An Ill Wind

The bullies are in the catbird seat. Marsha Lederman writes:

We are living in what is increasingly a culture of meanness and bullying. And that bullying is infecting not just the public discourse, but the way government operates.

Witness Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Keeping Students in School Act, so named to earn sympathy from parents and the public. Using the Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ notwithstanding clause to suspend workers’ rights and impose a contract a union rejected – as the Ford government proposed – is a bully move, and it is being threatened against education support workers.

This morning, the province's lowest-paid education workers went on strike:

These are the support workers who clean up your kids’ vomit, who track you down when your child is sick, who pick up discarded needles from playgrounds before children arrive for school. These are the educational assistants who help special needs students learn with their peers. These are the early childhood educators who care for your children in the tender kindergarten years.

Even before inflation sent prices through the grocery-store roof, the pay for these workers – mostly women – was insufficient. Now, they face a government willing to pass a bill to suspend their right to demand better through fair bargaining and striking – an extraordinary move, and an extraordinarily nasty one.

Yesterday, Ford wasn't in the House when the bill passed third reading. However,

on Monday, as this bill was in the works, Mr. Ford posted a video of his smiling self in his Muskoka sweatshirt, carving a pumpkin and reminiscing about Halloweens past. Leave it to Beaver‘s Eddie Haskell came to mind: grinning politely at Mrs. Cleaver, but when her back was turned, picking on Beaver and Wally – the children.

And, in Ottawa, we're taking an inside look at the Freedom Convoy:

You want to see what happens when the bullies take over? Check out the Emergencies Act inquiry. The “Freedom Convoy” rode into Ottawa and harassed the city with its horns and its hot tubs. And its participants and leaders are now trying to gaslight the country by claiming the protest was a positive event, not meant to disrupt the city. It was like Woodstock! Peace and love, baby!

A description of a stuffed dummy with the face of a howling baby and the word “honk” on its chest outside the inquiry was a perfect illustration of the immature behaviour this gang was – and still is – up to. The mocking laughter, the childish memes they post, their profane flags targeting the Prime Minister – these were the actions of people who suddenly felt powerful, and decided to use that power in the pettiest of ways.

The disease drifted in from the south:

It shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose, that this culture of meanness has infected the hallowed halls of governance, given that that’s where it got its big boost, south of the border. When you have a presidential candidate who mocks a disabled reporter, or suggests women accusing him of sexual assault were not hot enough for him to have done so, and people actually laugh and, worse, go on to elect him – something’s up with society.

Donald Trump is gone from power, but the nastiness remains. In the American south this summer, I saw a billboard that read, “Every tongue will confess Jesus is Lord – Even the Democrats,” next to a picture of a devil’s pitchfork. I saw a bumper sticker on a pick-up truck that read, “This truck runs on liberal tears.” At a wholesome theme park, one patron wore a T-shirt declaring, “I’m not one of the sheep,” over a map of the United States.

Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in a home invasion last week, and instead of receiving unanimous cross-party condemnation and expressions of concern, this vicious assault was used laughingly by certain Republican elements. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a photo of a hammer over a pair of men’s underwear with the words, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.” Imagine amplifying something crude and cruel like that to score political points? Imagine something like that having the ability to score political points?

It is an ill wind that's blowing.

Image: Quarter To Three

Contracts Of Difference

Pierre Poilievre is a one-trick pony. His message is simple and he repeats it constantly. Taxes -- all taxes -- are bad. Chief among the taxes Poilievre wants to eliminate is the carbon tax. Max Fawcett writes:

Carbon pricing, billed by economists as a market-friendly way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, has instead become the bête noire of Canada’s conservative movement. And while it might seem like the backlash against the carbon tax ought to be dying down after three-plus years, it actually appears to be growing. With Pierre Poilievre attacking it daily from his perch in Ottawa and Danielle Smith threatening to cause a constitutional crisis from Alberta, the politics around climate policy in Canada are getting even more perilous than ever.

But if policy wonks inadvertently got us into this mess, they might just be the ones who can get us out as well. A few of them have come up with an idea called “contracts for difference” that could pour concrete on the federal carbon tax and trigger the sorts of major investments in emissions-reducing projects Canada needs if it’s going to get within shouting distance of its climate targets. Better still, these contracts could help us sidestep the sort of federal-provincial conflict that seems unavoidable when it comes to policies like the cap on oil and gas emissions or other heavier-handed approaches.

