Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Paul Daly The Canadian Press

On The Edge

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

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

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

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

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

The consequences of that war have been catastrophic:

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

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

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

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

Image:  Andrew Meade and photographs courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Unforgivable Folly

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

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

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

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

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

Yet that mass movement has not materialized:

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is unforgivable folly.

Image: Cpl. Marc-André Leclerc, DND Canada

A Wild Ride

From now until the election, not just Americans -- but all of us -- are in for a wild ride. Michael Harris writes:

The traditional cliché is that all politics is local. For now, no politics is local. What happens over the next four months in the United States will affect everyone, which is why the eyes of the world are on Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.  

NATO, China, Europe, Canada, and Ukraine, and an array of others all have a massive stake in the outcome. Will Americans choose the former prosecutor, or the convicted felon; the first Black, female commander-in-chief, or the 78-year-old twice impeached ex-president who talked about shooting migrants in the legs at the border, and deporting millions of them now living in the United States. 

Two very interested bystanders in this most unusual presidential election are the Canadian federal leaders who may soon be squaring off against each other to decide who will be prime minister: Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre.  

What happens in the United States may foreshadow what happens here:

In the end, not even the president of the United States could suspend—let alone repeal—the laws of the great game. You can’t play poker without chips, and you can’t run a campaign without money.

Although Trudeau is not encroaching on his dotage, there is still a lesson here for him. Biden couldn’t ultimately ignore inconvenient polls, and neither can Trudeau. 

For months and months now, Trudeau has been several postal codes behind Poilievre and the Conservatives in the polls. A majority of Canadians don’t want him leading the Liberal Party into the next election expected in 2025.  

Trudeau’s answer so far has been to double down on his insistence that he will contest the next election as head of the party. He assures his nervous caucus that things will gradually get better by the time Canadians choose their next prime minister: interest rates, inflation, and lower housing costs.  

And they will, incrementally. The Bank of Canada, for example, just dropped the interest rate to 4.5 per cent.  

The problem with that approach is that it didn’t much matter in Biden’s case. The U.S. has had a robust economic recovery from COVID. It also brought down the inflation rate significantly, and is gradually lowering interest rates. But none of that had any affect because that’s not how voters were experiencing it. They aren’t grateful for a reduction in the rate at which their expenses are increasing. They are remembering what groceries used to cost in pre-COVID days.

There is another problem with the PM ignoring polls showing his deep unpopularity, and a massive and consistent Conservative lead as the party of choice. If that doesn’t bother the PM, you can bet it bothers every Liberal MP looking to stay in his or her job.

A restless caucus could easily become a rebellious one if the leader and the polls remain in the ditch. If the conviction sets in that Trudeau is about to lead the party lemming-like over the cliff in 2025, his own team may turn on him as the Democrats did on Biden.

That’s because the Liberal caucus has seen in the U.S. the power of down-ballot candidates to remove an unpopular leader when he becomes a drag on their own reelection prospects. For now, it is up to Trudeau to decide whether it’s “damn the polls, and full speed ahead,” or the Biden option. But it may not be up to him much longer.

Stay tuned.

Image: 

Kamala Harris And The Liberals

Justin Trudeau needs to pay attention to Kamala Harris. Robin Sears writes:

It is rare that one event can upend an entire political landscape overnight. But it happened at 1:45 on a Sunday afternoon in Delaware.

Mindful that every campaign exaggerates its wins and discounts its failures, consider these statistics about U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who become the Democratic frontrunner on Sunday to replace President Joe Biden on this year’s Democratic ticket.

 She has raised more than $100 million in 48 hours. A sum never before seen.

She has won more than 2,000 delegates endorsement, guaranteeing her nomination at the Democratic Convention in three weeks time. She had won 20,000 new volunteers overnight.

There's a lesson in Harris' rise and in Canadian polls:

Respected pollster Nik Nanos cautioned not to take as secure his “who’s on top” numbers. They tell him that a large chunk of Conservative support is made up of Trudeau deserters, not Poilievre lovers. He warns all those saying the political stage is set for a Tory landslide to be careful. A single serious mistake could wound Poilievre badly. Where his potential deserters would then go is unknown. But it is a flashing yellow light for Conservative strategists.

