit that swore allegiance to Hitler. The standing ovation he received in Parliament after being recognized by then-Speaker Rota has turned into something very different. He may now face extradition to Poland and retroactive justice for alleged war crimes.

The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies alleges that Hunka’s unit “was responsible for the mass murder of innocent civilians with a level of brutality and malice that is unimaginable.”

Even Zelensky himself now faces major headaches over the bungled guest list that has captured the world’s attention. Remember, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said he invaded Ukraine to rid it of neo-Nazis. Canada’s face plant has empowered him.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Image: TheTimes Of Israel

Dancing To A Madman's Tune

Donald Trump just skipped the second Republican debate. He figures the nomination is in the bag. E.J. Dionne explains what is happening:

Trump wants his foes to stay weak. By not showing up, he reduces them to squabbling bit players trying to bring each other down while the major contenders offer pale imitations of his own message and values.

Republican voters once open to someone other than the former president are concluding that if they’re going to get Trumpism, they might as well go with the guy who invented it. And they’re getting little useful advice from party leaders who — as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told his biographer McKay Coppins — see Trump as a disaster but are too timid to say so publicly.

All of this was not inevitable:

It didn’t have to be like this, because the strength of Trump’s lock on the party is vastly exaggerated.

Sure, Trump has an unshakable base, those who would stick with him if he were indicted a dozen more times. But that hard core accounts for no more than about 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate. There really is (or was) room for someone else to break through.

But not one of them has inspired real excitement, and the politician who once seemed best placed to take on Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has had a miserable year.

As a result, Trump has been able to combine his base with a fair share of the largest group of Republicans: those with a more or less positive view of the former president but willing to support someone else.

The sad news for the country is that Republicans let a real chance to end Trump’s career slip away. The opportunity might not come around again. Critics of the GOP enjoy observing that the more Trump is indicted, the more Republican voters flock to him. The timelines of his growing lead and his expanding list of felony counts do overlap, but there are better explanations for his comeback.

Republicans have simply not shown the courage to take Trump on. They're cowards. And, as a result, they're dancing to a madman's tune.

Image: Pinterest 

Clouds In The Future

Politics isn't just about elections. It's also about what happens between elections. Doug Ford made that abundantly clear yesterday when he reversed his decision to build houses on Ontario's Greenbelt. Despite the change, the editors of The Toronto Star were not impressed:

Let’s be crystal clear. There is no redemption in doing the right thing only under extreme duress and after all excuses have been exhausted. By his own hand, Ford has done massive, perhaps irredeemable, damage to his credibility and government.

“It was a mistake to open the Greenbelt,” Ford told reporters in Niagara Falls as he announced the scrapping of a land-swap plan to remove 7,400 acres from the protected area in a plan that stood to make billions for developers.

His foray into Greenbelt development was not, as he put it, “a mistake.” To call it a mistake implies inadvertence.

Rather, his Greenbelt gambit was a conscious decision to reverse a previous commitment he had made to Ontarians not to open the protected zone for development.

 He did it not out of error or ignorance, but because he thought he could get away with it.

 He couldn't and didn't. I see clouds in Doug's future.

Image:

We Should Be Ashamed

The news services are abuzz with Justin Trudeau's accusation that the Indian government was involved in the murder of a Canadian citizen. But, on that subject, something happened in the House of Commons yesterday that should concern us all. Erica Ifill writes:

On Monday, Trudeau rose to address Parliament and inform the nation that Canadian security agencies had been engaged in a weeks-long investigation of the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, which, The Globe and Mail confirms, “can be linked to Indian government agents.” Nijjar was a Canadian citizen who was gunned down in Surrey, B.C., this past June. He supported Sikh separatism, which raised the ire of the Indian government, so much so they labelled him a terrorist. That may be India’s viewpoint, but here in Canada—unless our constitutional rights were taken away from us in our sleep—we can politically support who we want. And one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter; it’s all a matter of power and perspective. This revelation should expand our lens in analyzing issues of foreign interference, as global powers rearrange themselves amid the breakdown of the post-Second World War international order and the rise of authoritarianism; Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi encapsulates the latter, as described by the Financial Times: “Modi has cultivated an image as a macho man—boasting of the size of his chest and of his willingness to use violence against India’s enemies.” As Trudeau stated unequivocally: “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty.” (The Indian government has denied the allegations.)

Following the prime minister, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre rose to address the House, attempting to match the PM’s stateliness, and instead face-planted his unseriousness into a puddle of anti-Black racism. In expressing regrets to Nijjar’s family, he slipped over his last name and said the N-word. With the hard “r.” He quickly corrected himself and everyone pretended that it didn’t happen and proceeded to continue with the issue at hand. The Conservatives didn’t blink, particularly Leslyn Lewis who was sitting adjacent to him and seemed to be accepting of that language, since she didn’t immediately object. And neither did the so-called anti-racism Liberals. And neither did the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

The silence was deafening. It says something about us and our politicians -- and we should be ashamed.