So what exactly is a "contract of difference?"

Here’s how the contracts work. Let’s say you want to build a project that reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and your economics depend on being able to generate credits for those reductions — ones that increase in value as the carbon price rises. If you sign one of these contracts (with, say, the Canada Infrastructure Bank) and a future Poilievre government slows or eliminates the carbon tax entirely, it would have to pay you the difference between what those credits would have been worth and their now-reduced value. A future government could still “axe the tax,” as Poilievre has promised, but it would be on the hook for potentially billions of dollars in costs. More importantly, there would still be an incentive for the project owners who signed these contracts to continue with their emissions-reduction efforts.

This isn’t just theory. Thanks to a new report from the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, we know these sorts of contracts can and do work. They were integral to the Alberta NDP government’s Renewable Electricity Program, and they’ve already yielded an estimated $160 million for Alberta’s taxpayers since 2019 thanks to their design and the combination of falling renewable energy costs and higher power prices. As assistant professor and report co-author Sara Hastings-Simon told the Calgary Herald, “Well-designed climate policy does not have to be costly to the public, and it can actually come at a benefit.”

But for all of its technical merits, it’s in the politics where this idea truly shines. The federal government is about to deliver its fall economic update, and it’s under considerable pressure to match the incentives for carbon capture and storage projects contained in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act in the United States. “If the government was to make changes to the investment tax credit or to supplement it with some additional measures, that would put us a lot closer to making final investment decisions on these projects," said Mark Cameron, vice-president of external relations with the Pathways Alliance, an organization representing Canada’s six largest oilsands producers. "If we don't get that kind of certainty by the middle of next year, then those timelines for 2030 are going to slip."

By backstopping these contracts for difference, the federal government could give industry that certainty without shovelling more carbon capture funding to companies that have so far refused to spend it — and are in the midst of posting record profits. It would call their collective bluff and reveal whether they’re actually serious about reducing their emissions or just trying to rag the puck until a future conservative government lets them off the hook.

More importantly, it might help avert the fight Alberta’s new premier seems to be spoiling for with Ottawa, which will surely slow any progress on this file. It’s probably tempting for the Trudeau government to proceed with its hard cap on oil and gas emissions or introduce an excess profit tax on the industry as a whole, given the popularity of those policies in places like British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. But they would be a lifeline for Smith, who otherwise seems determined to drown her own government with policies that pander to separatists and anti-vaccine activists. A recent Navigator poll showed her trailing NDP Leader Rachel Notley on virtually every issue, including management of the economy, but she is still favoured when it comes to “standing up to the federal government.”

Apparently, Chrystia Freeland is focusing on these issues in today's economic statement. Let's see what she has to say.

Image: The Macdonald-Laurier Institute

A Forced March

It looks, Michael Harris writes, that Americans are poised to begin a forced march toward fascism:

The way most pollsters and pundits see it, the Republicans are poised to evict the Democrats from the House of Representatives in the looming midterm elections. It may even turn into a blowout. The GOP stands a better than even chance of winning back the Senate as well. With Americans gasping at gas prices and their skinny wallets, President Joe Biden is about as popular as chewing tobacco.

It is hard to ignore the theatre of the absurd in the current situation. Emotion, and a puerile sense of economics, is ruling the roost south of the border. How could a party that denies the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency, a patently and demonstrably false belief, that has been debunked for two years now in court after court and the bona fide media, win power?

How could a party that supports a twice-impeached ex-president who attempted a coup to retain power and now faces a $250-million fraud suit brought by New York’s attorney general, gain the public trust?

Americans left "normal" behind long ago:

Make no mistake about it, this is no normal election year. There are nightly spectacles on the television news of armed vigilantes who call themselves “observers” setting up camp about 22 metres away from polling drop boxes. Their ostensible purpose is to detect signs of cheating in the early voting and to document it. They are the MAGA militia. They take pictures of voters, follow them back to their cars and take down their license plates. That is not observing. That is the old “we know who you are, and we know what you did” intimidation thing.