This appears to be what is happening to the Trump campaign already. Having predicated their entire strategy on mocking Joe Biden, who finally relented to pressure and decided to not run for re-election this fall. The Republicans are in a bit of a pickle using the same tactics on the immigrant child of Indian and Jamaican parents who fought her way to the top on merit.

Replacing one wounded leader with a fresher face at the last minute rarely works in Canadian politics, ask Kim Campbell. Still, worried Liberals may be watching the Harris juggernaut quickly build speed and scale and wonder. Apropos Nick Nanos observation, maybe even a non-superstar new Liberal leader could successfully woo a large slice of Trudeau deserters back. Harris seems to have wooed many worried Democrats back in days.

We don't repeat American history in this country. But this is an era of rapid change. Canadians are caught up in that change as much as the Americans are.

Image: CTV News Montreal

Wow

That was interesting. Joe Biden flipped the script. Dana Milbanks writes:

On Sunday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared that President Biden absolutely, positively had to run for another four years as president.

“It’s not possible to simply just switch out a candidate who has been chosen through the democratic, small-d democratic process,” he told ABC News’s “This Week.”

Biden's response was "Wanna bet?" As Milbanks continues:

[The Republicans] wanted desperately to campaign against Biden this fall, and their party’s nominee, Donald Trump, had built his entire campaign around beating an opponent he could portray as old and feebleminded. But Biden upended everything Sunday with these words: “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and my country for me to stand down.”

His opponents seemed not to know what to do. The Republican response was confused and weak. They accused Democrats of a coup and a conspiracy to hide Biden’s “dementia.” They called for invoking the 25th Amendment and teed up legal challenges. But mostly they responded, in what was clearly a coordinated if illogical plan, by insisting that Biden resign immediately. “If Joe Biden can’t run for re-election,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) wrote in a typical formulation, “he is not capable of serving as president for the next six months and needs to resign NOW!

Politics is a cruel business. It's not about governing. It's about winning. And to win, you need to put on a good show. Biden -- wise though he is -- is no showman. Kamala Harris is no showwoman. But, as a former prosecutor, she knows how to prosecute the case against Trump.

Let's hope she succeeds.

Image: CNN

A Tough Row To Hoe

Progressives in the United States and Canada have a leadership crisis on their hands. Michael Harris writes:

In both countries, the progressive parties are in a crisis of leadership. For very different reasons, the parties themselves are deeply conflicted about their incumbents: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau here, and President Joe Biden in the United States.   

The polling and approval ratings for both leaders are abysmal. They are so bad, in fact, that even though they are incumbent leaders of governments, they have each been invited by members of their own party to step down.  

After nine years in power, the Liberals are dealing with the public’s “Trudeau fatigue.” The Democrats in the United States are saddled with a wobbly president deemed to be too old for a second term by two-thirds of Americans. 

Another similarity? Both beleaguered leaders have not only refused to resign, but insist they will carry the party banner into the next election.

Grit or denialism?

That depends on your point of view -- and timing:

Those who support the president—including the panicked staff in the White House, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, and much of the Democratic leadership—talk about colds, jet-lag, and all the wonderful things that Biden has done over his long career. They are on the loyalty train, possibly of the misguided variety.

Then there are those who “love” the president, but think he is too old and diminished for the job, include a growing chorus of elected representatives, pundits, and celebrities. Actor and Democratic fundraiser George Clooney made that case in a guest essay in The New York Times on July 10.  

Trudeau is another matter:

Trudeau is not Biden. He is mentally sharp, still youthful, and formidable on the campaign trail. But there is no pretending that the Liberal Party in Canada does not have a major leadership issue to resolve.  

Based on how the Democrats have fractured their party by ignoring Biden’s age and competency issues until that became impossible; based on the fact that this has happened just months away from what might be the most consequential election in U.S. history; the Liberals should resolve their leadership issues now.

There is word today that Trudeau is bringing Mark Carney into the Liberal caucus.

Stay tuned.

Image: The Hill

Good Businessmen?