Image: AZ Quotes

Mike Roman

In Georgia, a guy named Mike Roman has been indicted in the case involving Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the results of the election in that state. Michael Harris writes that Roman has been a Republican dirty trickster for decades:

Roman’s backstory is a tangled tale, but one worth telling. That’s because in today’s politics, borders mean nothing. What happens in the U.S., and elsewhere, doesn’t stay in the U.S. All politics, like commerce, is globally linked.

After dropping out of the University of Miami, Roman found a career in politics, first as a fixer, later as a dirty-trickster.

Roman became something of a backroom boy wonder. He went on to work on the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain and Giuliani.

Despite his claims of being a political researcher and consultant, he was actually a sultan of scaremongering. In the 2008 presidential election, he promoted a video of two alleged members of the New Black Panther Party standing outside a polling station in Philadelphia. One of the alleged intimidators was holding a nightstick.

The video was played on a loop on Fox News. Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California and an expert on election law, made this comment:

“The video was certainly used by political operatives to create this false impression of voter intimidation and fraud being a major problem.”

But here's the thing. Roman is connected to the Conservative Party of Canada:

As busy as Roman was with his Republican machinations, he found time to help out the Conservative Party of Canada. On April 11, 2019, Andrew Scheer, then-Conservative leader and leader of the official Opposition, was the keynote speaker at a closed-door event held at a luxury resort in the foothills of Alberta.

At that meeting, the leader and Conservative party strategists talked to oil company executives about political campaigns. Not energy policy, but campaigns.

At the same meeting, Roman had some ideas of his own about how to deal with opponents like environmentalists. He talked about “countering such groups with opposition research.” It was a euphemism for something he was very familiar with — digging up dirt on your opponents. What the Russians would call “kompromat.”

The Republican operative was closely associated with an organization named the International Democrat Union. Roman first shows up as the organization’s treasurer, later as assistant chairman. The chairman of the IDU was then, and is now, Stephen Harper.

Eighteen months after resigning his seat in Parliament, on Feb. 21, 2018, Harper became chairman of the International Democrat Union. Founded in 1983, the IDU is dedicated to getting right-wing governments elected around the world. Influence or interference? It is a very fine line.

Since its start 40 years ago, the IDU has expanded dramatically. It now has 84 member political parties, some dedicated to increasingly harsh versions of right-wing politics. India’s ruling right-wing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, joined the IDU in 2016, and Israel’s Likud followed suit in 2018.

One of the IDU’s members, Victor Orbán’s governing party in Hungary, has been criticized by the European Union for the steady erosion of democratic institutions. The EU has even openly questioned if Hungary is still a democracy.

Human Rights Watch has accused Orbán of sustained “attacks on rule of law and public institutions” by undermining judicial independence and putting journalists under surveillance.

Something to keep in mind as Pierre Poilievre rises in the polls.

Image: The Tyee

Don't Be Fooled

Global News reports that in 2018 Doug Ford instructed his Environment Minister, Rod Phillips, to make environmental legislation ineffective:

When Ontario Premier Doug Ford first took office in 2018, his first environmental minister was given a simple yet central task: get climate legislation out of the way of business.

The mandate letter written for the province’s minister of environment, conservation and parks suggests his task was to remove environmental and climate legislation, not to create more of it.

Rod Phillips, the first in a string of Ford’s environmental ministers, was told to scrap the province’s cap-and-trade program, fight the federal government on the price on carbon and review environmental laws to make sure they weren’t cumbersome for voters and didn’t obstruct business interests.

Phillips was asked to work with other ministers to look at “various pieces of environmental legislation that impact businesses” and make sure the laws and regulations are “as flexible and nimble as possible.” He was instructed to make sure environmental assessments — a complicated set of studies designed to predict the impact of new projects on the areas around them — could be completed within a calendar year.

In October 2018, months into its first term, the Ford government officially killed cap-and-trade — triggering the federal carbon backstop that added a surcharge to the price of fuel in Ontario.

To combat that, the environment minister was also told to work with his colleagues at the attorney general’s office to fight the “imposition of a regressive carbon tax on Ontario’s citizens” and to use legal action to “stop this carbon tax in its tracks.”

Now, Pierre Poilievre is touring the country promising to "axe the tax." Neither man is a friend of the planet. Don't be fooled.

Image: The Toronto Star

Not New And Improved

Their convention is over and the Conservatives are riding high in the polls. Given the policies they adopted on transgender kids and race-based hiring, Canadians should be wary of the party. But, Michael Harris writes, they should be even more wary of the party's leader: 

Poilievre presents as the champion of regular Canadians. In fact, he is a privileged creature of the Centre Block, someone who entered Parliament in his early 20s and never left. His entire resumé is politics.

For almost all of his nearly 20 years in Ottawa, Poilievre didn’t feel the need to sing Canadians a lullaby about what a sensitive, new-age guy he really is. He was too busy being Canada’s answer to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, a partisan attack dog ready to do his leader’s bidding, biting, or bullshitting.