Such tactics seem to be working. According to a recent Reuters and Ipsos poll, two out of five U.S. voters are worried about intimidation at polling stations, and even acts of violence if the GOP doesn’t win.

In these post-truth times, it is not just facts that don’t matter. Neither does character. Richard Nixon appealed to an American Silent Majority, and preacher Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority launched the Christian right into U.S. politics. Now America is in the grips of the Immoral Majority, based on a lie so big it would have impressed Joseph Goebbels. Donald Trump has simply super-sized the whopper.

Consider the case of Herschel Walker:

The important thing is not Walker’s lies and hypocrisy. The issue to many Georgia Republicans is Walker’s loyalty to Trump, and his key role in winning back the Senate for the GOP. Fitness for office means nothing. Winning office is the be all and end all. It means control of the system. You know things are upside down when a Liz Cheney is shown the door, and a Herschel Walker gets the GOP establishment’s bear hug.

People get nervous at comparisons with Hitler. But look at the facts:

Hitler banned a free press, and Trump has characterized the media as the “true enemy of the people.”

Hitler had his Brownshirts and Trump has his Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

Hitler’s Big Lie was that Germany didn’t lose the First World War and was instead stabbed in the back by a cabal that included corrupt politicians. Trump’s Big Lie is that he didn’t actually lose the 2020 election, but that it was stolen from him by corrupt Democrats.

Hitler’s refrain was “one people, one realm, one leader.” Trump’s version as expressed at the 2016 Republican convention was “I am your voice. I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order.”

If you can't -- or won't -- learn from history, you're going to repeat it.

Image: The University of Chicago Press

We Do Ourselves Harm

You may have noticed that, during the inquiry into the truckers' convoy, Pierre Poilievre is nowhere to be seen or heard. Susan Delacourt writes:

Police and politicians had many fierce disputes about the convoy, we’ve learned in often-fascinating detail over the past three weeks, but one thing they appear to have all agreed upon is that it was a public-security threat of major proportions.

Nearly two dozen witnesses have now taken the stand at Justice Paul Rouleau’s commission hearings in Ottawa. Many of them have been police officers. Not one of them has given backing to this idea that the convoy was merely a fun-for-the-whole-family adventure. “Devastating impact” and “a crisis in Ottawa,” were among the descriptive phrases used by retired Ontario Provincial Police superintendent Carson Pardy.

Poilievre has said nothing -- although he did have plenty to say during the protest:

As recently as June, Poilievre was also still insisting on social media “that Trudeau could have ended the trucker protest in one day, if he’d had the guts to listen to the people — and let them go back to their jobs.”

Like Poilievre, Ontario Premier Doug Ford is doing his best not to be seen or heard. Perhaps that's because he's too busy preventing Ontario's education workers from striking -- which will be their legal right after Friday of this week. And he plans to use the notwithstanding clause to avoid any legal blowback to his legislation. 

There's no mystery to these people. We know who they are. And we do ourselves harm when we elect them.

Image: The Toronto Star

Divine Right?

I have already written about Doug Ford's refusal to testify at the public inquiry into the occupation of Ottawa. Today, Michael Harris takes on the issue:

Besides refusing to personally shed light on a matter that goes to the heart of the public interest, there is another reason why Doug Ford should be ashamed of himself. As the leader of the government, he represents the law. What message does it send to the public when the head of government decides that he doesn’t have to give an interview, offer testimony, or comply with a subpoena on a matter of great importance to everyone?

What message does it send when he effectively tells the people who elected him, he doesn’t have to tell them what really happened in their province?  And there is this question: if the prime minister of the country can step up and testify at the Emergencies Act inquiry, without a subpoena, as he plans to do, why can’t the premier of Ontario?

Ford argues that his government has already co-operated with the inquiry by handing over cabinet material and making senior officials of the government available for testimony. He is going to court to argue that the subpoena violates his parliamentary privilege.

That is a fig leaf to cover what is really at stake here. Ford doesn’t want to comply with the subpoena from the commissioners, because it will put him precisely where a growing number of politicians and their aides don’t want to be: forced to answer inconvenient questions under oath.

