Kamala In Westmount

Dan Bilefsky is a Canadian correspondent for the New York Times. He grew up in Westmount, where Ms. Harris and her mother and sister moved after her mother divorced her father. Her mother did cancer research at McGill. Bilesky has been talking to people who knew Kamela then:

Her childhood friends recalled a confident young woman who showed seeds of activism, found cultural affirmation in her Black identity and complained about French class.

Mara Rudzitis, an art teacher at Westmount High for 22 years, recalled Kamala sometimes spent her lunch hour making art in the arts and crafts studio, where students would come to paint and make ceramic masks.

“We didn’t get the cream of the crop at Westmount High — many of those kids would go to private schools — we got more of the sour cream,” she told me. “Kids are very impressionable at that age and Kamala was exposed to people from all walks of life and nationalities.”

Ms. Kagan told me that while Ms. Harris was a diligent student, her limited exposure to French before coming to Canada disadvantaged her at a high school where the students in the French immersion section received more attention and resources. Ms. Harris arrived in Montreal knowing a handful of French words learned from ballet classes and was placed in the English section, Ms. Kagan said.

Montreal was a multicultural city long before Canada adopted multiculturalism as a policy. Hers was a much different environment than the one Donald Trump -- and many Americans -- have grown up in. Certainly, it's the polar opposite of the world Donald Trump knows.

Harris's education has been broad and deep. Trump hasn't learned anything since he was ten years old. He was, William T. Kelley -- one of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania -- said, "the  dumbest goddamn student I ever had."

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Image: The New York Times

Who's He Talking To?

Bruce Arthur writes that Doug Ford seems to be confused. When asked about Thanksgiving:

He said stick with 10 people, indicated he would do the same, denied he said it, said stick to your household without specifying what the household was, tweeted to clarify afterwards, deleted the tweet, and tried again. It still didn’t specify that his immediate household is two people, not 10.

Perhaps he's getting bad advice:

So who is giving him advice? CMOH Dr. David Williams, whose advice has often seemed wayward? Associate medical officer of health Dr. Barbara Yaffe, who said she hadn’t seen the worrisome Toronto neighbourhood positive test data reported by the Star until she read it in the paper, and which the federal health minister is now concerned about?

The numbers in Ontario are spiking -- as they are around the world:

But the seven-day average, with old cases excluded, is 601. Two weeks ago it was 386. The lineups and testing backlog muddy the waters. There is no way to look at the state of Ontario’s epidemic and say the curve is flattening. Not yet.

COVID fatigue has set in. And Doug Ford's confusion does nothing to stop the growth of that fatigue.

Image: toronto.ctvnews.ca

Completely Noodled

Donald Trump claims he's been cured. But his insanity grows as he lurches toward defeat. Consider his interview with Maria Bartiromo. Edward Keenan writes:

Over the course of the hour-long appearance, Trump attacked vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris as a “monster” and a “communist” who wants “killers and murderers and rapists to enter our country.” He attacked his Attorney General Bill Barr for not locking Biden and former president Barack Obama up in jail on unspecified charges of the “greatest political crime in American history.” He said polls showing him trailing ever-further behind Biden didn’t match the evidence he sees: “They have a boat thing, they have 5,000 boats, they have thousands of trucks all over the country. I don’t believe the polls.” He again refused to say he’d peacefully transfer power if he lost, saying falsely that “thousands and thousands of ballots” marked with his name have been found in rivers. And he called Nevada election officials “cheaters” and “con men” and suggested postal carriers there would be indicted.

As Trump has seen his position in the polls sink — all 11 national polls noted Thursday by aggregator fivethirtyeight.com showed Trump trailing by at least eight points, and eight of them showed Biden with a double-digit lead — he seems to have entered a Mad King-era in his campaign: furiously retweeting conspiracy videos; impulsively announcing he’d put an end to congressional stimulus talks that the American public overwhelmingly favours (before maybe having second thoughts and calling for some kinds of stimulus again); telling Americans who have lost loved ones to COVID-19 not to be afraid of the virus, suggesting both that “when you catch it you get better, and then you’re immune” (sadly, neither part of that sentence is always true) and that getting it personally was a “blessing from God.”

So the question no longer is, "Will he lose the election?" It's "What will he do when he loses the election?"

