A Relic

Robin Sears writes that John Tory is a relic of a bygone era:

Toronto’s expected-to-retire mayor is, by contemporary political standards, a relic. Mostly that’s a good thing. Promising to resign when you are not compelled to is a relic of the standards of another era. So is thinking that you can carry on affairs with those who report to you.

Even as a very young political operative, John Tory was always reflective of his background and the values it inculcated. Arguing on political panels or over lunch, Tory would always refuse to meet vitriolic partisan insults in kind. Learning that an opponent had just received a new baby or lost a cherished friend, John would always reach out.

He was never naive, though, about the hard culture and sometimes bad, even corrupt, behaviour of many in politics. Walking one day past the enormous hole in the ground that was to become the CBC headquarters, we were puzzling about the rise in municipal corruption in the Toronto suburbs. I said I found it very hard to align with our mostly corruption-free federal and provincial political cultures.

He offered a mildly sardonic smile and said, “So long as one person, in the right committee, at the right time, by raising their right hand, can turn that mud-filled hole into a multimillion dollar real estate asset — there will always be corruption in municipal politics.” It is an acute bon mot that I remember more than four decades later.

Despite his faults, Tory reflected the best qualities of earlier political leaders:

It was the Bill Davis, Lester Pearson and Tommy Douglas approach to politics. Fight hard for what you believe, never mistake your opponents for enemies, and attempt to bring grace and respect into the ring every time.

But times have changed. Tory was tripped up by his own mistakes. And whoever replaces him will not echo a bygone era.

Image: CTV News

They Took It

The premiers have accepted Ottawa's offer on health-care. They said it wasn't enough  -- and it isn't -- but they took the money. Michael Harris writes:

If Canada’s premiers are feeling Christmas morning disappointment with Ottawa’s financial package intended to save the public health-care system, they aren’t resorting to the usual antics when their demands aren’t met.

The chair of the premiers’ council, Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson, noted the significant shortfall in requested funding. Quebec Premier François Legault griped that Ottawa’s package was not a long-term solution to the problems besetting the health system.

But not a single premier came out swinging against Ottawa’s offer, not a single one turned it down — at least not yet.

The premiers had asked for $28 billion a year to be added to the Canada Health Transfer. They got $46.2 billion spread over 10 years, with just under half of that coming in the form of a boost to the Canada Health Transfer.

Another $25 billion will be doled out through bilateral deals with individual provinces and territories, with strings attached. Ottawa would like the funding to be invested in areas such as primary care and mental health.

The bilateral deals give Ottawa significant leverage in its dealing with the provinces and territories. With each side deal it is able to consummate, a unified opposition to Ottawa’s offer will be weakened. Think of it as divide and concur.

But the real hallmark of this agreement is data:

What really puts Ottawa in the driver’s seat with this offer, should the premiers accept it, is the level of oversight the federal government will exercise. Through the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the provinces and territories will be required to share data that Ottawa will use to assess whether the new funding, such as it is, actually produces better outcomes for Canadians.

If surgical wait times don’t improve, if more doctors and nurses aren’t recruited, if more Canadians don’t end up with access to family doctors, new funding could dry up — though there are no explicit penalty clauses in the federal proposal. But why else measure performance outcomes, if failing grades don’t come with consequences?

So why are the premiers not raising Cain?

It comes down to this. Health care is now an existential issue for every political party. With record numbers of Canadians without a family doctor, with a shocking number of patients dying in ERs and a COVID-weary medical profession barely on its feet in overwhelmed hospitals, health care in this country is not merely in trouble, there is a clear and present danger of a collapse.

That’s why federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said the system doesn’t work anymore. That’s why no politician wants to be seen as haggling over the details of a fix, when so many Canadians are suffering, and without timely access to medical care. In Nova Scotia alone, 558 ER patients died in 2022, up 10 per cent from the previous year.

That’s why Ontario Premier Doug Ford is apparently prepared to embrace Trudeau’s insufficient financial lifeline, characterizing it as a “down payment” on better future funding from Ottawa.

Everyone seems to be on board:

That’s why Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, whose reflexive reaction to anything Trudeau does is shock and outrage, says he will not only honour the Liberal deal if he is elected prime minister, he will give even more money to the premiers. Even Poilievre understands that at a visceral level, Canadian identity rests on public health care, not hockey. Too bad he didn’t bother to tell Canadians just how much more he would be willing to spend if he ran the show.

Everyone it seems except Jagmeet Singh:

Singh, who entered into a supply and confidence deal with the Liberals that could keep Trudeau’s minority in power until 2025, has accused the prime minister of endangering Canada’s public health-care system in the most fundamental way.

“Most concerning is that, according to the premiers, Prime Minister Trudeau did not raise a single concern with provincial plans to build more for-profit, private health care. When he had the chance to stand up for Canada’s public health-care system, he stood down,” Singh said in a statement.

Even though Trudeau has repeatedly said that health care in all provinces and territories must comply with the Canada Health Act, Singh thinks Trudeau has missed the point. Rather than easing staffing problems in hospitals by having some procedures done in private clinics, the NDP believes that approach will only make matters worse. 

So, what happens next? Hard to say. But keep your eye on those side deals with the provinces.

Image: CTV

They Make A Lot Of Noise

Pierre Poilievre is playing his victim card. He claims that the head of the CBC is picking on him. Michael Harris writes:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is now slagging the president of the CBC. What is Catherine Tait’s sin? According to Poilievre, Tait has unleashed a “partisan attack” against him. In other words, she has criticized him.

