No More Of The Same

On Monday, Olivia Chow was elected mayor of Toronto. Max Fawcett writes:

Chow is taking the reins of a city that’s in much worse shape than it was when she unsuccessfully ran for mayor the first time in 2014. The housing market is actively hostile to anyone who didn’t buy their home a decade or more ago, and the rising cost of shelter is pushing more people towards the margins — and, often, beyond them. The transit system suffers from chronically low ridership, which is a function of both post-COVID work patterns and growing safety concerns spurred by a series of random violent encounters. Crucial new infrastructure projects like the Eglinton LRT line seem to drag on forever, while traffic and congestion just keep going from bad to worse.

She’ll also have to find ways to fill a $1-billion hole in Toronto’s budget and the Ford government isn’t about to help her with that any time soon. Despite promising not to get involved in the mayoral election, Premier Doug Ford ended the campaign by endorsing former police chief Mark Saunders and lashing out against Chow. “If you want my opinion, if Olivia Chow gets in, it’ll be an unmitigated disaster,” he said. “Businesses are going to be fleeing Toronto as far as I'm concerned.”

After her election, Ford was less harsh,

suggesting he was willing to “work with anyone ready to work with our government... Together, let’s focus on building a strong Toronto for generations to come.” But given their differing perspectives on what actually constitutes a “strong Toronto,” you can bet that conflict between Chow and Ford will be one of the hallmarks of the next three years. The fate and future of Ontario Place, and the Ford government’s plans for a large luxury spa there, promises to be the first of many battles.

Chow's biggest problem will be housing:

Like almost every elected official in Canada’s cities right now, Chow’s biggest challenge will be getting a handle on the housing market. Her plans include the creation of 25,000 new rental homes on city-owned land, raising the city’s Vacant Homes Tax from one per cent to three per cent, and increasing the Municipal Land Transfer Tax on luxury homes worth more than $3 million. All the funding generated by these tax increases will go towards affordable housing measures.

Chow has also said she’ll raise property taxes, although she’s yet to indicate exactly how much that will be. This is an unpopular but entirely necessary measure, one that even finds backing (however reluctant) in the pages of the National Post. As Kelly McParland noted, “Since amalgamation created today’s Toronto 25 years ago, a series of mayors has refused to ask homeowners to pay the full cost of the services they demand. Ontario’s biggest and priciest city also has its lowest property taxes. All those multimillion-dollar downtown homes get off cheaper than any of the neighbouring suburbs, or towns and cities beyond.”

So Chow and this generation of Torontonians have been left to pick up the tab. Jack Layton's widow heralds a change:

This will mark a clear break with the last 14 years, where conservative mayors and councils slowly deprived the city of its financial oxygen, whether through artificially low property tax rates or other forms of economic stricture. Services have been cut or allowed to deteriorate in quality, infrastructure was allowed to crumble (hello, Gardiner Expressway), and the primacy of car culture went mostly unchallenged, despite all the furor from the right around the city’s small number of bike lanes.

Chow won't be able to fix everything in three years. But, clearly, Torontonians don't want more of the same.

Image: The Toronto Star

A Pup Tent In Their Own Backyard

Chantal Hebert writes that Pierre Poilievre's performance has not been stellar. He appears to be taking the same road that his two predecessors took:

Nine months into his tenure, there is no denying that the latest CPC leader is having a measurable impact on Canada’s federal dynamics.

But is it the kind of impact the Conservatives need to return to the government benches? The early evidence suggests otherwise.

More so than its federal rivals, the Conservative party has tended, over the course of its history, to be beset by infighting.

If the past is any indication, it is only when the party succeeds in setting aside its internal divisions that it achieves its goal of forming government.

Brian Mulroney in 1984 and Stephen Harper in 2006 both managed to tick the box of party unity before leading the party to government.

But Poilievre doesn't unite people. He pisses them off:

If anything, fractures within the party have become deeper over the first months of his tenure.

Such divisions were on exhibit over the campaigns that led to Monday’s federal byelections.