Image: nymag

No Bobble Head

I have always enjoyed reading E.J. Dionne's columns. Perhaps that's because I feel a distant kinship with his French Canadian forebears. Dionne writes that Kamela Harris did a superb job last night -- by keeping the focus on Donald Trump's failures and Joe Biden's character:

No matter how hard, in his quiet and earnest way, that Vice President Pence tried to turn Wednesday’s vice-presidential debate into an assault on Joe Biden, Sen. Kamala D. Harris and reality itself forced the discussion back again and again to the failures of the Trump administration.

If Pence’s goal was to disrupt the trajectory of an election that has been moving the Democrats’ way, he plainly failed. And Harris succeeded by declining to make herself a center of attention. She acted instead as advocate for Biden and a sharp, detailed but tonally restrained critic of the current occupant of the White House.

Around our house, we have come to refer to Pence as "Oily Mike." Despite Pence's calm demeanor, that characterization was on full display last night:

Pence’s reserved demeanor may have done more to harm than help the candidate whose cause he was promoting, by reminding viewers of Trump’s extreme lack of discipline.

And, when Pence attacked Biden, Harris was ready with information, not spin:

She was skilled at using Pence’s attacks to provide listeners with new information helpful to her ticket.

Thus, when Pence accused Democrats of being anti-Christian for their handling of Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Harris pointed out that both she and Biden were “people of faith.” She said that she was “insulted” by Pence’s attacks and noted that Biden would, in fact, be only the second Catholic president.

And when Pence attacked Biden’s economic plans, Harris used his criticisms to place herself and Biden in the great tradition of lunch-bucket Democrats — and managed to convey more detail about Biden’s plans than Biden himself had in his own debate. She spoke of how Biden would make it easier for young people to attend college, for all Americans to get health care — and stressed that Biden would not raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year.

When Pence accused her of being a lousy District Attorney, she responded that she "would not be lectured" by Pence. She will not be a bobble-headed vice president -- something Pence has been for the last four years.

Image: amazon.sg

When the Doctors Disagree

The public health professionals at Queens Park and in Toronto disagree. Bruce Arthur writes:

The two sides, while wasting three days, have their lawyers figuring that out. With a virus that we now know moves faster than traditional public health measures, every hour can count. The city and the province are wasting plenty of them.

But the jurisdictional disagreements are a sideshow for the real thing, because the actual divide is clear. Toronto medical officer of health Dr. Eileen de Villa looks at the data, looks at the backlog, looks at her resources, and thinks the city should take the extraordinary steps of closing indoor dining and restricting all unnecessary travel. And the province — chief medical officer of health Dr. David Williams, and Premier Doug Ford — looks at the same data, listens to her and Mayor John Tory, runs it through their advisory tables, and disagrees.

Between Sept. 20 and 26, 44 per cent of Toronto outbreaks involved restaurants, bars and entertainment venues. Two cases at Yonge Warehouse and Regulars Bar created a combined 2,300 possible exposures, which is enough to jam contact tracing if nothing else happens. Sources say Toronto Public Health has shared all its data with the province.

Then there is the data obtained by the Star’s Kate Allen and Jennifer Yang. Test positivity data shows the virus is again surging in Toronto’s most vulnerable neighbourhoods, but also across the city. And remember, the picture’s incomplete.

The battle again is between dollars and bugs. For Doug Ford, dollars have always driven policy. The irony is that, until the bugs outrank the dollars, there will be far fewer dollars driving the bus.

Image: cbc.ca

Pope Francis Chimes In

Pope Francis is not afraid to take on the issues of his time. Last week he issued an encyclical on the problems that beset us. Catherine Pepinster writes:

In this weekend’s document he makes it clear that populism and nationalism – of the kind Trump typifies – are damaging, warning that “a concept of popular and national unity influenced by various ideologies is creating new forms of selfishness and a loss of the social sense under the guise of defending national interests”.

It’s also clear that Francis has seen through the neoliberal experiment and its alleged trickle-down benefits that have only served to create a class of the super-rich and left behind the people who are most in need – such as people with disabilities and, indeed, those who rely on state-provided education and healthcare. “If a society is governed primarily by the criteria of market freedom and efficiency, there is no place for such persons, and fraternity will remain just another vague ideal,” he warns.