What Tait said was all the more offensive to Poilievre because it is true. The Conservative leader has, after all, shown a distinct bias against the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. As part of his populist iconoclasm, Poilievre has promised to get rid of the public broadcaster. All Tait did was remind readers of The Globe and Mail that Poilievre’s sloganeering is not designed to raise public consciousness, just money.

In the current dust-up, Poilievre has travelled from the contrived to the absurd. Stephen Harper’s handpicked choice for party leader ludicrously declared that Tait’s comments about him “prove” his contention that the CBC is the “mouthpiece” of Justin Trudeau.  

This kind of rhetoric is commonplace on The Right these days:

That is Marjory Taylor Greene logic. It is also a mammoth slander of the over 7,000 people who work at the corporation, including a stable of fine journalists. Does he really think all those journalists could fit in Trudeau’s pocket? Now Poilievre is once again soliciting money from the public to help him “go around” the CBC.

Everyone should pay attention to those words. The Conservative Party is fond of perpetuating the myth that the media is against them, and more than that, that it carries a brief for the Liberals. The party often describes its aversion to the media as an attempt to get its message out to Canadians without the “filter” of journalists. That is hogwash. Their real issue is not getting their message out unfiltered. It is getting their message out unquestioned.   

These days, conservative politicians don't have facts on their side. So they make a lot of noise.

Image: BrainyQuote

Will We Have An Election?

They met and Justin offered the premiers more money. Chantal Hebert offers her take on the situation:

A boost in health-care spending was always expected to be one of the main items of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s next budget.

If the restraint that was on exhibit at the health-care table is a harbinger of that budget, it may turn out — much like the prime minister’s health plan — to be more prudent than ambitious.

If they are to be competitive against the Conservatives in the next election, the Liberals need to shore up their economic credentials. Trudeau’s conservative approach to health-care funding could translate into a decisively more fiscally conservative budget.

But that could yet put their minority government on a politically unsustainable course in Parliament.

It's beginning to look like the agreement between Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh is in trouble:

At week’s end, the most vocal critic of Trudeau’s proposal to the provinces has turned out to be his partner in the current Parliament.

By comparison to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, the premiers, even as they expressed their collective disappointment at not being offered more money, sounded remarkably at peace with the situation.

But then, Singh was left with very little to show for the influence that is supposed to attend his caucus’s non-aggression pact with the minority Liberals.

He had called on Trudeau to draw a red line on the contracting out of surgeries to for-profit clinics. But according to provincial sources, the prime minister spent little or no time dwelling on the issue.

To add insult to injury, the New Democrats’ top demand of a national pharmacare program did not rate a mention in the first ministers’ list of priorities.

As for the Conservatives, they had nothing to say in the lead-up to the meeting between Trudeau and the premiers:

Should he become prime minister, Pierre Poilievre now says he would live by the terms set out by Trudeau.

The Conservatives have no interest in fighting the Liberals on the health-care battlefield in the next election campaign. Their leader’s stance essentially neutralizes an issue that has never been a winning one for his party.

But for all that, no one expects Poilievre to support the upcoming budget and the Bloc Québécois is unlikely to come to the rescue of the Liberal government.

So, it will be up to Singh. Will we have an election? Time will tell.

Image: The Toronto Star

Things Can Change Quickly

 

It caught us all by surprise. The Toronto Star's Edward Keenan writes:

Well, holy mackerel. Did anyone see this coming?

But this is a shock. Mayor John “Bland Works” Tory, who has spent decades developing a reputation as the walking personification of pablum, who often spoke with apparent devotion of the wife he has been with since the disco era, who was swept into office eight years ago on the promise of ending the three-ring circus of personal drama hijacking city business that had defined the Rob Ford era ...

For Torontonians, the revelations and the resignation come together, all of a sudden, just months after they’d overwhelmingly elected Tory to a historic third term, after he’d asked for and accepted unprecedented new strong mayor powers, and just a week before the climax of a city budget process he has controlled in a way no other mayor previously has.

And it throws the city’s government and political situation into disarray.

So Jennifer McKellvie, the deputy mayor, will take over until there is a by-election. Tory's resignation reminds us that things can change very quickly.

And that the Greeks knew a lot about human frailty.

Image: CTV News Toronto

Democracy Under Siege

Michael Den Tandt writes in the Globe and Mail that democracy is in trouble:

Simply put, democracy is losing. The reason: Western governments, led by the United States, have not come to terms with the reality that liberal and free societies worldwide are under attack from within – using the very tools developed by their brightest innovators to express that freedom.

Digitization and the world wide web, those promethean sparks of the late 20th century, are the principal vehicles for populist disruption. Yet even as Europe and the U.S. ponderously turn, like a pair of moribund wildebeest facing a pack of jackals, to impose governance on the 30-year-old internet, Web3 and artificial intelligence are set to whisk deliverance away. How can regulators, already neutered by transnational data flows, cope with a digital universe in which fake video and audio are indistinguishable from real clips, while being infinitely scalable and producible on a laptop?

“On the internet,” the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen said in a prescient jeremiad to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2019, “everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.”

The technology that many thought would democratize the world has been weaponized against democracy:

In April, 2021, the European External Action Service (EEAS), the foreign affairs department of the European Union, issued a report called Short Assessment of Narratives and Disinformation Around the COVID-19 Pandemic. The report, produced by the EEAS unit charged with countering disinformation, found that from December, 2020, through April, 2021 – with much of the world in lockdown and vaccines just beginning to emerge – Russian and Chinese information operations were in high gear.