A decade ago, the government of Ontario replaced our LCBO with a much bigger building. It does a roaring business, particularly in the summer. These days, there's a long picket line outside the building. Almost a decade ago, Doug Ford rode to power, promising a "buck a beer" and wider access to booze. He also made it clear that he was convinced that profit made the world go around.

That's what makes what's going on so strange. The LCBO is very profitable. Linda McQuaig writes:

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), a crown corporation, has been doing a fine job selling alcohol — not exactly a risky enterprise requiring a lot of innovation — through its 677 outlets across the province.

And since it is publicly owned, its healthy annual profit — $2.5 billion in 2023 — goes into the public treasury, where it pays for things like health care and education.

Those profits have been invested in healthcare and education.  But Ford has been cutting off revenue streams to the province's treasury. Ontarians no longer pay to renew their license plates. And Ford wants to cancel the contract with Ontario's Beer Stores at a cost of 225 million dollars:

Like so much this premier does, the basic animating force appears to be a zealous desire to privatize, to hand over ever more of our province to private interests, to further cannibalize Ontario’s strong tradition of public services and public enterprises that have served the province well.

Ford is following the path of former Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris, whose needless privatizations produced some disasters for Ontario.

Harris’ privatization of Highway 407 has cost us billions, his water-testing privatization was a factor in seven water-contamination deaths in Walkerton, and his privatization of long-term care homes worsened the COVID crisis, with death rates four times higher in private homes than in public ones.

Both men claimed to be good businessmen. Right.

Image: Niagara At Large

Get Real

Americans are tearing themselves apart over Joe Biden. Nobody's talking about Donald Trump. Dana Milbank writes they're focusing on the wrong guy:

The heavy-handed attempt to force Biden to quit the race after his disastrous debate has, predictably, backfired. Biden has dug in, pitting “elites” against the people. Democrats are fighting among themselves. George Clooney is diagnosing Biden’s mental competence (he played Dr. Doug Ross on “ER,” after all). And Republicans can hardly believe their good fortune, as they portray Biden as a zombie — with no good answer to their attacks.

Trump’s Doral rally was full of endless variations on the “Weekend at Bernie’s” theme. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now in the final round of auditions to become Trump’s running mate, warmed up the crowd by identifying a “conspiracy” to hide Biden’s mental condition. He went on: “We know he’s not calling the shots. … Look, the guy’s a figurehead for a shadow government of leftists that are propping him up.”

Then came Donald Trump Jr. “We’re running against a party that wants to take away your AR-15, but they gave a vegetable the nuclear codes,” he began. He tried another: “If Joe Biden showed up to pick you up in an Uber, would you get in the car? … Would you let your worst enemy get in that car? Maybe. Maybe. Dumb ways to die, right folks?”

Trump lawyer Alina Habba sampled a line on the crowd: “He cannot spell ‘Bob’ backwards.”

And Trump himself made Biden’s purported feeblemindedness — always an element of his stump speech — the dominant theme. He mockingly challenged Biden to another debate. Pretending to be Biden struggling with a golf club, he also challenged the president to an 18-hole match, offering Biden a 20-stroke lead. “They all knew this guy was grossly incompetent, and every Democrat in the House and the Senate was in on it,” he alleged. “It was a scam. The American people can never trust this group of liars ever again. They put our country at great risk and danger.”

Trump joked about Biden taking naps and struggling to lift a beach chair. He floated the idea that “Hunter is in the White House running government right now, they say.” Seizing on an Axios report that Biden is only “dependably engaged” between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., Trump claimed: “He can’t work because he’s mentally no good. He’s shot.”

This is nuts. The moron is in plain sight. And it's not Joe Biden.

On another note, some comments have been disappearing from this blog after they have been published. Apparently, this is a long-standing problem with Blogger. I have not found a way to recover them. I apologize.

Image: New York Daily News

Don't Buy The Image

Pierre Poilievre claims he's a man of the people. Linda McQuaig isn't buying it. She writes:

Poilievre has managed to pass himself off as anti-elitist and populist largely because Canadians have heard little about all the time he spends — when the cameras aren’t rolling — courting the country’s business elite.