Francis condemns unrestrained individualism. But he's no progressive either:

For Francis, fraternity is much more than an ideal, but a necessity if the world is to become a better place. But while his idealism sets Trump followers’ teeth on edge, he can also make Democrats on the left uncomfortable, too. There is no advocacy here of big government and welfare state narratives either. Instead, he is focused on the local and the small. And at the heart of his teaching in this document and all his papal pronouncements over the past seven years has been a strong stance on the right to life that takes him all the way from completely rejecting capital punishment to vetoing abortion, too.

There are lots of Catholics in the United States. In the last election, they broke 52% for Trump and 44% for Clinton. It'll be interesting to see what happens this time around.

Image: forbes.com

Believe It

Donald Trump is crashing and burning. But, as has been the case from the beginning, Donald lives in a permanent state of denial. Jennifer Rubin writes:

The national polls are stunning: Biden has a 14-point lead in the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll (53 percent to 39 percent) taken before Trump announced that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Biden has a 10-point led in the Reuters-Ipsos poll (51 percent to 41 percent). Biden led by at least eight points in all the polls released on Sunday. In the two most recent Pennsylvania polls, Biden leads by seven points. The FiveThirtyEight poll average shows Biden’s lead hovering around seven points in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Trump’s obnoxious and bullying routine in last week’s debate did not sit well with viewers. NBC-WSJ polling found that 49 percent said Biden won, 24 percent said Trump won and 17 percent said neither did (the “balance” punditry that both were bad gets the least support among actual voters).

But his spokesman still mocks Joe Biden for wearing a mask:

Campaign adviser Jason Miller went on the Sunday shows and continued to mock Biden for wearing a mask too frequently (“a prop,” he called it), showing how little Trump has learned from his own illness. Trump is in the hospital; Biden is traveling to battleground states.

Even worse, when confronted with the White House’s failure to follow guidelines for mask-wearing, Miller insisted that all is well since they test for the virus. This mentality led to a Rose Garden event where attendees were tested, yet no fewer than eight people, that we know of, have tested positive for the virus.

And on the weekend, Trump went on a joyride in an SUV to see his supporters. The other occupants of the vehicle were masked and gowned. Nothing about the virus has sunk into Trump's skull.

Stupidity can be terminal. Believe it.

Image: imgflip.com

There Comes A Time

There's been a lot of magical thinking about COVID. The most persistent magical meme is that we've turned the corner. Alan Freeman writes:

As we head indoors in our small family units for the next six months or so, there is no way we’re going to be partying at Christmas. Perhaps next Easter, but then only if we have an early spring. Hopefully, new efforts by authorities to slow the spread by reducing social contacts will soon have an impact. But if they do, will we want to plunge into another upward spiral by letting down our guard too soon as we did this summer?

The fact is that the pandemic is far from over. The pain, both social and economic, is likely to persist throughout 2021 and politicians should stop trying to make us feel better. They need to tell us the truth even if we don’t want to hear it.

Masks, distancing and hand washing will not be enough. Faster and more readily available testing will help but until there is a safe, effective and well-distributed vaccine, some activities are just not going to be safe. We are going to have make tough choices. If schools and factories are to stay open, bars, gyms, saunas and theaters will likely have to close, especially in hard-hit regions. And we’ll have to stop visiting friends and family indoors.

Unfortunately, there's been a lot of magical thinking in Quebec. The number of infections in la belle province keeps rising -- partially because Quebec keeps insisting that it will do its own thing in its own way:

From the start, Premier François Legault has seemed more interested in a distinct Quebec approach to the pandemic than the right approach. During the early weeks of COVID-19, Quebec officials compared the province’s performance with Portugal and Germany, not even deigning to look at the more successful approaches in B.C. and Alberta, let alone neighbouring New Brunswick, which essentially kept the virus out, reporting just two deaths since March.

When Canada’s chief science adviser, Mona Nemer, openly criticized Quebec in May for failing to put together an adequate testing and tracing strategy, Dr. Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s director of public health, hit back, declaring he wasn’t responsible to “this lady” and calling her a back-seat driver. Of course, she was right. It took months for Quebec to boost its testing numbers and its tracing efforts remain weak.