Even as the two autocracies undertook an international campaign to promote their own COVID-19 vaccines – Sputnik V and Sinovac, respectively – they sought to “undermine trust in Western-made vaccines, EU institutions and Western/European vaccination strategies,” the EEAS report found. “Both Russia and China are using state-controlled media, networks of proxy media outlets and social media, including official diplomatic social media accounts, to achieve these goals.”

Further, it highlighted the ties between the far-right factions of the Russian Orthodox Christian Church, and far-right Christian Americans. In a 2019 paper for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Laura Rosenberger and Thomas Morley explored how Russian links to global populist movements extend into France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. “Russian military strategists see cyberwarfare not as a distinct, separate form of military operation but rather one that is integrated into other means of asymmetric warfare, such as disinformation,” they wrote.

This isn’t to say that every keyboard warrior who shares an anti-vaccine meme is a Russian agent. But it is to say that authoritarian regimes have a clear interest in seeing that meme shared – just as Vladimir Putin’s regime had a clear interest in seeing Donald Trump become leader of the free world in 2016.

The old saw -- caveat emptor -- still applies. Approach the internet carefully.

Image: AZ Quotes

An Apt Description

Joe Biden gave quite a performance a couple of nights ago. Eugene Robinson writes:

Biden came prepared for catcalls from far-right members of the new House majority. I wondered at times whether I was watching a State of the Union address or a raucous session of Prime Minister’s Questions in the British House of Commons. Rather than being rattled or angered by GOP outbursts, Biden seemed to relish them — at times, even to provoke them. And he tossed out an ample supply of folksy Bidenisms in response.

My favorite was when he praised the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act, approved last year, that capped the cost of insulin at $35 a month for seniors on Medicare. He called on Congress to “finish the job” and extend that cap for all Americans. When someone on the Republican side of the room remonstrated, Biden paused before departing from his script to reply: “As my football coach used to say, lots of luck in your senior year.”

Then he translated into standard English: If anyone tries to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, “I will veto it.”

Biden threw down the gauntlet in front of the Republicans:

Biden took the same playful approach when he challenged Republicans to spell out their economic plans and stop threatening to send the federal government into default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And while he was touting the benefits of the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that he signed into law in 2021, he noted that some Republican members of Congress had voted against it. Nevertheless, he said, “I’ll see you at the groundbreaking.”

The president’s point was that despite all the hyperpartisan, apocalyptic rhetoric, the federal government has been functioning. Progress is messy, halting and incremental, but it does happen — inch by inch, step by step, mile by mile.

Biden used the august occasion — and used undisciplined Republicans as foils — to display his own vigor, sense of humor and aura of command. Behind him, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) appeared at several moments to try to shush the most voluble Republicans, perhaps knowing the clash wasn’t going well for his party.

Last night, in a television interview, James Carville -- that good ol' boy from Louisiana (pronounced Looziana) -- said the Republican Party was the party of white trash. In the American South, the phrase "white trash" suggests three things -- racist, ignorant, and untrustworthy.

The phrase is an apt description of the modern Republican Party.

Image: New York Post

Trudeau And Smith

Justin Trudeau and Danielle Smith shook hands yesterday. You could see the pain on Smith's face. Graham Thomson writes:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, Tuesday’s video of Danielle Smith’s painfully awkward handshake with Prime Minister Trudeau is worth a novella.

Then again, given the soap-opera quality of Alberta politics these days, it’s really a telenovela.

Packed into the five-second video is years’ worth of Alberta conservative political theatre embellished with anger, cynicism, partisanship and hypocrisy.

When a smiling Trudeau offered Smith his hand, she looked so ill at ease you’d think he was offering her a dead fish. She responded in kind with a handshake so reluctant that Trudeau ended up pretty much holding her hand while the photo-op cameras clicked.

This is Alberta-Ottawa relations 2023.

For Smith and her supporters, Justin Trudeau is the boogeyman:

Smith won a United Conservative Party leadership race in which she pandered to angry Conservatives by, among other things, relentlessly demonizing the prime minister as being anti-oil, anti-pipeline and all-around anti-Alberta. As premier, she has said the Liberal government is not a true national government, and in December passed an Alberta Sovereignty Act aimed at thwarting federal laws Smith deems to be un-Albertan.

But Smith's rhetoric has put her between a rock and hard place:

The problem — call it a trap — for Smith is she has to get along with the federal government, particularly when it comes to getting money from Ottawa. This week’s long-anticipated first ministers conference on health-care funding is such a trap.

Ottawa is offering the provinces money — a whopping $196 billion over 10 years — if they agree to strings attached. Premiers say it’s less money than they hoped and need time to think it over. Smith won’t commit to accepting the money but at the same time can’t simply refuse it. And she can’t take too long to accept it, especially with a provincial election campaign on the way in May.

There’s historical precedent. In April 2021, then-Premier Jason Kenney undermined his dwindling popularity in Alberta’s major cities by attacking the federal $10-a-day child-care plan by dismissing it as a “cookie-cutter, nine-to-five, urban, government and union-run institutional daycare” plan. He dragged his heels on a bilateral deal but finally signed one in November of that year at a brittle news conference with Trudeau that almost matched this week’s Smith-Trudeau clumsy handshake for awkwardness.

Kenney had put himself in a politically vulnerable spot by courting angry anti-Trudeau supporters to win the UCP leadership in 2017 and the Alberta election in 2019. They rebelled against him during the pandemic when they accused him of cosying up to Trudeau after Kenney pleaded with the federal government for more COVID-related help. (Ottawa responded with more per-capita funding for Alberta than any other province.) Kenney’s reward from his angry rural Conservatives was getting booted out as UCP leader in 2022 and being replaced with the even angrier anti-Trudeau leader, Danielle Smith.