The Manitoba riding of Portage-Lisgar was the scene of an ugly fratricidal war between Maxime Bernier’s breakaway party and the Poilievre forces. Meanwhile, in the Ontario riding of Oxford, part of the local CPC establishment campaigned for the Liberals.

While the Conservatives held both ridings, it did not make the kind of dent in Liberal support it will need if it is to win the next general election. Nor did its campaign project the image of a government-ready party. Settling scores, at just about any future cost to the party as exemplified by the battle against Bernier, seemed to be the only order of the day.

Increasingly these days, conservative insiders tend to be more critical of Poilievre’s approach than his Liberal, New Democrat and Bloc rivals.

Those critics include prospective star candidates who — only six months ago — were seriously thinking of running under the CPC banner.

Former prime minister Brian Mulroney spoke for many of them when he dismissed tactics to undermine the Liberal government and praised Trudeau’s leadership last week.

The Conservatives are incapable of pitching a big tent. They would rather have a pup tent in their own backyard.

Image: K9 Of Mine

Complete And Utter Insanity

The United States House Of Representatives has voted to impeach Joe Biden. Dana Milbank writes:

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) rose in the House Tuesday evening after the last vote. “For what purpose does the gentlewoman from Colorado seek recognition?” asked the presiding officer, Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.).

The gentlewoman sought recognition to unveil a parliamentary maneuver that would force a vote within 48 hours on H. Res. 503, “Impeaching Joseph R. Biden Jr., president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.”

No impeachment proceedings. No investigation. No evidence. No crimes. Not so much as parking ticket. Just a willy-nilly, snap vote to impeach the president, because Boebert dislikes Biden’s immigration policies. In her mind, “President Biden has intentionally facilitated a complete and total invasion at the southern border,” she charged on the House floor.

At this, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) flew into a fit of jealousy because Boebert had thought to use the maneuver (called a “privileged resolution”) to force an impeachment vote before Greene got a vote on her articles of impeachment against Biden. Boebert stole her impeachment articles, Greene whined to reporters, calling Boebert that name that every kindergartner fears: “Copycat.”

Congresswoman Jewish Space Lasers then confronted Boebert on the House floor and called her a “little b----” who “copied my articles of impeachment,” according to a Daily Beast account that Greene confirmed.

But Boebert was unmoved — because she’s on a mission from God. She filed her impeachment resolution because “I am directed and led by Him … by the spirit of God,” she told the evangelical Victory Channel.

God could not be reached for comment.

The Republicans then voted to send the resolution to two House committees to investigate Biden. They've got the process ass-backward. But, more importantly, they have exposed themselves as the Party of Complete and Utter Insanity.

Image: The Independent

The Whopper King

Pierre Poilievre is using Donald Trump's playbook to claw his way to power. He specializes in telling whoppers. Michael Harris writes:

As adroitly pointed out by Gary Mason in The Globe and Mail, Poilievre’s claims that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is responsible for the housing crisis is patently false. Speculative and predatory international investors, one of the main causes of high housing prices, do not make an appearance in the videos. As usual, these videos are emotion-heavy and fact-averse.

Nor is Trudeau keeping drug addicts on the street and in a mess by giving them the very substances that have ruined their lives. That’s how the opposition leader depicts safe injection sites, despite the informed opinions to the contrary of addiction specialists and police, who know that such sites save—not take— lives. 

That is done not, as Poilievre claims, by giving these addicts dirty drugs, like the lethal ones they buy in dark allies. They get the clean variety, and they get them in a rehabilitative setting. Again, Poilievre rates a 10 on the Pinocchio scale for this dangerous populism. But it plays well with people who like to think of Trudeau as a pusher.

Apparently, all it takes for Poilievre to spin out the whoppers like a sleepless Donald Trump ranting on Truth Social is his rage coach, a set of facts to mangle, and a target whose demise would be to his direct political advantage. 

For Poilievre, the target is Trudeau. But it's democracy that Poilievre really has in his sights:

Whether a Canadian has no roof over their head or not enough grocery money, it’s Trudeau’s fault. Poilievre’s political future depends on Canadians buying his junk political analysis. If they do, the Conservative Party of Canada will have done the same damage to Canadian democracy as Trump has done to American democracy.