Even as Poilievre has attacked corporate lobbyists — vowing they won’t be able to shape policy under his Conservative government as they have under the Liberals — he’s been consorting with a wide range of corporate lobbyists at about 50 extravagant private fundraising events across the country since being chosen party leader almost two years ago.

Details of these interactions have come to light due to investigative work by the online outlet The Breach, which has documented the presence of more than a hundred active or recent corporate lobbyists at Poilievre fundraising galas held at private mansions and swanky clubs, by carefully combing through the records in Elections Canada’s registry.

For instance, Poilievre was the central attraction at a lavish Regina fundraiser last November hosted by Saskatchewan’s wealthiest family, the Semples, owners of the Brandt Group of Companies, with major holdings in real estate, mining, construction, agriculture and pipeline equipment.

It didn’t seem to bother Poilievre that the Semples have a reputation for being anti-worker. In addition to serious health and safety violations, one of their companies was reprimanded by a labour tribunal for trying to impose its own collective agreement, which eliminated more than 50 pages from the existing agreement and added “unreasonable clauses” that gave the company extra powers.

Not exactly the friend of the working man:

But Poilievre has constructed a whole political persona for himself around the notion that he’s different, claiming recently that he’s visited 110 shop floors and five union halls while largely avoiding speaking to business groups.

Indeed, he’s warned business that they shouldn’t expect a warm welcome from government under his watch, that he plans to revamp the cosy relationship the Liberals have had with business.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Poilievre seems receptive to the corporate crowd.

As The Breach noted in an earlier investigation, the corporate set is heavily represented on the Conservative national council, which includes lobbyists representing major oil, pharmaceutical and real estate companies, as well as retail giants and others opposed to unions and minimum wage hikes.

None of the members of this 20-member Conservative council appears to represent workers.

Just a small heads up.

Image: The Walrus

King Donald

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court declared that the American President -- and they were writing about Donald Trump -- is King. Jennifer Rubin writes:

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. held: “We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former president have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office.” He continued: “At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide whether that immunity must be absolute, or instead whether a presumptive immunity is sufficient.”

They are preparing the way for King Donald:

The notion that any illegal action could be draped in the cloak of “official conduct” should alarm all Americans. As the dissent points out, if as commander in chief Trump were to order Seal Team 6 to assassinate political opponents, what is to stop him? Given that the next president could be an already convicted felon, the prospect of an imperial president with a get-out-of-jail card should be terrifying. And to make matters worse, the court may not inquire into the president’s motive to determine if he was acting in an official capacity.

That's the key: the president's motives can't be questioned. What kind of court excludes motive in the commission of a crime? Two of the six justices have connections to the insurrection Trump staged. The last time he ran, he had no platform. This time he has a nine-hundred-page tome, declaring what he will do. His intention is to declare himself king.

Clearly, the highest court in the land is on Trump's side. Only American voters can save themselves.

Image: Salon.com

Canada Day 2024

We're grumpy these days. Mr. Poilievre tells us that "Canada is broken." It's Poilievre boilerplate -- over the top and mean. There is much to fix and improve. But there is much to celebrate.

Happy Canada Day.

Image: Britannica

Why Stay?

A lot of people are suggesting that Justin Trudeau should go. Martin Regg Cohn writes that Justin should talk to Kathleen Wynne:

Kathleen Wynne has been there, done that — and didn’t go.

After a bitter byelection defeat for the federal Liberals in Toronto–St. Paul’s riding this week, Wynne has been asking herself the same question anew. As premier, she stayed to fight another campaign in 2018, paying a high price in the election defeat that followed.

History also suggests that changing leaders is no panacea for unpopular premiers or prime ministers. After Wynne left, the Ontario Liberals under Steven Del Duca lost badly again to Doug Ford; after Brian Mulroney quit as PM in 1993, his successor Kim Campbell was wiped out; same with Pierre Trudeau’s successor, John Turner, in 1984.

Consider what Wynne is saying:

“I think what’s going to happen now is there’s going to be a lot of internal soul-searching,” Wynne told me. Over the next few weeks, MPs will be “trying to figure out now how to have the tough conversation with him,” because “he’s going to have to make a decision.”