So Smith should both look and feel uncomfortable. Hers is not smart politics.

Image: The Toronto Star

No Go Joe?

Pressure is building on Joe Biden not to run for a second term. Michelle Goldberg writes:

When President Biden gives his State of the Union address [tonight], he will have a lot to boast about.

He’s presided over record job creation and the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years. Whereas Donald Trump’s infrastructure weeks were a running joke, Biden signed the largest infusion of federal funds into infrastructure in more than a decade. His Inflation Reduction Act made a historic investment in clean energy; the head of the International Energy Agency called it the most important climate action since the 2015 Paris climate accord. (And incidentally, inflation is finally coming down.) Biden rallied Western nations to support Ukraine against Russia’s imperialist invasion and ended America’s long, fruitless war in Afghanistan, albeit with an ugly and ignominious exit. His administration capped insulin prices for seniors, codified federal recognition of gay marriage and shot down that spy balloon everyone was freaking out about. He’s on track to appoint more federal judges than Trump.

Biden can also take a victory lap for Trump’s declining influence. Lots of pundits rolled their eyes when Biden sought to make the midterms a referendum on the MAGA movement’s threat to American democracy. Voters didn’t. Even more than Trump’s defeat in 2020, the loss of Trumpist candidates like Arizona’s Kari Lake and Georgia’s Herschel Walker in 2022 convinced many Republicans they need to move on from their onetime hero.

In other words, Biden has been a great president. He’s made good on an uncommon number of campaign promises. He should be celebrated on Tuesday. But he should not run again.

The problem -- as in Canada -- is who's on the other side:

It is worrying that in the Washington Post/ABC poll, Trump was slightly ahead in a hypothetical rematch, but Trump’s negatives tend to go up the more he’s in the public eye, and a presidential campaign would give him plenty of chances to remind Americans of his unique malignancy.

Plenty of Democrats worry that if Biden steps aside, the nomination will go to Vice President Kamala Harris, who polls poorly. But Democrats have a deep bench, including politicians who’ve won in important purple states, like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. Biden said he wanted to be a bridge to the next generation of Democrats. There are quite a few promising people qualified to cross it. A primary will give Democrats the chance to find the one who is suited for this moment. 

Yesterday, I wrote about Justin Trudeau's possible retirement. Today the subject is Biden. I was quite happy to retire. I suspect both men will not be. But, then, I didn't have the fate of a nation resting on my shoulders.

That's the difference.

Image: Global News

Knowing When It's Time To Go

In professional sports, in politics, and in life in general, it's wise to know when to go. Michael Harris writes that some Canadian politicians knew when to leave the stage. Many others didn't:

Tom Brady made that point five years ago when he told an interviewer that the only thing he was afraid of was the end of his playing career in the National Football League. The greatest quarterback of all time had trouble saying goodbye. How much trouble? He retired twice, once last year in a flood of emotion, and again last week without the histrionics. 

Conservative Richard Hatfield was the longest-serving premier in New Brunswick history, winning four provincial elections and holding that post from 1970 to 1987. Despite mounting controversies and scandals, including drug charges against the premier laid by the RCMP, and allegations that he had offered marijuana and cocaine to four students, Hatfield refused to resign. Instead, he decided to contest the 1987 provincial election only to see his party demolished.

The man who succeeded Hatfield, Frank McKenna, handled his exit from politics very differently. This very popular politician wiped out the Conservatives in the New Brunswick provincial election of 1987, winning every seat in the legislature. He promised he would leave that post if he was still in office after a decade. And exactly 10 years after his rout of the scandal-plagued Conservatives, McKenna retired from politics, exactly as he’d promised. 

This brings us to Justin Trudeau. Harris believes Trudeau is at the end of a pretty good run:

Justin Trudeau, like Tom Brady, has had a story-book political career. He is five-for-five in running for a seat in the House of Commons, representing the Quebec riding of Papineau. As Liberal leader, he has won three out of three federal elections, and has served seven years and 90 days as prime minister. 

But if the polls have it right, running for a fourth time to remain prime minister may be a bridge too far. Recent surveys show the Liberals trailing the Conservatives by seven points, and suggest a majority of Canadians would like Trudeau to step down and hand the ball to a new leader. Pollster Nik Nanos says that it is a troubling sign for Trudeau that 43 per cent of Canadians think the country is headed in the wrong direction, compared to 40 per cent who believe it is moving in the right direction. Over the last 16 years, only twice has the “wrong” number been numerically higher than the “right” number: the last two years of Harper’s doomed government in 2013 and 2014. 

It's not easy to retire. But it helps to know when you should retire. I wonder if Justin reads what Harris writes.

Image: The Toronto Star

Religious Bigotry

Justin Trudeau returns to Parliament this week having backtracked on a couple of issues. Althia Raj writes:

For the Liberals, the return of Parliament this week was marked by a series of reversals after many unfortunate own goals.

On Friday, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino acknowledged bungling gun control as the Liberals withdrew controversial amendments to legislation that Conservatives and the NDP had denounced as scooping up hunters and Indigenous Peoples in an effort to target assault-style weapons.

On Thursday, Justice Minister David Lametti tabled a bill asking for a yearlong delay before expanding medical assistance in dying to those solely suffering from mental illness. Last fall, Lametti was adamant a delay wasn’t needed. But public pressure mounted, and this week government officials acknowledged it was to get the process right, to prepare professionals, and to consider an upcoming report from a Commons committee.