The irony of Poilievre relentlessly training his “firehouse of falsehoods” on Trudeau is that it is totally unnecessary. There is a far better way to get Canadians to vote for you, Poilievre. Talk about Trudeau’s policy decisions, why you oppose them, and how you would have done a better job. You, too, can converse without sneering.

Lord knows there is a lot to talk about, including pipelines that should or shouldn’t have been bought; the success or failure of Canada’s aspirational carbon emission targets; whether Ottawa is or isn’t paying its fair share for health care; and so on. That way, people would see how your mind works, apart from the low art of sloganeering. They would see what you actually stand for, and why you would make a better prime minister than your favourite whipping boy. 

But the Conservative Party and its leader seem transfixed by what happened in the United States back in 2016. Trump proved that it is possible to lie and slander your way into the White House. He handed his Canadian political cousins the bully’s blueprint to power.

Canadians should be smart enough to see the ruse. Time will tell.

Image: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

National Cowardice

Tom Friedman begins his latest column with a series of rhetorical questions:

What if Mitch McConnell, at the close of his scalding speech on the Senate floor blaming Donald Trump for the riot that occurred at the Capitol on Jan. 6, had promised to use his every last breath to ensure that Trump was convicted on impeachment charges and could never, ever become president again?

What if Melania Trump, after the porn star Stormy Daniels said Trump had unprotected sex with her less than four months after Melania gave birth to their son, had thrown all of Trump’s clothes, golf clubs, MAGA hats and hair spray onto the White House lawn with this note, “Never come back, you despicable creep!”

What if the influential evangelical leader Robert Jeffress, after Trump was caught on tape explaining that as a TV star he felt entitled to “grab” women in the most intimate places — or after Trump was found liable by a Manhattan jury of having done pretty much just that to E. Jean Carroll — declared that he would lead a campaign to ensure that anyone but Trump was elected in 2024 because Trump was a moral deviant whom Jeffress would not let babysit his two daughters, let alone the country?

The questions explain why Donald Trump continues to get away with what he does. Trump, Friedman writes, is like a drug dealer

who thrives in a broken neighborhood, getting everyone hooked on his warped values. That is why he is doing everything he can to break our national neighborhood in two fundamental ways.

Trump has consistently tried to denigrate people who have demonstrated character and courage, by labeling them losers and weaklings. This comes easy to Trump because he is a man utterly without character — devoid of any sense of ethics or loyalty to any value system or person other than himself. And for him, politics is a blood sport in which you bludgeon the other guys and gals — whether they are in your party or not — with smears and nicknames and lies until they get out of your way.

Drug dealers thrive in neighborhoods where the residents don't have the courage to confront them. In other words, Trump continues to get away with his behaviour because of national cowardice. There's a lot of that going around in the United States.

Image: Wonderful Quote

The Bonnie And Clyde Factor

Donald Trump will be indicted for a second time today. Michael Harris isn't convinced that he'll ever face justice. To begin with, a judge who twice ruled in Trump's favour -- until she was reversed by a higher court -- will preside over the trial. But there is something else -- what Harris calls The Bonnie and Clyde Factor:

U.S. culture is steeped in romanticizing, if not glorifying, the bandit, the bad guy, and the outlaw.

Jesse James got a TV series; Growing up Gotti, based on the offspring of notorious Mafia boss John Gotti, became a reality TV show; the Godfather and its sequel made over $500 million; John Dillinger, once America’s most wanted gangster, has his own museum in Indiana; according to the New York Times, a photograph of William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, was bought at a flea market for ten dollars. The paper reported that the image of the legendary outlaw could be worth millions.

What do Americans find so irresistible about gunslingers, mobsters, and bank-robbers?

Could it be the notion that these outlaws are somehow freer than the rest of us, like the drug dealing bikers in Easy Rider? They don’t obey the normal rules, and they don’t come when called. They are a law unto themselves, and perhaps they remind a lot of people how timidly they have lived in harness to the usual conventions.

Could that be why Donald Trump’s popularity went up after he was indicted in New York?

A lot of Americans just don’t want Donny the Kid, their outlaw politician and bad-boy billionaire, to be caught. 