On the policy side, the unreconstructed Poilievre fronted the dubious Fair Elections Act. As an answer to the robocalls scandal and illegal voter suppression, it was absurd. It made voting harder and cheating easier. Instead of strengthening Elections Canada, Poilievre’s legislation hobbled it. Much of it was dumped when Trudeau came to power.

During the three-week illegal occupation of Ottawa in 2022 by truckers who were against mandatory vaccinations against COVID and wanted the government to resign, Poilievre sided with the truckers. Two of the he occupation’s leaders are currently on trial for criminal mischief.

Not only is Poilievre himself not new, (he has been in politics longer than Trudeau) but, according to The National Post, the team that is coalescing around him is deeply connected to the government of former prime minister Stephen Harper.  

Jenni Byrne was a key Harper staffer; Shuvaloy Majumdar worked for Harper and Associates, as well as Harper-era cabinet minister John Baird; Arpan Khanna worked for Jason Kenney; Melissa Lantsman worked for several Harper cabinet ministers and Doug Ford’s 2018 election campaign; Adam Chambers was executive assistant to Harper finance minister Jim Flaherty; Sean Speer was a senior adviser to Harper; Carl Vallée was Harper’s chief spokesman when Poilievre was the PM’s parliamentary secretary; Paul Taillon worked for former Harper cabinet minister and ex-Alberta premier Kenney; and Brooke Pigott was Harper’s director of public opinion research.  

The Poilievre Party or Harper 2.0?

This is not the new and improved Conservative Party. It's the party that still hasn't found its way out of the ooze.

Image: Winnipeg Free Press

For A Long Time

The Greenbelt scandal has become quicksand for Doug Ford. It has exposed the "man of the people" for what he is. Emma Teitel writes:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford must assume us “folks” aren’t too bright. How else to explain the premier’s lame excuse that he wasn’t aware of alleged biases in the disastrous Greenbelt land swap process because he doesn’t “believe in micromanaging” his ministers?

There’s no question: whether you’re loading a dishwasher, or trying to build housing on a mass scale, micro-mangers are annoying and bad for morale. But in order to be a micromanager one must attempt to manage, period. And Ford appears to have done nothing of the sort.

A halfway decent manager, never mind a micromanager, would stop this project in its tracks, not steer the thing in a marginally different and likely harrier direction. But once again, we’re not dealing with a good manager, or a manager period. We’re dealing with a premier embroiled in a potentially career-ending scandal, whose usual shtick cannot and will not save him now.

Ford pretends to be just a regular guy. He isn't:

“I meet with the common folks,” he said. “Do you know what I do? I want to find out what the people are doing. I go into the local Walmarts, the Home Depots, the Sobeys and the Loblaws and the Metros to talk to people. I go into the Canadian Tires. That’s where you get how people are feeling.”

Unfortunately for the premier people aren’t feeling very good about his government at the moment. According to a new survey from Abacus Data, overall support of Ford’s Progressive Conservatives fell two percentage points in the last two weeks — to 27 per cent. Even worse for Ford: the government’s support among committed voters has fallen seven percentage points since July, a shift Abacus’ chief executive called “significant.”

Throughout this scandal Ford has all but scoffed at reporters for hammering him on the land swap scandal, characterizing it as a non-issue in the minds of regular folks who just want housing built. But clearly it is an issue, one that is probably made worse by Ford’s insulting invocation of “regular folks” to distract from his government’s arguably low moral character.

Regular folks — a.k.a. the people of Walmart, Sobeys, Canadian Tire and every big box store Ford didn’t mention — are perfectly capable of reading a report indicating that their housing minister did a horrendous job managing the province’s most critical file.

Regular folks are perfectly capable of seeing in the news that the premier initially stood by that minister and when asked about this fact by reporters, shot off a string of non sequiturs about the common man.

Doug has never been who he pretends to be. Some of us have known that for a long time.

Image: Chris Young / THE CANADIAN PRESS

We've Been Here Before

The owners of Big Tech are the new Robber Barons. Linda McQuaig writes:

Like the Railroad Barons of the late 19th century, today’s Big Tech giants strut around, acting like they own the world (which they mostly do). Among their many imperious actions, they’ve taken to blocking Canadians’ access to our own news.

This is their high-handed response to Ottawa’s attempt to force them to pay Canadian publishers for news content, which Big Tech giants Google and Meta link to on their social media platforms.

Without some crackdown by Ottawa, Canadian publishers will have trouble staying in business, as Google and Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are managing to scoop up billions of advertising dollars that used to support the Canadian media.

So, it’s easy to side with the Canadian media business — even though it’s largely dominated by corporate chains. (Torstar, which owns the Toronto Star, also owns a half-dozen smaller Ontario newspapers. The largest Canadian newspaper chain by far — owning about half of Canada’s newspapers — is Postmedia, which has a strong right-wing bias and is owned by a U.S. hedge fund.)