But Trudeau's hottest potato is his appointment of Amira Elghawaby as an advisor on Islamophobia and Quebec's reception to her appointment:

Elghawaby, a former Star columnist, was appointed on Jan. 26 to serve as an adviser on the government’s efforts to fight Islamophobia, racial discrimination and religious intolerance. In Quebec, her appointment caused an uproar — she has suggested the majority of Quebecers appear to be swayed by anti-Muslim sentiment, accused Quebec Premier François Legault of showing xenophobic tendencies and, in a since-deleted tweet, said the claim that French-Canadians were oppressed under British rule made her want to “throw up.” That kind of language starts a fire in modern Quebec, qhich is steadfastly committed to secularism  -- as expressed in the recently passed Bill 21.

Quebec's secularism is a hard rejection of the influence of the Catholic Church in Quebec. I grew up in that province, where priests used to instruct their parishioners on how to vote. Advice that used to be taken seriously there -- Le Ciel best bleu. L'Enfer est rouge. Heaven is blue. Hell is red. -- is now a standing joke.

One hundred and fifty years ago, religion was a major fault line in Canadian politics. It would be a grave mistake to return to those days.

Image: Must Do Canada

Carlson On Canada

Recently, Tucker Carlson suggested that the United States should "liberate" Canada. Max Fawcett writes:

Carlson may have been joking about the idea of "liberating" Canada, but he’s probably dead serious about the notion that Canada’s current government is actively infringing on the freedoms and liberties of its citizens. It was Carlson, after all, who helped elevate last year’s trucker convoy into a global phenomenon on the far right. “Find an enemy, create a crisis, stay in power forever,” he said in his Feb. 21, 2022, monologue. “It's the oldest recipe for tyranny that there is. If we don't recognize it in our own age, it's only because nothing like this was supposed to happen in a democracy, but it is happening, most clearly in Canada.”

There’s a substantial subset of his viewers, and a smaller slice of the American population as a whole, that takes this portrayal of Canada seriously. They genuinely believe we’re being governed by communists, that we’ve fallen prey to a far-left dictatorship, and our freedoms are being suppressed in order to advance the wishes of the World Economic Forum or some other tinfoil-laden conspiracy theory. The longer people are fed that sort of toxic nonsense, the more likely it is that it winds up in the head of someone who could do something about it.

Carlson has become a spokesman for wing-nut conservatism; and, therefore, what is funny -- because it's stupid -- is really no laughing matter. Carlson's brand of conservatism has found a home here:

And while American troops and tanks aren’t about to roll across our shared border, Carlson’s brand of conservatism already has. On any number of issues, from the merits of gun control to the perils facing free speech and the unimportance of climate change, Canadian conservative leaders like Danielle Smith, Scott Moe and Pierre Poilievre are in lockstep with Carlson. If the Trudeau Liberals keep sinking in the polls, his imaginary invasion might not even be necessary.

George Carlin warned long ago that we should never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.

Image: The National Observer

After They Light The Match

The Republicans plan to hold the Biden Administration hostage over the national debt. They tried this once before -- in 2011. This time around,  Paul Krugman writes, things are different:

The G.O.P., perhaps remembering the political backlash after Donald Trump tried to dismantle Obamacare, has since become much more cautious. McCarthy has already declared that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table”; if his party ever gets around to making specific proposals, it will find out that Medicaid, which covers even more Americans than Medicare, is also extremely popular, even among Republicans.

Nor is political caution the only reason Republican leaders have become reluctant to attack the safety net. The G.O.P. base has also lost interest in spending cuts, turning its attention to culture wars. As my colleague Nate Cohn recently noted, in early 2021 far more Republicans reported having heard about a decision to stop publishing some of the Dr. Seuss books than about President Biden’s $1.9 trillion spending bill.

Inevitably, some Republicans are trying to make the budget a culture-war issue, claiming that large sums can be saved by eliminating “woke” spending. But what spending are they talking about?

So how much "woke" spending is there?

I’ve been trying to find specific examples of federal outlays that conservatives consider woke, bearing in mind that right-wing think tanks and politicians have a strong incentive to find big-ticket items that sound outrageous. The results of my search were, well, embarrassing. For example, the spending listed in a Heritage Foundation report thundering against “woke earmarks” totaled about $19 million — less than the federal government spends every two minutes.

So the bottom line on the debt crisis is that there is no bottom line: Republicans denounce excess spending, but can’t say what spending they want to cut. Even if Democrats were inclined to give in to extortion, which they aren’t, you can’t pay off a blackmailer who won’t make specific demands.

Unfortunately, that doesn't make the problem easy to solve:

The emptiness of Republican fiscal posturing is no guarantee that we’ll avoid a debt crisis. If anything, it may make a crisis more likely. MAGA may lack policy ideas, but it’s rich in nihilism; Republicans don’t know what policies they want, but they definitely want to see Biden fail.

So far, the Biden administration’s strategy seems to be to flush Republicans out of hiding, force them to propose specific spending cuts, then watch them retreat in the face of an intense public backlash. There are also, I presume and hope, contingency plans to avoid crisis if this strategy fails.

But it’s hard not to be worried. It’s dangerous when a political party is willing to burn things down unless it gets its way; it’s even more dangerous when that party just wants to watch things burn.

Like Nero, they plan to party after they light the match.

Image: The Guardian

Is The Tide Turning?