The defiance of subpoenas by politicians has become  an epidemic:

This is getting to be a serious issue in politics, both for politicians themselves and their staffs. Consider the parade of American public figures in whose dubious footsteps Ford is following.

Courtrooms are to former U.S. president Donald Trump what garlic and crosses are to Dracula. The reason is simple. When you get to court, if you lie under oath, it’s a crime. You can lie to the country, and you can lie to the media with impunity. But when you lie in court, it’s called perjury. Which is why Trump has done everything possible to avoid the subpoena of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack, despite his empty criticism that no one at the proceedings is telling his side of the story.

When he was finally dragged into court by New York Attorney General Letitia James in her massive fraud investigation of the Trump organization, the artist of the deal answered only one question: what was his name? After that, he took the Fifth Amendment 440 times, a tactic he once said was the stock and trade of the Mafia. He has now been served with a $250-million lawsuit for alleged massive fraud by New York’s attorney general.

Senator Lindsay Graham refused to comply with a grand jury subpoena from the Atlanta-area district attorney looking into potential interference in the 2020 election by Trump and his minions. Georgia election officials testified that during a telephone call, Senator Graham tried to get them to change the result of the election in Trump’s favour.

Former White House Trump adviser Steve Bannon ignored a Congressional subpoena from the Jan. 6 Select Committee. He never produced a single document, nor the log of his activities at the time of the Capitol Hill riot. Instead, he argued that he had “executive privilege,” a point a lawyer for the former president disputes. Bannon was eventually convicted on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress, and has been sentenced to four months in prison. He remains at large pending his appeal.

Does Doug believe he rules by Divine Right? 

Image: The Hill Times

Sleepwalking Through A Crisis

Judy Rebick writes that Canadian democracy is in crisis:

Thirty years ago on  October 26, 1992, Canadians voted on the only pan-Canadian referendum in my lifetime. The Charlottetown Accord, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s second attempt to amend Canada’s Constitution was voted down by a 54 per cent majority.  I doubt you will read about this extraordinary democratic event in the mainstream media because it was defeated despite or maybe because of the support it had from all of all the Premiers and all but one of the political parties. Moreover, all the daily newspapers across the country supported it. The people rose up Canadian style and voted no.

I write about it in 2022, not only to remember this extraordinary episode in Canadian history but because we are facing a similar crisis in democracy and once again need to rethink how our democracy works. Quebec just elected a majority government where the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) won a significant majority of the seats with only 37.32 per cent of the vote, the Doug Ford Tories in Ontario won a majority of seats with only 40 per cent of the votes, and the BCNDP just undemocratically disqualified a challenger to run as leader of the party thus avoiding a debate on the future of the province and installing a Premier without any election whatsoever.

Rebick remembers the Charlottetown Accord and how it went down to defeat:

In 1992, I was President of the National Action Committee (NAC) on the Status of Women, Canada’s largest women’s group and a major spokesperson for the “No” campaign.  The experience of the Charlottetown referendum changed my ideas about democracy.  As I travelled from coast to coast, speaking at countless meetings and on dozens of talk shows, I found an informed and articulate population. I may not always have agreed with people’s views, but it was clear that they had carefully thought out what they were saying. Many people would come with a marked up copy of the accord and written questions to ask the panelists who represented the two sides. I had never felt such intense political participation. Because people knew that they had a direct vote on the outcome, they got more involved. Since the difference didn’t fall along the usual left-right spectrum, people had to decide for themselves what they thought. 

Canadian voters were energized. That is not the case today. We're sleepwalking through a very important time -- for Canada and the world.

Image: The Canadian Encyclopedia

What's The Difference?

After the last provincial election in Ontario, Andrea Horvath -- the leader of the NDP -- and Steven Del Ducca -- who led the Ontario Liberals -- resigned. During Ontario's municipal elections, Horvath was elected mayor of Hamilton and Del Ducca was elected mayor of Vaughn, north of Toronto. Donald Trump is still going madly about his country, claiming he won his election. Susan Delacourt writes:

Defeat of one kind or another is a constant possibility. In fact, simple arithmetic tells us there are far more losers than winners in every election. Losers, however, are often dispatched to the distant past, the land of “didn’t you used to be…?” All across Ontario this week, many failed municipal candidates — many more than winners — are collecting up their signs and fading back to obscurity and non-elected life.