Wynne predicts Liberal MPs across the country will be going door to door this summer hearing their constituents say, “We love you, we hate your leader.”

That’s what happened to Wynne in her last years, and it’s the fate befalling Trudeau now.

“I lived through that and it’s tough.”

MPs have to decide whether they can stand it. And the PM must determine if he can withstand it.

Wynne thought her situation would improve -- and so did Cohn:

Back then, I thought if Wynne could reintroduce herself to voters and somehow rehabilitate her image, she had a better chance to eke out a narrow victory in 2018 than any of the other pretenders to the throne. But as readers know, I’m always wrong — and as it turned out, the downside risk of an unloved leader was a massive loss on voting day.

Similarly, Trudeau may be the best bet for a longshot Liberal minority victory in the federal election due in late 2025. But by virtue of the personal hostility he engenders — akin to Wynne — he could very well be the worst bet if things don’t go their way, leading to even bigger losses.

It's not a simple decision. Stay tuned.

Image: CTV News

Very Consequential

Canadians aren't impressed by their political leaders. Michael Harris writes:

Federal politics has entered a “none-of-the-above” phase.  

The same polls that show Justin Trudeau taking his party over the electoral cliff if he remains leader also show something else of importance. Canadians are deeply unimpressed with the current crop of federal leaders.  

The latest Angus Reid poll nicely captures Trudeau’s emphatic unpopularity, but also the striking unpopularity of his rivals. The prime minister is viewed favourably by just 28 per cent of respondents in the Angus Reid poll, and unfavourably by a whopping 67 per cent.  

The Conservative Party has a commanding 20-point lead over the Liberals amongst decided voters, a staggering, double-digit lead they have had for months. 

But according to other key findings in the poll, 50 per cent of respondents had an unfavourable view of Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh.  

That makes predicting what will happen in the next election difficult:

While most observers have counted Trudeau out, based on persistent documentary evidence, [Nick Nanos] came up with another number that puts the Conservative “juggernaut” factor in an intriguing context.  

“Although the Conservatives enjoy a comfortable advantage in vote intentions, their pool of accessible voters—that is, the proportion of Canadians who are open to voting Conservative—is not much larger (45 per cent) than the group of voters accessible to the Liberals (43 per cent).”

In other words, the next election will not necessarily be decided by today’s polls, but by tomorrow’s, next week’s, next month’s, and next year’s political gamesmanship. And happenstance.

Things can change radically over a short period. Like climate change, political change can be swift and very consequential.

Image: CTV Nrews

On The March

 

Authoritarianism is on the march. Michael Harris warns that we should keep our eyes on Europe:

Across the world the hard right is moving toward centre stage. The latest sign that liberal democracy is in decline comes from an ocean away. But we in Canada would be fools to believe ourselves safely distanced from that tide.

Earlier this month Europe conducted the second largest democratic vote in the world. Four hundred million voters were eligible to choose who sits in the EU Parliament. The most stunning result was a far-right surge — with immediate and dramatic consequences.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo resigned in the wake of the results. His party, Open VLD, won just seven seats, while the two right-wing parties each picked up 20 seats in Belgium’s 150 seat federal parliament. De Croo was left with a one-seat advantage in the seven-member coalition he led and decided that was unworkable.

French President Emmanuel Macron called a snap legislative election for June 30 after his centrist party lost heavily to Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally party.

Le Pen’s party captured 31.37 per cent of the vote and Macron’s centrist Renaissance coalition only 14.6 per cent. National Rally took 30 seats compared to Macron’s 13. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire pronounced: “This will be the most consequential parliamentary election for France and for the French in the history of the Fifth Republic.”

Although the centre-right European People’s Party will remain he largest party in the European Parliament with about 186 of the chamber’s 720 seats, the right is now positioned to be in the running to form governments in France, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany.

Post-pandemic, the world is taking a nasty turn:

None of this accidental. It is, in part, blowback from inflammatory political rhetoric. Donald Trump, for example, refuses to rule out violence if he loses the November election. That moves him from being a polarizing figure to an instigator, just as he was on Jan. 6, 2021. He has warned that there will be “death and destruction” if he is jailed over his recent 34-count criminal conviction in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case.