Canadians have known economic pain for quite a while now. Glen Pearson writes:

Canadians continue to feel that the ongoing impacts of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict are having detrimental effects on the economy overall and their own personal standard of living as well.  They aren’t wrong.  We knew collective pain was coming.  It still is, continually prompting speculation about an oncoming recession.

But the situation appears to be changing:

This past weekend, CNN host Fareed Zakaria offered some valuable insights rarely mentioned in traditional media accounts.  He titled his episode “The End of the Russia Shock”.  It was a bold statement.  Here’s why he said it.

The launch of the Russian-Ukrainian war sent the global economy into something of a tailspin, with skyrocketing prices for oil, gas, and fertilizer, leaving commentators to note that the economic pain could go on for years.  That’s not happening, at least to the degree predicted.  After a surprisingly short amount of time, the economic shock has begun to dissipate.

According to the Global Index, global food prices ended lower in 2022 than when the conflict started.  They remain high but are now beginning their descent.  Having suffered a series of meteoric spikes, natural gas prices have now fallen below initial levels.  Oil prices have dropped considerably from their peak levels months ago.

There remain many essentials that still carry historically high costs, but the worst of it now seems to have passed and that will carry significant economic, political, and personal improvements.

What's going on?

Zakaria targets three groups as responsible for avoiding what could have been an economic catastrophe – governments, the private sector, and citizens, saying that they all “swung into action” in a fashion that blunted the more drastic predictions.

While sanctioning Russian energy resources, Western governments ramped up their domestic oil production and utilized vast reserves put aside for precisely such dramatic circumstances.  European countries searched out and secured energy partnerships with other nations.  And Canadians, like other citizens in the world, sacrificed in their own way.  They drove less in the summer and, partly due to a warmer winter, turned down their thermostats to reduce costs.  This had a major impact on the economy in ways few understood.

The decline in natural gas prices led to a lowering of costs for fertilizers, which is ultimately leading to a decline in food prices – not quickly enough, but at least heading in the right direction.  A moderate fall season and warmer winter are also leading to abundant harvests.

With many observers now wondering if the Russian forces are in retreat, some are wondering if a full economic recovery could eventually be possible.  That seems doubtful, but at least we are considering it.

All this is bound to have political consequences around the world.  Economic shock, especially extended over time, could lead to political turbulence and citizen discontent.  This would have profound effects on governments and opposition parties alike.  Should pressures ease, however, especially as the warmer months draw nearer, a sense of national optimism could be on the rise, forcing political parties to recalibrate their policies and practices as a result.

Pierre Poilievre doesn't see things this way. He's been traveling around the country proclaiming that "everything is broken."

Time will tell if the tide has turned.

Image: Quotefancy

A Multi-Headed Hydra

Andrew Nikiforuk writes that we now face an army of COVID viruses:

What began as an airborne pandemic driven by a single virus has become a viral cloud roiling around the globe thanks to public policies that have allowed unfettered transmission.

As a consequence the pandemic now represents different threats in different regions for different classes of people at different times. The wealthy elite attending Davos may be protected by tests and clean air machines, but the rest of us face contrasting realities.

Consider how the virus has evolved:

We no longer face one viral foe or a single variant such as Delta. Omicron has produced four lineages of genetically diverse descendants morphing into an ever-growing swarm of 700 subvariants referenced by a confusing jungle of numbers and letters. What was once a single violin has become a complex and expanding orchestra with no discernable conductor. Even virologists now have trouble keeping track of where the variants are coming from, and what their different mutations mean.

And it's what we do -- or don't do -- that drives the evolution of the virus:

Our actions, or inactions, are driving this evolution. Current policies allow unimpeded transmission. And in that context, vaccines and anti-viral treatments, despite their obvious life preserving benefits, have created conditions under which the virus is evolving rapidly.

Some variants have become immune evasive. Others have become more transmissible or adept at binding to human cells. Many mutations have rendered antibody treatments totally ineffective. A study showing the descendants of BA.2 and BA.5 have become more pathogenic. There is no shortage of new variation thanks to a high mutation rate, and variants continue to beget new descendants in an ever-expanding viral family tree.

By naming the latest subvariant XBB. 1.5 “Kraken” after a legendary squid-like sea monster, the Canadian evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory has done the world a small favour. People tend to pay attention to things we name and that name served as a reminder that this new viral swarm is mutating at an accelerating pace. One star has become a viral nebula.

Now we're caught on the horns of a dilemma:

Welcome to our current pandemic paradox. About two-thirds of the world have been vaccinated. These vaccines can prevent death and disease, but not infection. They reduce the risk of long COVID, but only provide partial protection against it. The effectiveness of many vaccines are now waning in many jurisdictions against more immune-evasive variants.

At the same time people’s vaccine hesitancy has sharply increased, despite research that shows bivalent boosters save lives.

So the many subvariant descendants of SARS-CoV-2 have no trouble finding human hosts. As they replicate, they mutate and behave as Darwin would have predicted. Evolutionary pressure on the virus selects variants that can escape drugs or vaccine-prompted immunity in addition to immunity elicited by prior infections.

The pandemic no longer resembles an elegant graph composed of peaks, valleys and occasional lulls in infection, death and disability. The new viral swarm, as evolutionary biologist Gregory has cogently explained in interviews, is producing not one or two waves but a sustained succession of waves, including four last year in Canada and five in the U.K.  

In other words the pandemic has gone from an acute emergency (sudden death and clogged hospitals) to an ongoing chronic reality (chronic disease and clogged hospitals plus waves of excess deaths).