Former Ontario New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath was elected mayor of her Hamilton hometown. Former Ontario Liberal leader Steven Del Duca narrowly won the mayor’s job in Vaughan. Both of these leaders resigned on election night in June when they failed to stop Doug Ford from winning a majority.

Meanwhile, in Brampton, Patrick Brown held onto his mayor’s job, which he had been prepared to leave if he won the federal Conservative leadership race. Brown was ejected from the race during the summer (and fined $100,0000 by the party this week for alleged campaign violations).

It says something about all three of these politicians that they were unable to walk away from the business — that even as they were still licking the wounds of defeat, they decided to take another run at election.

So you have to ask the question, what's the difference between these politicians and Donald Trump?

Image: CBC

Empty Barrels

The Republicans have been talking about a Biden Recession. But this week's economic numbers revealed their lie. Paul Krugman writes that there may be a recession coming, but the United States is not in one now:

For now, suffice it to say, we weren’t in a recession earlier this year and aren’t in a recession now, although we could find ourselves in one in the future as delayed effects of rising interest rates kick in.

So, unable to sell a recession, the Republicans have turned to inflation as The Great Boogeyman. But they have no plan to deal with it:

It . . . seems worth pointing out that the G.O.P. doesn’t have a plan to fight inflation. Actually, it doesn’t have any coherent economic plan at all. But to the extent that Republicans have laid out what they will try to do if they win the midterms, their policies would make inflation worse, not better.

When pressed about how, exactly, they would reduce inflation, Republicans often fall back on some version of “Gas was only $2 a gallon when Trump left office!” So let’s talk about that comparison.

First, it’s remarkable how the right has reimagined January 2021 as a golden moment for America. At the time, about 20,000 Americans were dying from Covid every week; there were still nine million fewer jobs than there had been before the pandemic. Indeed, the still-depressed state of major economies, including that of the United States, was the main reason world oil prices were unusually low, which in turn was the main reason gas was cheap.

A better comparison would be with 2019, the year before the pandemic, when gas averaged $2.60 a gallon. Bear in mind that average wages have risen about 15 percent over the past three years, so gas would be as affordable now as it was in 2019 if its current average price were $2.99. As of Wednesday, it was $3.75. So yes, gas has become less affordable, but not by nearly as much as Republicans claim.

And despite G.O.P. rhetoric, Biden administration policies have had little impact on gas prices, which have been driven by events affecting world markets — notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and to some extent by bottlenecks in refining, which grew worse for several weeks starting in mid-September but have eased again.

So what is the Republican plan to bring gas prices down? There isn’t one.

What about inflation more generally? You can make the case that large deficit spending early in the Biden presidency fed inflation (although it had little effect on the most politically salient prices, for energy and food, which have soared around the world).

If you’re worried about the inflationary impact of budget deficits, however, you should know that almost the only concrete economic policy idea we’re hearing from Republicans is that they want to extend the Trump tax cuts, which would … substantially increase the deficit.

It’s true that many Republicans adhere to an economic ideology that doesn’t see deficits caused by tax cuts as a problem, either because they believe — in the teeth of all the evidence — that tax cuts somehow pay for themselves, or because they believe that government spending, not deficits per se, is what causes problems.

But if you believe that cutting taxes without any plausible plan for offsetting spending cuts isn’t a problem even in a time of inflation, markets beg to disagree. Look at what happened to the pound and British interest rates after Liz Truss, the quickly deposed prime minister, announced an economic plan that, broadly speaking, looks a lot like what Republicans are proposing here. 

It's all a lie. Republicans are empty barrels. They make a lot of noise. But there's nothing there.

Image: Sound Cloud

The Importance Of The Big Lie

Donald Trump has long had a habit of saying the quiet part out loud. And he's done it again. Greg Sargent writes:

Donald Trump has long harbored a tendency to confess to his sins in public. Now he’s done it again, revealing a large truth about today’s Republican Party in the process: He declared that his lies about the 2020 election are instrumentally useful in motivating GOP base voters.