It is a dangerous message. A study released last year showed one in four Americans thought political violence was justified to “save” the country. Among just supporters of Trump the number jumped to four in ten.

Thanks to social media platforms, found another U.S. report on the growing embrace of political violence, there is a great deal of “anonymous rage” out there.

Not only is a convicted felon, sex assailant and tax fraudster positioned to win back the White House, his iconoclasm has apparently turned the GOP into the Lawless and Disorder party.

We're in for a rough ride.

A Pig In A Poke

Pierre Poilievre claims that he's the working man's friend. But the policies he promotes reveal that he's on the side of the working man's overlords. Linda McQuaig writes:

Pierre Poilievre often calls Canada “broken,” but he rarely reveals that his dream Canada is an austere place that few Canadians would recognize or want to live in.

However, in an unscripted comment last month that received almost no media attention, the Conservative leader briefly provided us with a glimpse of the bleak vision he has for Canada.

“I’m very hesitant to spend taxpayers’ money on anything other than the core services of roads, bridges, police, military, border security and a safety net for those who can’t provide for themselves. That’s common sense. Let’s bring it home,” Poilievre told reporters during a campaign stop at a Vancouver gas station.

This suggests an agenda of cuts that goes well beyond axing the carbon tax.

So what is he really talking about?

Poilievre didn’t even mention — among his list of things he considers worthy of taxpayers’ money — Canada’s major social programs including health care, education, pensions and family supports, which are central to the lives of almost all Canadians.

Now, I doubt if Poilievre is planning to cancel or completely stop funding these programs. (Health care and education are provincial responsibilities, although they rely on funding from the federal government.)

But his comment at the gas station indicates a desire to redesign Canada in a profound way — as mostly a supplier of “core services” — infrastructure, police, the military.

As for the social dimension, he favours a bare-bones, U.S.-style “safety net” aimed only at the poor, with the rest of the population forced to provide for themselves and their families in the marketplace.

If he gets a majority, he’s likely to be swift and ambitious in cutting and privatizing. As The Star has reported, the Ford government’s apparent interest in calling an early election is partly driven by its desire to hold the election before a Poilievre government produces a first budget with deep spending cuts, tarnishing the Conservative brand.

Poilievre presents himself as a friend of the working person — but a Canadian government supplying only “core services” would mean cutbacks that hurt working people.

His agenda seems very much in line with the far-right Fraser Institute.

These are very old ideas. They brought about the Great Depression and the Great Recession at the beginning of this century. You'd think that, by now, we'd recognize a pig in a poke when we see it.

Image: English Stack Exchange

Another Departure

Some long-time politicians have simply had enough. The latest departure is Shannon Phillips. Max Fawcett writes:

At some point, even for the toughest of cookies, enough is enough. After years of enduring threats, harassment, and even an illegal surveillance campaign by local police officers — one that never resulted in criminal charges — Alberta NDP MLA Shannon Phillips announced last week that she was resigning from politics. “I’m the next in a line of woman politicians who are taking a pass,” she told the Globe and Mail.

“Yes, I'm mad,” McKenna said on social media. “We are seeing the deterioration of politics on our watch - allowing attacks on politicians especially on women — by right wing politicians & their mouthpieces. This toxic workplace would never be tolerated anywhere else. It's democracy that's at stake, folks.”

The price she paid for her political involvement was high. And while she switched to the opposition benches in 2019, that price just seemed to keep getting higher. “These conditions are not improving,” she told the Globe and Mail this week. “The right is only getting more crazy and more bonkers, and disinformation is just getting worse. And that is going to have an effect on people’s desire to do this work.”

To be a politician these days you have to live with constant harassment:

"In 2019 there was approximately eight files we opened up on threat behaviours, either direct or indirect threat towards an MP, and in 2023 there was 530 files opened," [Patrick]McDonnell said. Worse, it’s now increasingly happening in real life instead of online, with people showing up at the homes of MPs and MLAs. As RCMP deputy commissioner Mark Flynn told the Toronto Star’s Tonda MacCharles, “we’ve seen a shift from people protesting or appearing…at Parliament Hill, minister’s offices, constituency offices, et cetera, to where we are now seeing people go to their residences and start taking actions at their residence.”