Something to think about.

Image: The New Yorker

A Train Wreck

David Johnston is gone. He was last week's sacrificial lamb. Intergovernmental Affairs leader Dominic Leblanc has suggested that the opposition parties construct their own solution to the problem. Susan Delacourt writes:

Only the most optimistic political observers, who have not been watching the antics in the Commons this spring, would give that idea much of a chance. Conservatives especially seem to be having too much fun with this whole issue, seeing it as an opportunity to cast the Trudeau government as elites in league with a foreign dictatorship.

Pierre Poilievre deals in Trumpian lies:

Have a look at how Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre sent Johnston packing on Friday night after the surprise — well maybe not a total surprise — announcement that the former governor general was stepping down as special rapporteur.

“Trudeau has been flailing around for months trying to cover up the help he got from Beijing’s Communist government,” Poilievre said in a post on Twitter.

Stop there for a moment: no matter how jaded one is with politics, this is a remarkable allegation to lay at the feet of the leader of a duly elected Canadian government — one that shouldn’t be allowed to sit out there, treated as fact. There is no evidence that the Liberals are in power because China messed with the last election and Poilievre has said, in less rabid moments, that he does not quarrel with the results of the 2021 vote.

Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet -- like Poilievre -- refused to view the top secret security documents which Johnston had gathered to make his case. Both Poilievre and Blanchet are selling grievance politics -- Blanchet from the east and Poilievre from the west.

Grievance politics raises hell. It doesn't propose solutions. I thought Mr. Singh was better than this. I now have my doubts.

And so, what have we got? A train wreck.

Image: AZ Quotes

Finally

Donald Trump has finally -- finally -- been indicted. Ruth Marcus writes in The Washington Post:

For me, a seven-count indictment — though we haven’t seen all the specific charges and accompanying details — is an amply justified demonstration of the rule of law in action and the principle that no person, not even a former president, is above the law.

At the time of the Mar-a-Lago search, there was a lot of talk, and not just from Trump allies, about whether Attorney General Merrick Garland had overstepped — whether he was transforming a matter of sloppy housekeeping into a federal case. I was not among those doubters, and the evidence that has since emerged only strengthened my conviction that Trump’s behavior was egregious and that his efforts to obstruct justice elevate this episode into the realm of criminality.

Among the evidence: reports that Trump aide Walt Nauta told federal agents that he moved boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago at Trump’s direction. “Investigators now suspect, based on witness statements, security camera footage, and other documentary evidence, that boxes including classified material were moved from a Mar-a-Lago storage area after the subpoena was served, and that Trump personally examined at least some of those boxes,” The Post’s Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey and Perry Stein reported in April. And in a sealed opinion, U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell found that the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege justified prosecutors’ decision to require Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to answer questions and turn over notes about the documents search.

All this convincingly distinguishes the Trump case from the seemingly parallel situations of former vice president Mike Pence and, more to the point, President Biden, both of whom came forward, in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago revelations, to volunteer that they had found classified documents among their private possessions.

Trump accuses Biden of doing the same thing he did -- which, of course, is absolute rubbish. But, then, Trump is a child. Chronologically, he's almost 77 years old. But his intellectual and emotional development froze at the age of seven.

Nevertheless, Trump will whine and complain for the rest of his life -- which will probably be spent appealing his convictions and in jail.

Image: The American Independent

Zombie Economics

There is an idea that should have died decades ago. Unfortunately, like a zombie from the film The Night of the Living Dead, it refuses to die. The idea is trickle-down economics. It's an idea that the Conservative Party of Canada keeps selling. Les Wittington writes:

As the next federal election draws nearer, Canadians will be hearing a continuing refrain from the Conservatives on the need for tax cuts to reduce the tax burden and help spur economic growth.

Party leader Pierre Poilievre is already playing this card, as has every leader of Canada’s main right-wing party going back 40 years. It was in the 1980s when so-called trickle-down economics—the notion that reduced taxes and benefits for corporations and the wealthy will trickle down and in time benefit everybody—took hold after being championed by United Kingdom prime minister Margaret Thatcher and American president Ronald Reagan.