Trump raised this in a call with Blake Masters, the Republican nominee in the Arizona Senate race, that was captured in a new Fox News documentary. Trump faulted Masters for saying at a debate that he didn’t see evidence of a rigged 2020 election, and urged Masters to be “stronger” on that point.

“You’re going to lose that base,” Trump told Masters, citing Kari Lake, the GOP candidate who might win the state’s governor’s race: “Kari’s winning with very little money. And if they say, ‘How is your family?’ she says the election was rigged and stolen.”

The conventional wisdom is that Trump can't think strategically. While it's true that he's not a good strategist, it's clear that simple strategy -- and repeating it -- is his strong suit:

It is unavoidably clear that many Republican elites have decided that adhering to or merely humoring Trump’s 2020 lies is essential to feeding that anger — and that they view these lies as a critical mobilizing tool in the midterm elections.

In Trump’s own telling, GOP base voters must be told that when they lose, they’ve been robbed — the outcome is illegitimate by definition. Scores of other GOP candidates are running for positions of control over elections — while essentially vowing to treat future elections as subject to nullification — which makes Trump’s point harder to deny.

Trump has supplied a plausible answer: Planting yourself squarely on the wrong side of Trump’s lies about 2020 might risk demobilizing or alienating the base, which could have imperiled McCarthy’s hopes of winning the House. What’s required instead is treating Jan. 6’s underlying cause as in some sense just.

The fate of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) illustrates the point. Cheney demanded that Republicans as a party unequivocally renounce Trump’s insurrectionism, even if it costs them Trump voters. This is precisely what required her purging from the party.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has been very clear on exactly this point. In a telling moment last year, Graham said of Cheney: “She’s made a determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”

Now Trump has said the same thing in his own way: The GOP needs his voters to succeed; keeping his voters in the fold requires telling them that when they lose elections, it doesn’t count.

All of this points to a country that is not only in decline but is also on the point of oblivion.

Image: Politico

What Happened To Shame?

We live in very strange times. Glen Pearson writes:

Consider the craziness of it all.  Donald Trump, out of office for two years, still believes his address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Vladimir Putin has carelessly risked the future of his career and the security of his nation in an effort to bend an already beleaguered people to his will.  China’s Xi Jinping has risked so much in his quest for world dominance that he’s about to force his nation into recession, which in that country will affect tens of millions of his citizens.

And now, this week, Britain is dealing with its third Prime Minister in as many months.  The Mother of All Parliaments has been so riddled with endless rounds of extremism, idealism, and populism that it can’t even manage its daily responsibilities.   It’s an embarrassment on a global scale that somehow doesn’t seem all that surprising in today’s political climate.

Democracy appears to be running on fumes while at the same time pushing the pedal to the metal.  Britain has seen two PMs selected in two months without any votes being cast for PM.  Scandal after scandal has rocked the governing party for years, yet it manages to retain power by failing to leave the choice of its legitimacy to the people.

The world is full of politicians who lie and don't blush. What happened to shame?

Image: Psychology Today

No Profile In Courage

The public inquiry into the convoy wants to talk to Doug Ford. But Ford isn't talking. Althia Raj writes:

Last Monday, the Ontario premier was asked why he wasn’t testifying at the commission. Among the 65 witnesses scheduled to testify, from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, Ford’s name was conspicuously absent.

“Were you asked? Did you decline?” a CBC reporter queried on Oct. 17.

“I have not been asked,” the premier responded.

But Monday, in a letter to several lawyers representing interested parties at the inquiry, the commission’s co-lead counsels Shantona Chaudhury and Jeffrey Leon wrote they had asked Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones, who was then the solicitor general, for interviews.

“The information gathered by commission counsel in the course of the investigation made clear that Premier Ford and Minister Jones would have evidence, particularly within their knowledge, that would be relevant to the commission’s mandate,” they wrote.

They asked on Sept. 19 and several times after that, they wrote. “All requests were refused.”

Chaudhury and Leon then asked Ford and Jones to testify voluntarily. But “as of last week,” that invitation had been “declined ‘for the moment.’”

So Monday, summonses were issued.