While the MPs involved are reluctant to talk about it, some of them have already had their windows broken and buildings vandalized. If the ongoing escalation here doesn’t stop, at some point soon this is going to lead to something far worse than property damage or threatening behaviour. Someone is going to get hurt, maybe even killed, and that puts the families of every elected official at risk. Is it any wonder that people like Phillips and McKenna, progressive women who take the lead on issues that most rile up far-right agitators, decided to leave?

It is time to make some changes:

First and foremost that means dialing down the rhetoric about a political opponent’s supposedly nefarious intentions and treating them like a human being with a difference of opinion rather than a threat to anyone’s livelihood or existence. It means significant additional resources for the offices in both the House of Commons and provincial legislatures that are responsible for maintaining the safety and security of elected officials. And it means finding ways to ensure both the police and courts are taking these threats more seriously.

We have become very nasty in the way we practice politics.

Image: I Stock

A Clear And Present Danger

Some countries are messing with our democracy. Michael Harris writes:

Canadian democracy has been weakened this past week by a signal failure of transparency, a dire error of priorities. On an issue of monumental importance, the public was informationally dealt out.

What makes that harder to take is that the Trudeau government never misses an opportunity to take a bow for its openness in governance. The PM talks the talk, but sometimes doesn’t walk the walk.

Thanks to the work of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), Canadians have learned that some Members of Parliament have been helping foreign actors to interfere in this country’s politics and elections.

The NSICOP report released on June 3 said that certain elected officials “began wittingly assisting foreign state actors soon after their election.” The key word is “wittingly.”  

The committee members said that they had seen intelligence suggesting that some MPs worked to influence colleagues on behalf of India, and that they had provided confidential information to officials with the Indian government.  

In one case cited in the report, that relied on information from CSIS, a then-sitting MP had a relationship with a foreign intelligence officer.  

According to the report, the MP even tried to arrange a meeting with a senior foreign intelligence officer in a foreign country. 

Several counties are facing this kind of threat. But if we don't know who is working for these countries -- and not for us -- they represent a clear and present danger. And unless we know who they are, we can't vote them out.

Image: Radio Canada

The MAGA Mob

Michelle Goldberg writes that Donald Trump's Maga Mob has embraced criminality. She refers to a recent interview with Peter Navarro from his Florida jail cell:

This week, Breitbart interviewed the former Trump official Peter Navarro, one of many criminals in the ex-president’s orbit, from the Miami prison where he is serving four months for contempt of Congress. While life behind bars is difficult, Navarro boasted that his stint has been smoothed by his ties to Donald Trump, which make him something of a made man. The former president, said Navarro, is beloved not just by the guards, but by the “vast majority” of inmates as well. “If I were a Bidenite, things would be a lot tougher here — and yes, they know exactly who I am and respect the fact that I stood up for a principle and didn’t bow to the government,” he said.

The entire Republican Party has embraced lawlessness:

One of the more unsettling things about our politics right now is the Republican Party’s increasingly open embrace of lawlessness. Even as they proclaim Trump’s innocence, Trump and his allies revel in the frisson of criminality. At his rally in the Bronx last month, for example, Trump invited onto the stage two rappers, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, who are currently facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder and weapons possession. (They’ve pleaded not guilty.) During Trump’s recent criminal trial, his courtroom entourage included Chuck Zito, who helped found the New York chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and spent six years in prison on drug conspiracy charges. (The Justice Department has linked his Hells Angels chapter to the Gambino crime family.) Trump, who has his own history of mafia ties, has repeatedly compared himself to Al Capone. MAGA merchants sell T-shirts — and, weirdly, hot sauce — showing Trump as either Vito or Michael Corleone from “The Godfather” movies, with the caption “The Donfather.”