But the battle with Meta, Twitter, and all the rest isn't just about advertising revenue:

Ottawa’s intervention on behalf of Canadian media — important as it is — doesn’t even attempt to achieve what Canadians really need: more control over the digital universe that increasingly dominates our lives.

The core problem is that the technology that largely determines our access to the news — and just about everything else we do online — is controlled by a few Big Tech giants that are highly sophisticated in extracting money from us, governing how we search for information and, in the process, shaping public discourse and much else about the way we live.

What we need is a public digital infrastructure that is not beholden to private interests.

As James Muldoon, a political scientist at the University of Exeter, puts it: “I don’t think access to humanity’s collective knowledge should be controlled by a for-profit company.”

An open-source digital system — which would be publicly funded — could enable democratic governance, allowing independent media to flourish. And a public search engine — a publicly financed version of Google — could ensure us all access to the vast trove of human knowledge and information, without being routed in ways that limit our control and benefit private interests.

This may sound too wildly ambitious, but it’s really just an updated version of the wildly ambitious public takeover of the key, emerging market in the early 1900s — for electricity.

They wanted to create a new public infrastructure for hydro power, wresting control from the mighty private interests — dubbed “Water Barons” — who had taken over the transformative new power source.

This pitted them against the likes of powerful Toronto business mogul Henry Pellatt, who headed a syndicate pushing for rights to develop Niagara Falls power. (Pellatt is best known for the massive mansion he built for himself, which he called “Casa Loma.”)

But the popular movement for “public power” triumphed.

Shortly after his 1905 election, Conservative Premier James P. Whitney created Ontario Hydro, turning electricity into a public utility and declaring that water power “should not in the future be made the sport and prey of capitalists.”

This public takeover of electricity, ratified overwhelmingly by municipal voters, proved crucial to the province’s development. By ensuring low electricity rates, it enabled Ontario industry to compete with larger U.S. businesses.

Creating a public infrastructure for the digital world today could be just as transformative. But it would require the Trudeau government to be truly bold and innovative and actually challenge Big Tech’s power and control over our lives.

We've been here before.

Image: Institute For Cultural Evolution

Those Who Seek Scapegoats

Canada has a housing crisis. And some are blaming immigrants. Susan Delacourt writes:

If politicians in this country are going to be seized with housing in the coming months — as they are all promising — they’re going to have to learn to tread carefully around the minefield of immigration.

Blaming immigrants for the housing crisis in Canada is something that all political parties say they’re keen to avoid, yet there have already been risky remarks on that score, across the board. And there will probably be more.

New Housing Minister Sean Fraser embarked into that perilous territory a few weeks ago when he said Canada might need to crack down on universities attracting foreign students without the means to house them properly.

Fraser, to be clear, said he wasn’t blaming the students and indeed stressed: “we have to be really, really careful that we don’t have a conversation that somehow blames newcomers for the housing challenges.”

That didn’t stop Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre from accusing Justin Trudeau’s government of whipping up resentment against immigration.

And Doug Ford has hopped on the bandwagon:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford continues to pin the housing crisis in his province — not to mention his Greenbelt scandal — on the desperate need to accommodate Ottawa’s abrupt increase to the number of newcomers to Canada.

“I didn’t know the federal government was gonna bring in over 500,000 (newcomers),” Ford said at a testy news conference this week.

“I didn’t get a phone call from the prime minister saying, ‘Surprise, surprise. We’re dropping these many people in your province and by the way, good luck, you deal with them.’”

To hear Ford tell it at that news conference, most of the unhoused people in his province are people who weren’t born in Canada. He talked of a phone call he got from a new Canadian in danger of losing his house and about the refugees and asylum seekers sleeping in church basements.

As my Queen’s Park columnist colleague Martin Regg Cohn put it, “if tolerance is truly his goal, the premier is playing with rhetorical fire … It’s not a dog whistle. It’s a bullhorn being blown from Ford’s bully pulpit.”

The housing crisis has been a long time coming. It began when, under the neo-liberal economic policies of the 1980s, the government got out of the business of housing its citizens.

Beware those who seek scapegoats.

Image: Linked In

They're Expendable

If there's one thing modern conservatives have trouble with, it's the truth. Max Fawcett writes:

Sometimes, it pays to read past the headline. That’s certainly the case with a recent National Post story titled “Trudeau’s Law Society,” one that suggested “it’s no coincidence that more judges who donate to the Liberal party are brought to the bench than Conservative donors.” The Investigative Journalism Foundation, a news organization that partnered with Postmedia on the story, went even further by tweeting that its story “shows that the federal Liberals appear to be stacking the courts with their supporters.”

Thirteen paragraphs down, the reader — if they make it that far — discovers that only 18.3 per cent of the Liberal government’s 1,308 judicial appointees made a political donation, with 76.3 per cent of them having donated to the Liberals. That means 13.9 per cent of their appointees donated to the Liberals, with 86.1 per cent either not donating or donating to one of the opposition parties. “I’m not saying the data is a problem,” former Trudeau economic adviser and policy consultant Tyler Meredith tweeted, “but when 4 out of 5 people appointed aren’t contributing at all, to anyone, the favouritism angle looks far less than sensational header (sic).”