Thinking that Quebecers outside Montreal were somehow immune to the virus, Legault called on Quebecers to take their summer holidays throughout the province. They responded in droves, flooding places like Gaspé in July and August, turning summer vacation into a super-spreader event. By the end of September, the Gaspé region was reporting the highest active case rate in the province.

When schools reopened in the province, students were told to wear masks in corridors but not in the classroom. Of course, the decision was announced after Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, said it was a good idea to enforce mask wearing throughout the school day and Ontario had signed on to the idea for its schools. When an English-language school board in Montreal decided that it would rather be safe than sorry and made masks mandatory in class as well, it was overruled by Quebec City.

Quebec isn't the only place where magical thinking has flourished. We live in a town which depends on summer tourism. This summer all kinds of tourists raised a middle finger to the rules. Luckily,  COVID numbers here are still low. But there comes a time when your luck runs out.

Going Down

This week has been the worst week of Donald Trump's presidency. Tony Burman writes:

The announcement early Friday that he and first lady Melania Trump have tested positive was shocking, but it was not surprising.

For months, Trump has been reckless, even criminally negligent, about the threat of the pandemic, and U.S. public health experts have estimated this lack of leadership has led to tens of thousands of avoidable American deaths.

But it is ironic this latest blow to his election campaign came only two days after one of his most dismal public performances as president.

Burman believes that his debate performance provides a clear signal that Trump knows he's going to lose the election:

Trump knows by now that he will lose November’s election, probably by a wide margin. With the death toll from the pandemic at more than 200,000 Americans and an economy that has collapsed, voters are clearly turning against him, including in the key battleground states.

And Trump, however delusional that he often appears to be, must know that.

Faced with defeat,  he has concluded that he is going to take American democracy down with him:

Trump no longer appears to see Democratic challenger Joe Biden as his primary rival. To him, Biden is mere roadkill along the way to a more crucial target.

As four years of Trump’s presidency have revealed, he sees America’s multicultural democracy — and all the institutions that support it — as his enemy.

In other words, no less than American democracy is in Trump’s crosshairs.

As a friend of mine likes to say, Mr. Trump is a Weapon Of Mass Destruction.

Image: Modern War Institute

Well Deserved

Donald Trump has tested positive. Frank Bruni writes that there are at least two morals to be drawn from that news:

The most obvious is that the coronavirus has not gone away and there is no guarantee, contrary to the president’s sunny prophecies, that it’s going away anytime soon, certainly not if we’re cavalier about it.

Which brings up another moral, also obvious but apparently necessary to articulate: There is a real risk in being cavalier. The president is now the embodiment of that. The first lady, too. Also Hope Hicks, one of his closest advisers, and who knows how many others in his immediate circle? That question exists because, from the start, there has been a culture of cavalier attitudes and behavior at the White House when it comes to the coronavirus.

Cavalier is an understatement. Denial is more accurate. Trump has spent his life denying facts. Now those facts have come home to roost:

That culture was on flabbergasting display during those evening briefings the president used to do, the ones that he used primarily to congratulate himself and his administration on their fantabulous job battling the pandemic. They battled it all the way to America’s exceptional status as the world leader in recorded cases of, and deaths associated with, the coronavirus.

That culture was evident in the rallies that the president arranged and insisted on doing over recent weeks. That culture persisted on Thursday, when, according to an article by Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman in The Times, Kayleigh McEnany, maskless, held a briefing with reporters after Hicks’s infection with the virus was confirmed and after McEnany was on a plane with her and exposed to her.

Whether this news will make a difference to Trump's supporters is difficult to say. It would be wrong to wish him ill. On the other hand, his fate -- whatever it turns out to be -- is well deserved.

Image: KING5.com

Mewling And Puking

 Like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson is a narcissist. John Crace writes:

Like most narcissists, Boris Johnson is unable to conceive of other people having an independent existence. Rather, they are mere satellites orbiting his ego. Mere objects whose only function is to do his bidding. And to be fair, it’s a world view that has served him well enough up to now as he’s cruised his way, with a flamboyant mixture of broken promises, outright lies and back-stabbing, to his life’s goal of becoming prime minister. Family, friends and colleagues that have been trampled upon along the way are just collateral damage.