A fascinating new book by John Ganz, “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s,” offers a useful way to think about the value system undergirding MAGA’s romance with the mob. Ganz’s book excavates a prehistory of Trumpism in the angry, cynical period between the end of the Cold War and the full flush of the Clinton boom. You can see, in the rise of figures like David Duke, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, Trumpism in embryo. (The chapter on Duke, and the cultish loyalty he inspired, is particularly illuminating.) But the most revelatory section — some of which Ganz has adapted in a post for his Unpopular Front newsletter — involves the mystique around the mobster John Gotti and the Buchanan-style paleoconservatives who saw, in the mafia, an admirable patriarchal alternative to the technocratic liberalism they despised.

It's been a long time coming. But it's the symptom of a very sick society. And it's not new:

Societies fetishize Mafiosi to the degree that they lose faith in themselves. Writing about the ideology embedded in the classic crime films of the 1930s, the Marxist social critic Fredric Jameson noted that gangsters “were dramatized as psychopaths, sick loners striking out against a society essentially made up of wholesome people (the archetypal democratic ‘common man’ of New Deal populism).” When, in the 1970s, gangsters instead represented a fantasy of family cohesion, it was a response to a broader climate of social dissolution. It’s a sign that a culture is in the grip of a deep nihilism and despair when moblike figures become romantic heroes, or worse, presidents.

I'm sorry to  end on such a pessimistic note.

Image: Wikipedia

Why Is He Sticking Around?

Justin Trudeau is in trouble. Lots of people wonder why he's sticking around. Michael Harris writes that two new books deal with that question:

Whatever the answer may be, two [books] have just been [published] — a full-length book by Stephen Maher, and a slim volume by Paul Wells. Both ultimately paint the picture of a leader who is washed up.

Maher’s book, The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau, is already a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon in the Kindle edition. And the Wells 96-page essay, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times, has been reviewed as a skilfully written psychological assessment of one of Canada’s longest-serving prime ministers. Neither work will put many smiles on faces in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Wells also portrays the PM as a man who doesn’t deal well with opposition. It’s his way, or the doorway.

“For all his pedigree and physical grace the work of politics has never come easily to him,” Wells writes, adding that “his judgment is often terrible. He has not surrounded himself with great talent; in fact, he has discovered a real gift for chasing talent away.”

Considering what happened to Jody Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott and Gerald Butts, Wells has a point.

The Maher book is much bigger and more extensive:

Maher’s book, at 385 pages, is the first full-length biography of Justin Trudeau, the interest it has already sparked is not surprising. Based on 200 interviews, including one with the PM himself, The Prince offers a trove of inside information that one would expect from the talented journalist who was part of the team that broke the robocalls scandal surrounding the 2011 election.

While Maher was writing the book, I visited with him in his home, a converted boathouse on the back harbour of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Over beer, we talked shop about the challenges of taking on a big book about a Canadian prime minister. I had one piece of advice for him about the complex business of getting a book from concept through to publication, a process in which an author is pushed and pulled in many directions: “Stick to your guns.”

I was struck that day by Maher’s sense of fairness in his assessment of the prime minister. He was not interested in writing a “hate Trudeau” book, although by doing so, it would be easy to cash in on the PM’s plummeting popularity.

When Maher began his work on The Prince, he thought the current PM was a more consequential figure than either Jean Chrétien or Stephen Harper, a high-impact leader who changed the country more than his predecessors.

It was the author’s opinion that history would look kindly on Justin Trudeau. Although that impression changed as his research progressed over 18 months, Maher’s book has been received as a fine example of a traditional journalistic deep dive: exhaustively researched, fair and balanced.

Maher's opinion of Trudeau is now more nuanced. There are two Trudeaus -- the Prince and the Entitled Snob:

Which Trudeau is the real one? The earlier version full of hope and hype, and some big-ticket accomplishments; or the Prince, who can’t get over his own sense of entitlement, even as his tired government seems to have lost its way?

Whether we will ever know the answer to that question depends on what the PM decides to do: walk off undefeated into the lucrative sunset of the speaker’s tour and the corporate boardroom, or stand his ground and fight, despite dismal polls and relentless journalistic epitaphs.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Maher shared a momentous quote on how the PM himself sees his political future. They are fighting words.

“I just see it as such a fundamental choice in what kind of country we are, who we are as Canadians,” Trudeau told Maher. “That, for me, is what I got into politics for: to have big fights like this about who we are as a country and where we’re going.”

Stay tuned.