Ironically, this matches reporting from Postmedia back in 2010, which showed 66 of the 270 judges the Harper Conservatives had appointed at that point had made political donations, with 41 of them having donated to the Conservative Party of Canada. A further 25 had names that matched political donors — mainly Conservative ones — but couldn’t be verified as the same people. If you include them in the list, that’s 33.7 per cent of judicial appointees who were political donors, with 72.5 per cent of them donating to the CPC.

Postmedia’s editors clearly didn’t agree. Earlier this week, they published the second story in this ongoing collaboration, one that highlighted six Superior Court justices who had attended Liberal fundraisers “shortly before being appointed.” It beggars belief that any government would appoint someone to the bench because they attended a $1,625 fundraiser, and the reporting again ignores the pattern of appointment under the previous government, one that included former justice minister Peter MacKay appointing the best man at his wedding and an old friend of his father to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court. As Press Progress reported back in 2015, MacKay had personal and financial ties to six of the nine appointments he made to Nova Scotia courts.

Mark Twain understood how statistics could be manipulated.“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics,” he wrote. Conservatives aren't the only politicians who lie. But, since the rise of Donald Trump, facts have become expendable.

Image: AZ Quotes

Monumental Cowardice

Today, a judge in Washington will set the date for Donald Trump's trial for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States. Instead of being appalled by what Trump did, Republicans are stumbling over themselves to defend him. Consider what happened at the recent Republican debate. Michael Harris writes:

Six of the eight presidential candidates raised their hands to indicate that even if the former president were to be convicted on any of the charges, they would vote for him in 2024. A couple of them went on to say they would pardon Trump if they became president. 

Reality check? They were a pack of zombies following the leader over a cliff.

Think about the enormity of what every one of the GOP presidential candidates, with the exception of Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, had done. The so-called party of law and order was declaring to millions of people watching the debate on television that even if Trump were to be found guilty of one or several felony offences, and of breaching his oath of office to uphold the constitution, they would put him back in the White House. 

They were signalling to the debate’s audience that it was okay to put a felon in the White House. 

The United States has descended into national insanity:

It is beyond absurd. How could anyone vote for the Republicans as lawmakers, when the leadership of the party had just confirmed that it was okay to put a convicted criminal in charge of the whole show? 

How must women feel watching this travesty, with Trump’s sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll already on the record in civil court? This is the party that criminalizes abortion, but whitewashes Trump’s behaviour. 

For one of the zombie-candidates who raised his hand to endorse Trump last week, the humiliation was total. If anyone should know just how low Trump can go, it is former U.S. vice-president Mike Pence. 

Remember those “Hang Pence” signs brandished by the pro-Trump mob during the Capitol insurrection? According to congressional testimony, Trump told his staff that maybe Pence “deserves” it. He certainly did nothing to quell the riot he had inspired, which placed a lot of other lives at risk besides that of Pence and his family. 

Just days before the first GOP debate, Pence told CNN in a direct reference to Trump that anyone who put themselves above the constitution should never be president. Yet a few days later, Pence affirmed that he would in fact vote for Trump. That flip-flop would break the back of a grizzly bear. 

Trump got to where he now is with lots of help. All those who helped him were -- and are -- cowards.

Image: 

A Lot Depends On The Alternative

The conventional wisdom is that Justin Trudeau is in the twilight of his political career. Michael Harris doesn't believe it. He writes:

The way most pollsters and pundits and all Harper-Cons see it, you can put a fork in Trudeau; he’s done. But they can put away the cutlery for now. The chances are better than even that the current PM will defeat his fourth Conservative leader in a row — assuming he sticks around for the next electoral tilt.

Yes, the polling looks bad. But there are few things less relevant than a mid-summer poll with no election in sight.

But consider other polls:

After eight years in power, Trudeau is polling higher than both Stephen Harper and Pierre Trudeau at the same point in their careers. In fact, only former PM Jean Chrétien had higher numbers after eight years in office than Justin Trudeau.

And according to a recent Nanos poll, there has been no rush to make Pierre Poilievre voters’ preferred choice for prime minister. Trudeau and Poilievre are in a dead heat in that category, both at under 30 per cent.

Lots of Canadians just don't like Trudeau -- with reason:

None of this is not to say that Trudeau, who assumed office with not much more than a famous name and photogenic smile, isn’t carrying some pretty heavy baggage now. That’s what eight years in office does to all politicians. Making things worse, most of the prime minister’s best-known blunders were self-inflicted, what in the tennis world would be called “unforced errors.”

After accepting a Christmas vacation on the Aga Khan’s island, news of the furtive trip inevitably leaked out. That’s how Trudeau became the first prime minister in history to be found in breach of federal ethics laws, violating three provisions of the Conflict of Interest Act.