He's always been the star of his own show. But, as is the case with Trump, people are beginning to change the channel:

There are growing signs that many people are increasingly deciding that enough is enough. Tory backbenchers have got fed up with being left out in the cold from the government’s coronavirus legislation and the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, made no attempt to disguise his anger on Wednesday at the way parliament had been sidelined. But the person who most gets under Boris’s skin is Keir Starmer. Because more than six months in, he has yet to get the better of the Labour leader.

It must be driving Johnson mad. Prime minister’s questions was always meant to be the Boris Show. The half-hour in the week when the country laughed at his jokes and enjoyed his put-downs. Except it hasn’t worked out like that at all. Partly because the Labour leader is visibly better prepared, but mostly because he refuses to be cast in Johnson’s image. Keir is very much his own man: he keeps his questions short and direct and calls out Boris’s bluster for the bullshit it is.

Starmer is getting the best of Johnson:

Today, Johnson was wrongfooted from the start when Starmer wondered why Luton was the only town to have gone into extra lockdown restrictions and come out of them. Boris’s reply that Luton had “pulled together” won’t have gone down well with the 25% of the country who live in the other 47 regions that are still living under extra strict measures, as it rather implied they must have been taking the piss.

For the rest of the session Starmer walked rings round Johnson. He picked him up for not even knowing what restrictions he had put in place where. The best that Boris could come up with was that it was up to everyone in each area to find out the rules for themselves. Then Starmer tackled the prime minister on his definition of “viable businesses” and the level of support he was prepared to provide. “Putting an arm around the whole country” didn’t quite square with an angry email Starmer had received from a wedding planner in the chancellor’s Richmond constituency.

By the end, Boris was merely an infant “mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms” yet to advance beyond Jaques’s first stage of man. Unable to come up with any clever – or even not so clever – replies, he merely yapped out his distress that anyone should dare to question him on anything and to accuse the Labour leader of sniping from the sides.

There's a lot of mewling and puking going on these days.

Blowing Things Up

There wasn't a debate last night. Donald Trump blew up it up. Trump proved definitively that he is absolutely unfit for the office he holds. He was unfit when he won the office. He is unfit today. Jennifer Rubin writes:

When faced with questions about his actual record and policy, Trump threw up word salads, switched topics, made scurrilous accusations and convinced any rational viewer he is in over his head. He mostly interrupted, repeatedly and falsely accusing Biden of harboring positions that his more progressive opponents in the Democratic primaries held. Trump was a walking Twitter feed — no facts, all bluster and all insults. Unfortunately, moderator Chris Wallace was never able to control Trump, so the debate devolved into constant interruption.

Trump wound up arguing with Wallace, who correctly pointed out that Trump does not have a comprehensive health-care plan. Trump insisted he was lowering drug prices (he hasn’t) without addressing his lack of a replacement for Obamacare. Biden explained that he is not in sync with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Medicare-for-all, as Trump claimed. As Trump tried to interrupt again and again, Biden asked derisively, "Do you have any idea what this clown is doing?” At another point, Biden quietly said, “Will you shut up, man?” He made the point that Trump has never had a health-care plan.

Trump vomited out a lie a minute:

On the economy, Trump boasted of his “best-ever” economy, but Biden took the side of the little guy, pointing out that the economy may be bouncing back for the rich but not for ordinary workers. Biden then threw Trump’s tax avoidance back in his face, after which Trump refused to confirm whether he paid $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017, as the New York Times recently reported. Trump then lied that he had relatively little debt (he reportedly owes $421 million) and insisted he paid “millions” in taxes. Biden heckled him, taunting him to release his tax returns.

Biden pointed to studies showing his own plan would create more jobs and grow faster under his proposals than under Trump’s. In response to Trump’s taunts, Biden said bluntly, “You are the worst president America has ever had.” Biden said they handed Trump a booming economy but Trump “blew it” and didn’t save manufacturing.

I'm not making any predictions. But Trump proved beyond a doubt that his former secretary of state was right. He truly is a vile, "fucking moron."

Image: vox.com

It's Here

The second COVID wave has arrived in Ontario. And things are not going well. Bruce McArthur writes:

On Monday, Ontario recorded a pandemic-record 700 new COVID-19 cases, and the premier said the second wave had arrived, and he announced a plan to hire 3,700 new front-line health-care workers, from, personal support workers to nurses, to deal with a surge. 