And, amazingly, it is still prominent today. That’s the case despite the fact—as non-rich people in Canada, the United States, the U.K., and many other countries have witnessed for years—the idea has never worked.

The data has been gathered. Trickle Down doesn't work:

In a comprehensive study that attracted international attention, economists at the London School of Economics and Politics recently looked at this issue using data from 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1965 to 2015. Their report, entitled The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich, concludes that tax breaks of this kind across advanced economies have only helped one group: the rich. While the wealthy rack up bigger bank accounts, driving up income inequality, these tax reforms do nothing for the rest of the population because the measures have no significant effect on economic growth or unemployment, the analysts found.

Nevertheless, the bogus theory continues to be put into practice:

In the U.S., the highest marginal individual income tax rate has fallen more or less steadily from 70 per cent in 1980 to 37 per cent under former president Donald Trump’s 2017 tax revisions. In that event, the wealthiest five per cent of households received nearly half—42.6 per cent—of the Trump tax cuts, with the top 0.1 per cent receiving an average tax cut of $193,380 in 2018, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center concluded.

And in the U.S., the statutory corporate income tax rate has gradually been reduced from more than 50 per cent in the 1950s to its current 21 per cent today. America’s wealthy didn’t need more help, but they got it anyway as this lower corporate tax rate disproportionately benefits the rich. As a result, in 2018, for the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes than people in the middle class, according to economists at the University of California at Berkeley.

While all this has been going on in recent decades, average people were left far behind. The after-inflation hourly wage in recent years in the U.S. provides about the same purchasing power it had in 1978, according to the Pew Research Center. And, over the same period, the U.S. national debt has grown from $772-billion (or 33 per cent of GDP) to $30-trillion (or 123 per cent of GDP).

Reducing corporate income levies has been an international phenomenon fuelled by competitive policies. Between 1985 and 2019, the global average statutory corporate tax rate dropped from 49 per cent to 23 per cent, according to economists.

Canada has been part of this tax-cutting fixation. Since the 1960s, individual tax filers have been contributing an increasing share of the federal tax pie. More recently, the Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin governments and the Stephen Harper government cut the corporate rate cumulatively from 28 per cent to 15 per cent. By 2015, for every dollar corporations anted up in tax, Canadian individuals contributed $3.50.

Life is imitating art. We are living through our own Night of the Living Dead.

Image: 

The Bottom Of The Barrel

Michael Harris doesn't pull his punches. What the opposition parties are doing to David Johnston, he writes, is a "ghastly shitshow:"

The slimy assault on the reputation and character of David Johnston is unforgivable. If he had recommended a public inquiry into China’s alleged interference in Canadian elections, the same people who are slagging him would be carrying him around on their shoulders.  

Make no mistake about it. Johnston’s only sin is that he didn’t give them what they wanted: a political club to bludgeon the government. 

Unlike his puerile detractors, Johnston had reasons for making the call that he did. And under the right conditions—conditions befitting a national security inquiry—he was willing to share them with all party leaders who wanted to be informed. 

But facts aren't important to the opposition parties:

The swift-boaters in opposition, led by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, prefer not to see the top-secret documents, complete with an annex. They prefer innuendo to information. They prefer not knowing what Johnston has come to know. They prefer instead to lead an opposition witch-hunt to remove the former governor general from his job as special rapporteur, burning his reputation to the ground in the process. And, of course, that is part of the wider game: scandal-mongering Prime Minister Justin Trudeau out of office. 

The CPC under Pierre Poilievre is merely a branch plant of MAGA Republicans practising the same smash-mouth politics.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s prominent involvement in this partisan abuse of power is another matter. He knows that Johnston is a government appointment. The opposition has no authority to demand his resignation. That’s why the NDP motion was non-binding. Nor does the opposition have any rational right to bloviate about their lack of trust in Johnston without taking the trouble to find out why he recommended against calling a public inquiry in the first place.

Poilievre is just a mean little kid:

Canadians have come to expect National Inquirer-style politics from Poilievre. His irksome innuendo about why Trudeau left a teaching job mid-semester tells you all you need to know about this Trump wannabe. Most of his caucus gave him a standing ovation. No surprise there.  