Gregory asks: What are the consequences of a rising sea of infections as opposed to tsunamis? And answers: “Sustained pressure on health-care systems with no major lulls anymore. In fact, the lows over the past Omicron year exceed the peak during Delta.”

Result: Canada experienced its worst death and hospitalization rate for the virus in 2022.

So, no, COVID hasn't gone back into its cave. It's evolved into a multi-headed hydra.

Image: Atlas Wiki Fandom

A Voracious Thirst

If you want to know what's to come in Washington, take a look at John Durham's investigation. Michelle Goldberg writes:

Trump’s circle insisted, falsely, that the Mueller inquiry was a hit job that employed Russian disinformation — via the Steele dossier — to frame Trump, all part of a plot cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Durham seems to have bought into this Trumpist conspiracy theory, and to help prove it, he tried to employ what appears to be Russian disinformation to go after the Clinton camp. More specifically, he used dubious Russian intelligence memos, which analysts believed were seeded with falsehoods, to try to convince a court to give him access to the emails of a former aide to George Soros, which he believed would show Clinton-related wrongdoing.

Astonishingly, The Times found that while Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr and Durham were in Europe looking for evidence to discredit the Russia investigation, Italian officials gave them a “potentially explosive tip” linking Trump to “certain suspected financial crimes.” Rather than assign a new prosecutor to look into those suspected crimes, Barr folded the matter into Durham’s inquiry, giving Durham criminal prosecution powers for the first time.

Then the attorney general sat back while the media inferred that the criminal investigation must mean Durham had found evidence of malfeasance connected to Russiagate. Barr, usually shameless in his public spinning of the news, quietly let an investigation into Trump be used to cast aspersions on Trump’s perceived enemies. (The fate of that inquiry remains a mystery.)

The Republicans have fine-tuned this kind of thing:

This squalid episode is a note-perfect example of how Republican scandal-mongering operates. The right ascribes to its adversaries, whether in the Democratic Party or the putative deep state, monstrous corruption and elaborate conspiracies. Then, in the name of fighting back, it mimics the tactics it has accused its foes of using.

Look, for example, at the behavior that gave rise to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump falsely claimed that Joe Biden, as vice president, used the threat of withholding American loan guarantees to blackmail the Ukrainian government into doing his personal bidding. Hoping to get Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to substantiate his lies, Trump tried to use the threat of withholding American aid to … blackmail the Ukrainian government into doing his personal bidding. The symmetry between accusations and counter-accusations, in turn, fosters a widespread cynicism about ever finding the truth.

It’s important to keep this in mind because we’re about to see a lot more of it. Now that they control the House, Republicans have prioritized investigating their political opponents. McCarthy has stacked the Oversight Committee, central to the House’s investigative apparatus, with flame-throwing fantasists, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert. Further, as Politico reported in a “field guide” to the coming Republican inquiries, McCarthy has urged Republicans to treat every committee like the Oversight Committee, meaning all investigations, all the time.

The Republicans have no policies. They have no principles. All they have is a voracious thirst for revenge.

Image: The Inquisitive Mind

Prime Minister Singh?

Most Canadians don't think of Jagmeet Singh as a potential prime minister. And they have history on their side. Michael Harris writes:

It is true that, despite a run of impressive leaders, the NDP has never won a federal election since its creation in 1961. To mention just a few, Tommy Douglas, David Lewis, Ed Broadbent, Jack Layton,  and Tom Mulcair were never able to deliver the goods—despite strong showings on their individual leadership qualities in poll after poll.  

But in Singh's case, Harris believes things might be different:

In a recent Ipsos survey, pollster Darrell Bricker found that 54 per cent of respondents wanted Justin Trudeau to step down in 2023. The same poll found that 59 per cent had an unfavourable view of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. This is not a ringing endorsement of either of the two traditional parties that have ruled the roost in Canada since Confederation. In the same poll, Jagmeet Singh scored the highest approval rating of any federal leader at 53 per cent.

Canadians have good reason to be disappointed in both the Liberals and the Conservatives:

Despite some very impressive accomplishments, the Liberals are beginning to make the kind of unforced errors characteristic of a government running out of steam. Chequebook politics is making them look like people who can’t manage a troubled economy, an impression reinforced by former Liberal insider Bill Morneau’s unflattering portrait of the prime minister in his new book.  

With a possible recession on the horizon, and rampant inflation breaking budgets from coast to coast, post-COVID grumpiness has reached a new high. The usual casualty of such oceanic disgruntlement is the incumbent government, whether or not it is to blame for the problems.

People are prepared to forgive flip-flops, like the PM’s stunning reversal of his policy on first-past-the-post elections, and on buying the controversial F-35 fighter jets. But scandal is another matter. If it should be shown that there was hanky-panky in the $100-million worth of contracts awarded to the U.S. firm McKinsey and Company, or corruption in contracts let out of the offices of Liberal cabinet ministers, the bloom could go off the Trudeau rose in a hurry.

And Mr. Poilievre is far from being a rising star:

Pierre Poilievre, who feeds off the anger of the disaffected, failed his initial test as leader when the CPC lost the first byelection under his watch. The party’s candidate not only lost to the Liberals, he was thrashed, losing by 20 points. That said, the turnout in Mississauga Lakeshore was just 26 per cent. 

In Quebec—like Stephen Harper before him—Poilievre has so far been a flop. A recent Angus Reid poll found that 44 per cent of respondents strongly disapproved of the new Conservative leader. Only eight per cent held strongly favourable views of Poilievre.   

He came out in favour of a mob of truckers who gave Canada its own version of the Capitol Building riot.  