It's not easy, waiting to be saved in Ontario. The alarm bells have been blaring for weeks, and Ontario’s hapless chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, is still calling 700 cases a “wake-up call” as if it wasn’t widely anticipated, and the government doesn’t appear to be listening anyway. Last week, many Ontario leading health-care figures signed a letter asking for increased restrictions on high-risk commercial spaces. Monday, the Ontario Hospital Association called on the province to immediately put high-COVID areas back to Stage 2 of reopening, from the current Stage 3.

So far, the Ford government has been working around the edges:

Provincial interventions thus far have been low-cost and minor: lowering private gathering sizes, closing strip clubs, earlier closing hours for bars and restaurants. Toronto, similarly, dropped bar and restaurant limits from 100 to 75, and maximum table sizes from 10 to six. Mayor John Tory raised concerns about banquet halls, which are closed in B.C., but not here.

Ontario’s welcome narrowing of testing eligibility last week will help alleviate unacceptable lab turnaround times. But while the 700 may be a one-day bulge, it’s part of a pattern. And it reflects new cases from 10-14 days ago, so it doesn’t include what schools might do to transmission, with a few already shutting down. Is pruning around the regulatory edges going to turn the tide?

The heart of the problem is the government's confused messaging:

Premier Doug Ford keeps pleading with people who aren’t listening to follow confusing and contradictory regulations. After all, it’s 10 indoors and 20 outdoors, but you can also fit 30 in a classroom, 75 in a bar, plenty more in houses of worship and banquet halls and stores. Besides, social circles of 10 were in ashes as soon as people sent their kids back to school in a province unwilling to adequately fund small class sizes.

It's become clear that's it's now up to individuals. And recent massive gatherings -- in places like Wasaga Beach -- suggest that large numbers of individuals don't give a damn.

Image: barrie.ctvnews.ca

Is It Any Wonder?

The New York Times has published ten years of Donald Trump's tax returns up to 2018. The Times reports that:

Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the president’s business empire. They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base.

“The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

Trump's claim to fame was that he would bring his business acumen to the United States government. The documents reveal that Trump has no business acumen. They also reveal that, in the year he won the presidency, he paid $750 in taxes. After the first year of his presidency, he paid another $750 in taxes.

Is it any wonder that he has almost destroyed the republic?

It's In the Pipeline

Robin Sears writes that universal childcare has been on Canadians' radar for a long time:

Childcare in Canada has a long and twisting history — from pre-Confederation days when informal day nurseries were set up in some larger communities, to 1942 when subsidized daycare spaces were created for mothers working in war industries, to the boom created by the first feminist wave of the 70s. Like capital punishment, abortion and marriage equality, the cause was litigated brutally on each side, gaining traction slowly until one day becoming “inevitable.”

Events have now made universal childcare inevitable:

Why now? Because the fundamental economic logic of childcare has become overwhelming — not as a social justice card, but in purely liberal capitalist terms. More working women means a larger labour force, producing greater output and tax revenues, along with a stronger and more skills-diversified economy.

The evidence is no longer debatable: childcare, done well, really does make a nation richer, as well as fairer. And no, it is not a socialist plot to indoctrinate young children with poisonous ideas while trapped for hours every day in the hands of lefty propagandists — a claim one regularly heard whispered back in the day.

And, as was the case with Medicare, there is a working model in place -- not just in one province, but in two:

In Canada, it was partly the success of the Quebec subsidized system over more than 20 years, and B.C.’s more recent success since the election of the NDP under John Horgan. The pandemic sealed the case.

There will still be a lot of wrangling between the feds and the provinces. There always is. But universal childcare is in the pipeline.

Image: cbc.ca

Get Rid Of The Big Money

Everywhere, it seems, politics is corrupted by big money. That certainly has been the case in Ontario. Martin Regg Cohn writes:

Back in 2016, after a series of columns exposing the wild west of Ontario fundraising, the previous Liberal government clamped down on the worst abuses — so that politicians from all parties could cater to voter interests, not pander to vested interests.

But Doug Ford’s Tories unilaterally diluted those reforms after they took power two years later, revoking public financing of political parties (modest “per-vote” subsidies based on most recent election results). Now, COVID-19 has changed the equation.