I used to have a higher opinion of Singh. No more:

If Singh really thinks that the fix is in—that Johnston is Trudeau’s toady, put there to do his bidding, and that only a public inquiry can get to the bottom of China’s attempted interference in Canadian elections— he should stop playing games and get down to brass tacks.  

He needs to start by getting that security clearance and reading the documents so that he knows what he’s talking about. Forget about the Official Secrets Act. If what the NDP leader finds out confirms his view that a public inquiry is needed, he needs to suck it up and tell Canadians that. 

And right after that, he needs to abandon his deal with the Liberals to keep this minority government in power until 2025. Never mind about what happens to him personally. Surely the leader of the NDP doesn’t have less public-spirited courage than the intelligence source who leaked this murky story to the press.

As for all the Conservative bloviating, it's wise to recall a little history:

This is not the first time that CSIS has warned the federal government about China’s alleged interference in Canadian elections. Back in 2010, then-CSIS director Richard Fadden gave a speech at a Royal Canadian Military Institute event to a collection of police officers, intelligence experts, and military officials.  

A few months after that speech, the CBC reported what Fadden said. He alleged that there was foreign interference in Canadian politics. He said that several municipal politicians in British Columbia, and at least two cabinet ministers in other provinces, were under the influence of the Chinese government.

By 2010, the government of Stephen Harper had the CSIS report in which those allegations were made. So what happened?

The House Public Safety and National Security Committee demanded clarifications from Fadden. When Fadden was asked if he should apologize to the Chinese-Canadian community for his remarks, he said no. “I think the foreign power is the problem.”

The committee recommended that Fadden resign, and that Harper issue a public apology for his CSIS director’s allegations. 

Instead, the Harper government entered into mammoth economic deals with China, despite Fadden’s allegations, which he never took back. 

Nine per cent of Syncrude was sold to Sinopec, the giant Chinese petroleum and chemical company.  

Then-industry minister Tony Clement applauded the $4.6-billion deal as he toured the new Bethune Museum in Gravenhurst, Ont., riding in a rickshaw with the Chinese national anthem blaring from speakers.  

Then came the $15.1-billion Nexen deal, which saw the Canadian energy company pass into the hands of the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company. 

The opposition parties are sloshing around in the bottom of the barrel.

Image: The Hill Times

The DeSantis Boomering

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is desperately trying to weaponize his state's public education system. But a rebellion is brewing. The rebellion is coming from teachers. Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman write:

By now, it’s obvious that the reactionary culture warriors who want to reshape American education are inspiring a serious liberal counter-mobilization in response. Remarkably, this backlash to the backlash is gaining momentum in some of the reddest parts of the country.

A raucous school board meeting in Hernando County, Fla., on Tuesday night captured what’s striking about this new phenomenon. The scene featured teachers pointedly declaring that right-wing attacks are driving them to quit, even as parents and students forcefully stood up on their behalf, demanding a halt to the hysteria.

“I have never seen such fear from my colleagues as I have seen in the last two months,” social studies teacher Victoria Hunt told the board.

At Tuesday’s meeting, local teacher Daniel Scott gave a moving speech, declaring that the climate of rage is driving him out of the profession.

“I don’t feel that I can adequately provide a safe environment for my students anymore,” Scott said, denouncing the “draconian working conditions that are causing many such as myself to abandon this honored career.”

Meanwhile, Alyssa Marano, a math teacher who has resigned, rejected the oft-heard charge of LGBTQ indoctrination of students. “No one is teaching your kids to be gay,” she told the room. “Sometimes, they just are gay. I have math to teach. I literally don’t have time to teach your kids to be gay.”

Nearly 50 teachers are reportedly planning to resign in this school district. Lisa Masserio, president of the teachers union in Hernando County, says state laws and directives restricting educators are a key reason. She told us: “There is increased pressure and scrutiny on an already difficult job.”

What goes around comes around.

Image: Wonderopolis

Up To No Good

Jagmeet Singh has introduced a resolution to remove David Johnston from his role as special rapporteur. Michael Harris writes:

So David Johnston is a hack cashing in on a jammy per diem, the prime minister is a rank manipulator, and the report by a former governor general into alleged Chinese interference in Canadian elections, is just a little back-scratching from one old canoeing buddy to another.