The political optics looked worse than the violations. Vacationing with billionaires on their dime, even if they are family friends, is not the best way of convincing middle- and working-class voters that you feel their pain.

In 2018, the Trudeau government stumbled through the SNC-Lavalin affair, which led to the departure from cabinet of then justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and health minster Jane Philpott, two female stars of the party led by a self-avowed feminist. A low point for the PM.

Wilson-Raybould claimed that the Prime Minister’s Office interfered in a decision her department had already made concerning the huge engineering firm. In August 2019, the ethics commissioner agreed with her, finding that the PM’s team had breached ethics rules by trying to get the justice minister to reconsider granting SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement, instead of a criminal charge.

In other words, Wilson-Raybould was dumped for being right, which is why Philpott followed her out of cabinet. That injustice cost the prime minister his principal secretary, Gerald Butts, who was forced to resign, and his majority government in the next election.

Justin has scored more than once on his own goal. But Stephen Harper's government was always ripe with scandals. Harris enumerates them and comes to this conclusion:

The bottom line in looking at both Liberal and Conservative scandals is that there is no ethical dividend in electing the Conservative Party of Canada. When it comes to scandals, neither of the two mainstream parties can lay claim to the high ground.

Pierre Poilievre can bloviate all he wants about the Trudeau government’s sins and misdemeanours. But he can’t erase the fact that for almost 10 years he was an integral part of a government that spent a lot of time in the political sewer.

And on the positive side of the ledger, Justin has wracked up an impressive legislative record:

Here is a partial list of what has been accomplished under Justin Trudeau:

After a couple of kicks at the can, Canada has gun control legislation banning the worst of the weapons that are wreaking havoc in the United States.

The Liberals created the Child Benefit for low- and middle-income families.

The government negotiated the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Trudeau created an over $82-billion multi-year national housing strategy, overseen by the popular Nova Scotia MP and cabinet minister Sean Fraser.

The government legalized marijuana and assisted dying, areas fraught with so many emotional downsides that no one else would touch them.

Canada answered the call in desperate times of war, admitting 40,000 Syrian refugees.

Trudeau cut middle class taxes and increased them on wealthier Canadians, while increasing CPP benefits for retirees.

And at a dire time in world history, with Maui burning, coral reefs dying and water wars about to break out in Central Asia, the Trudeau government passed and doggedly defended a carbon tax on greenhouse gas emissions.

Trudeau’s greatest initiative, or worst, depending on whether you believe COVID restrictions amounted to a public health necessity or an assault on civil rights, was the government’s massive response to the pandemic. According to the conservative C.D. Howe Institute, the government’s policies saved 35,000 lives.

Joe Biden is fond of saying, "Don't compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative." A lot depends on the alternative.

Image: The Canadian Press

Conservatives And Conspiracy Theories

Pierre Poilievre continues to strengthen his ties to conspiracy theorists. Max Fawcett writes:

It’s not exactly a secret that conservatism has made more room in recent years for conspiracy theories, whether they’re about vaccines and COVID-19 or the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its apparently nefarious influence over the Canadian government. But a recent fundraising email that included mention of “globalist Davos elites” caught the eye of Canadian Press reporter Mickey Djuric, who covered the CPC’s ongoing flirtation with the language of dog-whistle politics and conspiracies. The response from Poilievre, along with past and present Conservative MPs and its director of communications? Gin up a new conspiracy about The Canadian Press and its relationship with the CBC and other “legacy” media outlets.

Conspiracy theories are the mother's milk of Conservative politics:

Former CPC leader Andrew Scheer decided to join the fray. “No wonder Trudeau wants to censor all but four or five Liberals [sic] news sources: they all coordinate in attacking Poilievre with the same false headline,” he tweeted. “Collusion?” This did not sit well with National Post columnist John Ivison, who clapped back at Scheer’s uninformed paranoia. “It's a wire story, with a suggested heading everyone used. Every political rookie knows that — and you're a lifer. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that you are deliberately trying to stoke conspiracy and disinformation. You need to give your head a shake, Andrew.”

Ryan Williams, an MP from Ontario, tried a different tack: pretending the conspiracy theories that kicked off this raging inferno of nonsense aren’t actually conspiracies at all. “The problem with the WEF is that elected officials are trying to implement its policies without being transparent about them in an election, or otherwise,” he tweeted. “Ideas like 15 min cities, digital ID, and Klaus Schwab below. Run these ideas in an election and see what happens.”

The godfather of all this baloney is, of course, Donald Trump:

Donald Trump turned this into an art form, albeit a vulgar one, when he became U.S. president, and his Canadian imitators have been doing their best to mimic him ever since. In his outgoing speech as CPC leader, Scheer blasted the mainstream media and its “narrative” and tried to boost alternative right-wing sources like the Post Millennial and True North.

Conservatives are good at attacking their opponents. But when it comes to thinking critically? Well, that's another story.