Fundraising is falling on deaf ears because ordinary Ontarians are out of pocket. Which leaves deep-pocketed developers whispering in the ears of desperate politicians.

Cohn believes that it's time to re-instate the per vote political subsidy:

With the benefit of hindsight, the premier has every reason to restore the “per-vote” allocations that he unilaterally phased out (scheduled to end next year). And with a little foresight, Ford could go even further in leading a cleanup of dirty money.

The perfect storm of a pandemic is the ideal time for the premier to curb excessive campaign spending, better reflecting the virtual world of COVID-19. Why allow parties to spend (and therefore raise) as much as $10 million for a provincial election campaign that amounts to overkill?

Amid COVID-19, we are entering a new world of political outreach and campaign marketing that is more digital than ever before. The premier could make the best of a pandemic by forcing all politicians to collectively clean up their act — with sharp new limits on how much they spend to grease their lumbering campaign machines.

The old fashioned way of funding campaigns is very costly:

All those sumptuous fundraising dinners are obscenely inefficient ways to attract donors — with big sums (and fine wine) poured down the drain to keep the cash flowing, while politicians waste time prostituting themselves.

As for those costly and clunky whistle-stop campaigns, they are whistling past the political graveyard. Just ask Ford, who ditched the traditional “leader’s tour” in the 2018 election, forsaking the customary chartered aircraft and customized bus, while eschewing the companion “media bus” laid on (for a hefty fee) for travelling reporters. The leader’s tour tends to be a “loss leader” for parties keen to get “earned media” (coverage), but most cash-starved outlets dropped anyway (the Star was often one of the few organizations to tag along).

The pandemic has forced many changes on us. But a change in the way we finance political campaigns could be a blessing:

Image: brazilian.report

A Violent Holocaust

 

This week, early voting began in the American presidential election. Frank Bruni writes:

Trump supporters descended on a polling location in Fairfax, Va., and sought to disrupt early voting there by forming a line that voters had to circumvent and chanting, “Four more years!”

This was no rogue group. This was no random occurrence. This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.

Republicans are planning to have tens of thousands of volunteers fan out to voting places in key states, ostensibly to guard against fraud but effectively to create a climate of menace. Trump has not just blessed but encouraged this. On Fox News last month, he bragged to Sean Hannity about all the “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”

It's going to be a helluva election. Bruni asks:

Is a fair fight still imaginable in America? Do rules and standards of decency still apply? For a metastasizing segment of the population, no.

Right on cue, we commenced a fight over Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat that could become a protracted death match, with Mitch McConnell’s haste and unabashed hypocrisy potentially answered by court packing, among other acts of vengeance, if Democrats win the presidency and the Senate.

That’s a big if, because we’re also hurtling toward an Election Day that may decide exactly nothing — and I don’t mean that night. I mean for months. I mean forever.

It looks to me that the United States is on the verge of a violent holocaust. I hope I'm wrong.

Image: The New York Times

Hope And Fear

Canadians got a double dose yesterday. There was hope in the afternoon and fear at night. Susan Delacourt writes:

Politics is always a dance between hope and fear — doubly so in a pandemic.

So Canadians were treated to two speeches from Trudeau and his government on Wednesday, ranging from optimism to pessimism as COVID-19 remains dangerously on the march through this country.

The speech from the throne, with its promise of “brighter days” — not exactly sunny ways — was clearly drafted as the more hopeful declaration from Trudeau’s government. But the prime minister’s televised address to the nation was about the very real fears rippling through the country right now. There was nothing very sunny in it at all, really.

“We’re on the brink of a fall that could be much worse than the spring,” Trudeau said. “I know this isn’t the news that any of us wanted to hear.”

Basically, Trudeau was giving us a double-barrelled dose of hope and fear on Wednesday, which are operating on different timelines.

The Conservatives and the Bloc grumbled. The Conservatives are now a prairie party; and they grumbled about natural resources. M. Blanchet believes he speaks for -- and only for -- Quebec. He grumbled about provincial jurisdiction.

So now it's up to the NDP and the Liberals. It will take some work, but they might be able to dance with each other. This is surely no time for an election.

Image: medium.com

Private Education?