Why Ford's silence? Well, so far, what the inquiry has discovered doesn't make officials look good:

So far, those who have followed the commission’s hearings learned the Ottawa Police Service was completely unprepared, senior officers didn’t trust each other, fought with each other, and their response was, unsurprisingly, unco-ordinated and unsuccessful. Ottawa city council wasn’t much better, with petty politics appearing to rule the day. It has not been much of a trust-building exercise, but in the end it should be. Given a full and transparent picture, citizens should be able to judge for themselves whether officials — at all levels — acted appropriately.

There are lots of questions:

Namely, why didn’t the province step in when it was clear the City of Ottawa and its police service were overwhelmed? Municipalities are creatures of the provinces. It was Ontario’s problem. What did the province do? According to federal Liberal sources, Ford’s government suggested behind closed doors that it was the federal government’s responsibility to act, seemingly because Ottawa is the country’s capital and the Ambassador Bridge a Canada-U.S. border crossing. Did the lack of agreement lead to further delay and an entrenchment of the protesters? Did the federal government take action that was more aggressive than necessary because of gaps in the province’s response?

Ford doesn't want to answer those questions. He's never been a profile in courage.

Image: The Toronto Star

Not Very Bright

Michael Harris writes that western democracies are in crisis:

Prime Minister Liz Truss held office for just 45 days, the shortest tenure of any PM in British history. The country that once prided itself on having the fifth largest economy in the world is now in post-Brexit chaos. Standard and Poor’s has downgraded the country’s debt, and savage cuts in public spending appear inevitable. Even the return of Boozing Boris, the PM who partied at Number 10 while Britains were under COVID lockdown, isn’t out of the question. The only certainty seems to be that no matter who the Conservatives choose as leader, the party will be trounced by the Labour Party in the next election.

With recession in Europe, and a cold winter looming without Russian gas, the situation is not much better on the continent. Italy just elected a far-right prime minister infamous for praising Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Amongst other things, Giorgia Meloni is anti-immigrant. Even in Sweden and France, the far-right has made advances in recent elections. Just as William Butler Yeats predicted in his great poem, The Second Coming, the centre does not seem to be holding in many democracies.

In Canada, new Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is pushing a right-wing agenda, featuring tax cuts, smaller government, and the amorphous promise of more “freedom.” And oh yes, hating Justin Trudeau. The man who stood with the “Freedom Convoy” during its slovenly and self-interested occupation of Ottawa appears to mean what he says. In a stunning example of abdication on the environment file, Poilievre recently told Quebecers that a Conservative federal government would not interfere in any of the province’s major developments on environmental grounds.

And there is a vile cauldron boiling in the United States:

The star basket-case of democracy in retreat is the United States. Britain may be in a mess, but the U.S. remains the most indebted country in the world. The national debt stands at an irredeemable $30-trillion, a significant portion of which was run up by Donald Trump’s unfunded and permanent tax cut for the rich.

If you count state and municipal debt, and Washington’s unfunded liabilities, like social security and Medicare, some debt clocks place the real number at $130-trillion in the red.  The only thing that keeps things careening along is that the U.S. can still borrow the money to pay the enormous annual interest on its debt.

But government-by-credit card is not America’s greatest problem. Faced with bigger bills for gasoline and groceries, an inflation rate Americans have not seen in decades, the country seems poised to elect the ethically bankrupt Republicans to run the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate, as well.

Why is this happening? There are lots of reasons:

A painful COVID hangover, hard economic reality, and the search for scapegoats has created a public mood where the worst thing for a politician to be is not a liar, a cheat, or a scoundrel, but an incumbent. History provides a caution. As Thomas Jefferson so famously, and ominously, put it: “The government you elect is the government that you deserve.”

It all comes down to how smart we, the voters, are. It appears that we're not very bright.

Image: Flickr

Very Uncomfortable

Susan Delacourt writes that the Freedom Convoy was a big deal:

Witnesses at the public inquiry into last winter’s convoy protest in Canada may already be running out of ways to describe how massive, weird and yes, frightening it was.

“Unprecedented” is a word that’s been thrown around a lot in the first week of hearings. “Nothing of this magnitude has ever been seen, quite frankly, in any city that I’m aware of in Canada in the last 25 years,” Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson testified.

Former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly, according to one of his deputies, called it a “hydra” — a creature with many heads that needed to be “cut off and cauterized.”