And his claim that crypto currency might be the way for Canadians to opt out of inflation is absurdity in hot pursuit of farce.

So there may be an opening for Singh. Harris believes there will be an election this year. As for Mr. Singh, we'll see.

Image: CBC

The Problem Is Ford

The healthcare system in Ontario is under severe strain. Doug Ford says that the way to fix the problem is to move procedures from hospitals to private for-profit clinics. Linda McQuaid writes that  the system is struggling because Ford is starving it of funds:

Ontario is one of the richest provinces, but it spends less per person on health care than any other province.

If Ontario just spent the average of what the other provinces have spent on health care per capita over the past five years, we’d be spending an additional $7.2 billion this year — more than enough to properly pay our beleaguered nurses, lure thousands more nurses to Ontario and bring back into use countless hospital operating rooms all over the province idled by years of budget cuts.

Ford is not a bright guy. Consider his solutions:

Ford bizarrely insists on capping nurses’ pay increases at a punitive one per cent, denying reasonable compensation to people who hold the key to reviving the system.

Instead, Ford squanders money on tax breaks, giving up $8.2 billion in revenue annually from tax changes since 2018. And, when he gets additional health care funds from Ottawa in the upcoming federal-provincial deal, he could use those funds for further tax cutting, unless strings are firmly attached.

Allowing more private health care won’t solve this underfunding. It will simply mean more health services are carried out by profit-seeking entities that will pocket a share of the public money.

We know about the profit motive — it permeates the business world, driving corporate managers to slash costs in evermore innovative ways so they can deliver ever-larger profits to shareholders.

We've seen the profit motive at work in Ontario's private nursing homes:

It turns out Ontario has carried out what amounts to a real-life experiment on the impact of the profit motive in health care — in the case of long-term care homes, where private equity and other innovative forms of cutthroat capitalism have had free rein.

This real-life lab reveals that the profit motive operates pretty much the same in health care as in the corporate world: it has transformed nursing homes into lucrative businesses and, during the pandemic, into killing fields.

Indeed, given that COVID death rates were four times higher in profit-making long-term care homes, it’s odd that commentators aren’t crying: “we gotta do something different!”

Ford wants to extend that model into our hospitals.

It's pretty obvious. Our healthcare system is failing because Doug Ford is calling the shots.

Image: The Rabble

They're Taking The Books Out Of Classrooms

In Florida, they're getting rid of lots of books. Marsha Lederman writes:

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder or more depressing on the U.S. book-ban front comes this plot twist from Manatee County, Fla. The school board near Sarasota recently issued an edict that prompted teachers to remove all books from classrooms in response to new rules from the Florida Department of Education.

That policy states that all books in schools must be approved by a librarian (called a “certified media specialist”), or staff risk third-degree felony charges. With some classroom libraries too large to dispose of quickly, teachers have had to physically cover them up, with construction paper in some cases – or risk possible jail time. Teachers are not allowed to choose books for their classrooms. And only vetted books are allowed, to ensure they are free of pornographic material, age-appropriate, and don’t contain “unsolicited theories that may lead to student indoctrination.” It’s effectively leading to negative-option reading, and that’s led to the removal of such dangerous books as Sneezy the Snowman and Dragons Love Tacos.

What is happening in Florida is happening throughout the United States:

Book bans in the United States are becoming so rampant that they are now likelier to elicit heavy sighs rather than shock. Still, seeing the statistics in black and white is alarming. According to that PEN report, from July, 2021, to June, 2022, there were 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 individual titles. The two categories most frequently banned in schools were books with LGBTQ themes or prominent LGBTQ characters, and books with protagonists or prominent secondary characters of colour.

This is a scene cooked up by fools – who are somehow in charge of education – trying to create a nation of more fools. And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed the bill into law, has presidential aspirations. Imagine edicts like this being issued nationally.

They're proudly marching backward -- to the Dark Ages, where Ignorance and Superstition ruled the roost.

Image: The Logical Place

Rural Rage

Rural rage is a feature of American politics these days. But it's not limited to the United States. In Canada, we are experiencing the same phenomenon. Paul Krugman writes:

The ostensible justifications for rural resentment don’t withstand scrutiny — but that doesn’t mean things are fine. A changing economy has increasingly favored metropolitan areas with large college-educated work forces over small towns. The rural working-age population has been declining, leaving seniors behind. Rural men in their prime working years are much more likely than their metropolitan counterparts to not be working. Rural woes are real.

The problem is that the party rural voters support does not champion their interests:

The policy agenda of the party most rural voters support would make things even worse, slashing the safety-net programs these voters depend on. And Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to point this out.

But can they also have a positive agenda for rural renewal? As The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent recently pointed out, the infrastructure spending bills enacted under President Biden, while primarily intended to address climate change, will also create large numbers of blue-collar jobs in rural areas and small cities. They are, in practice, a form of the “place-based industrial policy” some economists have urged to fight America’s growing geographic disparities.

The economic forces that have been hollowing out rural America are deep and not easily countered. But it’s certainly worth trying.

But even if these policies improve rural fortunes, will Democrats get any credit? It’s easy to be cynical. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the new governor of Arkansas, has pledged to get the “bureaucratic tyrants” of Washington “out of your wallets”; in 2019 the federal government spent almost twice as much in Arkansas as it collected in taxes, de facto providing the average Arkansas resident with $5,500 in aid. So even if Democratic policies greatly improve rural lives, will rural voters notice?

These days, misinformation rules the roost. Until that is dealt with, the rage will continue.

Image: The Toronto Star