Image: Red Deer Advocate

The Blood On Trump's Hands

Jack Smith has charged Donald Trump with crimes he's committed throughout his life -- fraud and conspiracy. But he does not hold Trump responsible for the violence behind January 6th. He writes that Trump "took advantage of " the violence. Fani Willis puts violence at the centre of her indictment of Trump. Jennifer Rubin writes:

The indictment describes defendants traveling to Freeman’s home to mislead and intimidate her. Willis alleged Trump defamed Freeman to Georgia officials (claiming she was a “a professional vote scammer and a known political operative” and saying that “Ruby Freeman, her daughter, and others were responsible for fraudulently awarding at least 18,000 ballots to Joseph R. Biden at State Farm Arena in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia.”) Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that Freeman had stuffed ballot boxes.

Trump tweeted references to a conspiracy about Freeman to his followers, which we know included those who were menacing election workers, making threats and endangering the lives of Freeman and others.

Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is also accused of bantering about lies concerning Freeman (who he falsely stated had been “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine”). These lies reverberated through social media, putting a target on Freeman’s back and helping escalate threats against Georgia officials.

The indictment works to refocus our attention on the mob Trump and Giuliani allegedly tried to incite, to the threats the MAGA horde lobbed toward election officials and others, and to the gripping testimony from Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, at the House Jan. 6 hearings. From everything we’ve seen, these Georgians’ lives were made a living hell.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” and an expert on fascism, told Insider that Trump resorted to inciting the crowd to violence when his other schemes failed “because he truly believes that violence is a way you can change history.” She added, “The thing about autocrats today is that they’re all corrupt, but they’re also violent. They use all of these tools at the same time. So, we can’t isolate one and say that Jan. 6 was just about this or just about that. It was everything. It was a process of months and it culminated in violence.”

Willis' case will probably conclude after the election. Trump has blood on his hands. And Willis is determined to make Trump pay for that blood.

Image: The New York Times

Even Worse

The Canadian Press reports that Pierre Poilievre is selling conspiracy theories:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has been hitting the summer barbecue circuit with ramped-up rhetoric around debunked claims that the World Economic Forum is attempting to impose its agenda on sovereign governments.

It is, some experts suggest, another sign that some conspiracy theories are moving from the fringes of the internet to mainstream thinking, as people's distrust of government grows.

In speeches to Conservative supporters across Canada, Poilievre has promised that none of his ministers will attend the international organization's conferences, including the annual meeting typically held in Davos, Switzerland.

"It's far past time we rejected the globalist Davos elites and bring home the common sense of the common people," said a Saturday fundraising email.

The Conservative party also recently sent out mailers with a poll asking people to tell Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who they think the prime minister should stand with: working Canadians or the World Economic Forum.

The wording implies Trudeau's cabinet is beholden to the latter.

The nutbars have moved into the mainstream:

Duane Bratt, political science professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, said some people have long embraced conspiracies, but now they have moved into mainstream politics.

"The big shift that we have seen is that it is now being promoted by someone who could be prime minister," said Bratt.

Poilievre peddled the WEF control claims during the Conservative leadership race in 2022, and it has emerged again as a regular talking point following the federal byelection in southern Manitoba, said Bratt.

In that contest in Portage-Lisgar, the Conservatives were looking to beat back a growing challenge from the People's Party of Canada.

Maxime Bernier, the leader of that party who has long accused the WEF of having a globalist agenda, ran in the byelection. The Conservatives attacked him for having attended the Davos summit when he was Harper's foreign affairs minister in 2008. Bratt said Poilievre's embrace of conspiracy theories could be because he's attempting to steal back votes from the PPC.

Poilievre was the man who suggested that Bitcoin was the way of the future.  His vision wasn't very good when he wore glasses. It's even worse since he took them off.

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Something's Out Of Joint

In a blistering report, Ontario's auditor general has skewered Doug Ford's government.  Rob Ferguson and  Rob Benzie write in The Toronto Star:

Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives “favoured certain developers” in a controversial $8.28-billion Greenbelt land swap rammed through in a fashion the premier admits was “wrong,” the auditor general found.

In a searing 93-page report to the legislature Wednesday, Bonnie Lysyk concluded Ford’s opening up of 7,400 acres of environmentally protected land last fall “cannot be described as a standard or defensible process.”

That process was run by Ryan Amato, the chief of staff to Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark, without proper input from independent bureaucrats or land-use experts, she said.

But the premier and Clark, who took media questions for more than an hour, vowed to continue with the land swap — which will benefit Tory-connected landowners — despite the auditor general’s push for them to reconsider.

Ford has always been about transferring public wealth into private hands. The same was true of former premier Mike Harris. Paul Kahnert writes:

During the time the Mike Harris Conservatives were in power from 1995 to 2003, a record amount of public wealth was transferred to the wealthy. Just what is public wealth? Public wealth is our education system, our healthcare system, our water system and was once our hydro-electric system. It is our provincial parks, forests, lakes, rivers and the green belt.it is also the collective total of all our tax dollars in the provincial treasury. There is much more to public wealth when you add in things like long term care, community centers, hockey and curling arenas. The sum total of our public wealth is quite massive and the wealthy want it.  