Acting Deputy Police Chief Patricia Ferguson, who said she had to look up what the word meant when Sloly created “Mission Hydra,” definitely agreed Ottawa was dealing with some kind of strange new beast last January when the so-called “Freedom Convoy” rolled into the capital.

“This was obviously unprecedented in terms of its size and the type of thing we were dealing with,” Ferguson said during her testimony last week.

Until we know what this multi-headed creature was, no one will know how to make sure it doesn’t return — or, more importantly, whether it remains an ongoing concern for peace, order and good government in this country.

So what have we learned about the convoy?

First of all, most obviously perhaps, this thing was clearly more than a protest. Police stopped calling it that, we learned, when the “protesters” failed to pack up and leave town after the first weekend — when the hot tubs, stages and jerry cans of gasoline started arriving. That fact was established in the testimony of acting deputy chief Ferguson and some of the documents explored when she took the stand.

Police were pretty unanimous that Ottawa was dealing with a full-fledged occupation within days of the convoy’s arrival.

We also know it was national in scope and on the radar screen of police intelligence at least a couple of weeks before Ottawa was occupied.

There have been lots of moments of high-level intrigue during the past week, but it was Ontario Provincial Police Supt. Patrick Morris who provided the content most likely to be turned into a spy novel.

Since about 2019 or so, Morris testified, police, security and intelligence agencies at all levels across Canada have been keeping their eyes on a “significant amount of protest, dissent, some of which caused us reasonable grounds to suspect or believe that those issues would engage in criminal activity or illegal activity that would have a public safety impact.”

What they’re monitoring are brush fires of dissent that can explode into larger conflagrations, such as the rail blockades of early 2020 that started as an Indigenous land protest in B.C. No doubt Hendon was also keeping an eye on the 2021 election protests that dogged Justin Trudeau, which seemed to be a sneak preview of the convoy.

All of their intelligence is amassed, Morris said, in something called a “Hendon Strategic Intelligence Report,” which is distributed widely across the country to police and other security agencies. (Whenever the spy movie is made, it might be called the Hendon Report.)

The Hendon reports, he went on, were honing in on loose, vague protests such as “Shut Down Canada” and something police called the “Patriot Movement.” They were also picking up on increases in hate crimes and illegal activity associated with dissent.

COVID fatigue definitely played a role as these protest flames were fanned into the convoy fire, Morris said. “This is not one monolithic entity. These are grassroots, what I refer to as affinity groups, that share grievances. They acted locally, and also tried to coalesce, and I would say that this was the first successful coalescence.”

The convoy, as we are learning through week one of the hearings, was frustratingly difficult to contain because it had no one leader, no one cause and no clear demands. Demands they did have, Morris said, were already recognized to be impossible to meet (end COVID mandates now, etc.).

Money is a huge issue, simply because there was lots of it being raised online. The Star reported earlier this week that foreign money was not a major factor in the protest, according to intelligence documents deposited with the commission. But we also know the convoy was getting big shout-outs on Fox News in the U.S. and Ontario Premier Doug Ford said earlier this week that U.S. governors were highly attuned to the convoy protest.

And there was American influence behind the occupation:

At least a couple of witnesses have testified, too, that what was going on in Ottawa felt a little too similar to what happened on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021. The commission, one presumes, is going to probe those connections more deeply, whether they are figurative (inspiration for some) or literal (actual ties to the insurrectionists in the U.S.).

I suspect that what the inquiry uncovers will make us very uncomfortable.

Image: The BBC

The Fortress Of Crazy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American Disease has flourished in Alberta.

Image: The Toronto Star

An Inevitable Downfall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

amazon.ca

Truss Is Gone

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

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

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

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

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

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

She becomes the shortest serving prime minister in British history.

Her departure should serve as a warning to all conservatives.

Will He Be A Witness?

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

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

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

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

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

But there is disagreement on that score:

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

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

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

To be clear, Ford was no Pierre Poilievre:

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

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

Image: The Toronto Star

A World That No Longer Exists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: CNN

Can He Do It?

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

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

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

And recent polls seem to bear out his assessment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: The Hill Times

What's Wrong With White Americans?

 

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

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

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

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

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

 That White Vote is problematic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: vox.com