If you wonder why so many Americans appear to know nothing, look to the failure of the nation's public education system. Jason Kunin writes that Ontario is headed in the same direction -- with help from the pandemic:

In the spring of last year, Premier Doug Ford launched a surprise attack on public education by announcing a series of cuts, disguised as an increase in class sizes, that over a four-year period would have eliminated thousands of teaching positions, decimated programming at schools across the province, and forced students into e-learning courses that no one had asked for or wanted.

But the pandemic has allowed Ford to accomplish what he couldn't accomplish earlier:

A year and a half later, likely thousands of teachers have been pulled from brick and mortar schools, in-school programming has been slashed, and virtual schools are not only set up in boards across the province, but teachers, once and still vociferously opposed to e-learning, are lining up to teach online.

For the Ford government, it's mission accomplished. The pandemic has been a gift.

In a matter of months, COVID-19 has undermined trust in the public school system, created mass incentive for private school and homeschooling options, and achieved a grudging level of public acceptance for e-learning. The ground has now been cleared for the introduction of U.S.-style privatization reforms, such as vouchers and charter schools. The coming months will tell if this is, in fact, where the government is going.

And Ford's education minister has proven to be just the man for the job:

Ford and his smooth-talking Education Minister Stephen Lecce accomplished all this by never wavering in their goals and by implementing a back-to-school plan so inadequately funded and haphazardly planned that almost a third of Toronto parents felt compelled to protect their kids by pulling them out of in-school learning. Applications to private schools have soared.

By taking only half measures to protect students and school staff, the Ford government let the pandemic do its work for them. Class sizes for elementary grades were kept large, masks for Grades 3 and under were made optional, few additional caretaking staff were hired, minimal funding for PPE or ventilation upgrades was provided, and back-to-school plans were unfurled so late into the summer that boards were left scrambling, and the system was thrown into chaos.

For political game-players hell bent on pushing ahead with a privatization agenda that the public doesn't want, in disaster there is opportunity, and in crisis situations the public can be sufficiently beaten down to accept what it doesn't want. This is how disaster capitalism operates.

And make no mistake: When education fails, democracy eventually fails.

Image: The Village Voice

 

Get Mad And Get Even

 

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes that now is the time to take the gloves off:

This is a moment to get mad and to get even. The way to do that is to crush President Trump and pulverize the Republican Party in the coming election.

If the Republicans want to push through a conservative justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg -- and Lindsey Graham says they have the votes -- they will. And the Democrats won't be able to stop them. That means they have to focus on the election:

Democrats can make them pay by taking their power away. All of it.

If you’re angry about how the GOP is tilting the Supreme Court, the first thing to focus on is booting Trump out of the White House and into well-deserved obscurity.

Four years ago, too many Democrats — especially young people and African Americans — stayed home on Election Day. Just 80,000 more Democratic votes spread across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania would have given Hillary Clinton, not Trump, the power to nominate three Supreme Court justices, shaping the high court’s ideological makeup for decades to come.

I don’t know who those Clinton-appointed justices would have been, but I know they wouldn’t be Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and whoever Trump picks later this week. The Supreme Court has to be made a turnout-driving issue for Democrats, the way it has long been for Republicans.

That doesn’t mean, however, letting the battle over replacing Ginsburg become the central issue in the campaign. Joe Biden needs to continue hammering away at Trump’s weaknesses: his abysmal and tragically dishonest performance on the covid-19 pandemic; the economic devastation that resulted from his failure to contain the virus the way leaders of other rich countries did; and his decision to respond to the movement against systemic racism by championing Confederate monuments and channeling bitter White grievance.

That means that, first and foremost, Trump must be sent back to Park Avenue to face the Manhattan district attorney. But the Democrats must also take back the Senate:

GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Martha McSally of Arizona and Thom Tillis of North Carolina trail their Democratic opponents; while Cory Gardner of Colorado, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Steve Daines of Montana and Graham are also in serious trouble. If Democrats win any four of those seats, then even if Democrat Doug Jones gets ousted in deep-red Alabama, McConnell’s majority is gone.

It can be done. It's been done here. Remember that 1992 election when the Conservatives were reduced to two seats in the House of Commons? It all depends on how many people come out to vote.

Image: The Guardian