Harris privatized Hwy 407 for a paltry sum. In a far worse deal Harris privatized the Bruce nuclear plant, where again the profits were privatized but the debt and risks remained public.  

Harris cut taxes massively for the wealthy and their corporations. In order to pay for those tax cuts, Harris slashed healthcare spending to the point where Ontario lost more than 10,000 nurses. Education was slashed by the education funding formula which to this day is still shortchanging the education system causing a crisis there. 

Harris changed the entire Hydro System from a non-profit at-cost system to a for profit corporate system packaging it up to be sold. Unbelievably after going fishing with Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, Harris installed an Enron designed electricity market which also is still plaguing us to this day. The list is much longer and includes a long list of a removal of laws and regulations that were designed to protect the public, including the removal of a law requiring a binding public referendum anytime a public asset was to be sold.

It seems like every day and every week; Ford is hell bent on breaking Harris’s record transfer of wealth to the wealthy. Long term care was privatized where thousands died during the pandemic, many from neglect. Given the horrific record of private long-term care, Ford gave these owners 30-year licenses and is allowing the building of more private long term care homes. 

On top of shortfalls caused by the funding formula, Ford is cutting education funding more. It certainly looks like he’s creating a crisis again so that education can be privatized by charter schools or online education services. 

We've known who these people are -- and we've known it for a long time.

Something's out of joint.

Image: TVO Today

The Trump Of The North

According to a recent Abacus poll, a large number of Canadians don't like any of the party leaders. Michael Harris writes:

Here are the numbers: 33 per cent Liberal; 22 per cent NDP and 19 per cent Conservative. According to pollster David Coletto, it is this group of people who don’t favour any of the leaders that will decide the next election. If Trudeau can hold on to the Liberal vote in this group and add it to the 20 per cent who want him to remain PM, there is a realistic chance he will win a fourth term.

The same Abacus poll that showed an overwhelming majority wants a change in government also found 31 per cent of respondents didn’t like any of the politicians on offer. This group was then asked how they would vote if there were an election tomorrow.

It's clear that Justin Trudeau is in trouble. But so is Pierre Poilievre:

The sticking point is Pierre Poilievre’s slavish adherence to the kind of Trumpian nastiness that is rotting the heart of the Republican party in the Indicted States of America. Poilievre specializes in put-downs, not lift-ups. It is usually the latter that inspire Canadians.

With former PM Stephen Harper’s public endorsement, Poilievre won the top job by dragging the CPC further to the right. And he has maintained that Freedom Caucus-style political stance as leader of the Opposition.

Gut the CBC, fire the chairman of the Bank of Canada, close safe injection sites, and keep the drill bit turning to the right while the planet is deep in a fossil-fuelled fever.

That approach may have gotten Skippy the clip of the day from question period, but it didn’t make more room in the CPC tent. Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction, and so far, Poilievre’s has got the arithmetic backwards. Great at subtraction, a flop at addition.

In the wake of Donald Trump's third indictment -- a fourth is on the way -- it's truly strange that Poilievre keeps insisting that he's the Trump Of The North.

Image: Sean Kilpatrick, the Canadian Press.

Indicted Again

Donald Trump has been indicted for a third time. Jennifer Rubin writes:

Trump has spent his life evading responsibility for his conduct; within the space of a few months, he has been indicted three times in criminal court and held liable in civil court for defaming and sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll.

What’s most notable about the legal filing? Smith did not overcharge nor clutter the indictment with repetitive charges. He appears intent on keeping the case relatively simple. Simple does not mean unserious, however. Choosing not to bring the dicey charge of sedition or conspiracy to commit sedition, Smith nevertheless captures the enormity of the crime — the assault on our democracy.

There are three things that need to be understood:

For starters, if Trump ran for president under the mistaken notion it would protect him from prosecution, it was a colossal miscalculation; instead, his decision forced Garland’s hand, drawing into the case an incorruptible, aggressive and determined prosecutor who, in roughly eight months on the job, filed two mammoth criminal cases against the former president. Had Trump not declared his candidacy, the Justice Department might still be “working its way up the chain” in its Jan. 6 investigation. Trump remains his own worst enemy.

Second, Republicans have a fundamental choice: Do they nominate a thrice-indicted criminal defendant who sought to overthrow our democracy? General election voters will not avert their eyes from the blizzard of facts or the seriousness of the charges. If Republicans proceed with Trump, they become the party of insurrection and deceit. The GOP will be stained for a very long time by sticking by Trump’s side.

Third, Smith has done his job — faster and more completely than even his most ardent supporters expected. The judge and jury will be expected to follow their oaths. But it is up to the voters to make certain an abjectly unfit character never assumes power. There is no shirking that obligation, no matter what the results in court.

Even if Trump is convicted he could still be re-elected. The indictment separates the realists from the fools. We will soon know how many Americans are fools.

Image: Black Star News