That’s the latest Trudeau trashing coming down the pike, including blow-back from a spoiled brat media that screeched for a public inquiry — only to get a report that said the evidence doesn’t show the Trudeau government allowed or tolerated Chinese interference.

A report that said opposition politicians engaged in an “excessively partisan way” which eroded trust in Canadian institutions.

In the rush to judgment that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was playing footsie with the Chinese government, a lot of people who should have known better forgot something of fundamental importance in the alleged Chinese interference story. Top secret material is at the centre of this dustup.

Why is that important? It means normal rules do not apply. It is against the law to reveal classified information, even to clear up the many misconceptions surrounding this case. And for good reason. Answering these kind of unsourced leaks, even by publicly providing the missing context for them, could reveal sources and methods. In the spy world, that could cost lives.

The result of all this is that there is rising paranoia in the country. The man who hopes to benefit most from this is Pierre Poilievre. His reaction has been interesting:

After slandering and smearing everyone involved in producing Johnston’s report as untrustworthy, conflicted or conniving, he refused to meet with the special rapporteur. He also declined to get the security clearance offered by the PM that would have allowed him to see for himself why Johnston concluded what he did.

The man who insisted on a public inquiry to lay bare the facts of this dubious story simply didn’t want to know them himself. Because perhaps then he would have to deal with another inconvenient truth laid out by Johnston. “The challenge is this: what has allowed me to determine whether there was in fact interference cannot be publicly discussed.” In other words, Poilievre couldn’t proceed with his campaign of innuendo and slander.

The resolution the House is debating is non-binding. But that doesn't mean it's harmless. Beware the fearmongers. They're up to no good.

Image: Outreach Magazine

To The Right

Judy Rebick writes that things are shifting to the right in Canada. In Alberta, it's beginning to look like Danielle Smith will squeak through with a victory this week:

No less of a conservative than Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne has written:

“It would be easy to dismiss the many odd things that come out of Danielle Smith’s mouth as the product of a disordered mind. Easy, and accurate.

“The past week alone has provided several examples. Equating the vaccine-compliant majority with Hitler’s followers; suggesting police officers who enforced public-health orders should face criminal charges; calling for doctors to be removed from decision-making roles in the next pandemic, in favour of the military. ”

A friend who was active in the pro-choice struggle back in the 80’s in Alberta tells me Smith was the most ferocious anti-abortion person in the province. Smith, like most Tories who want to win, keeps her views on abortion hidden but she recently admitted that she looks to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as role models for Alberta.

In Ontario, the Ford juggernaut continues:

In Ontario despite massive opposition, the corrupt Doug Ford government is privatizing health care as fast as they can. Bill 60 cuts core services including surgeries and diagnostics out of public hospitals into private for-profit hospitals and clinics. This at the same time as public hospitals are starving for funds and staff.

According to the Ontario Health Coalition this will create two-tier health care in Ontario in which patients will be faced with an increasing array of user charges and extra-billing for care when they are sick, elderly, in need and least able to pay.

To drive back the privatization, the Ontario Health Coalition is organizing a massive citizen run referendum on privatizing health care. The voting takes place all over the province on May 25 and 26, as well as online. It’s a unique strategy that may or may not push the government back.

The Ontario Federation of Labour is organizing a cross province day of action on June 3 that includes opposition to privatization. The combination of both actions may force Ford to take a step back and just as importantly spark some energy in progressive social movements that has been sorely lacking.

There is one bright spot in Ontario:

We seem to be seeing a bit of a shift in Toronto where left-wing Olivia Chow is far ahead in the polls. After 15 years of right-wing leadership at City Hall, and a visible deterioration of living standards for most, people are looking for an alternative. The Toronto Labour Council just released an Environics poll of 1,001 eligible voters in the city. Fifty-five percent say the city should invest in better services even if it means a tax increase. This included the supporters of right-wing candidates.

The trend line is clear. That's why progressives need to work hard to counter the trend:

Canada has never been as moderate as we pretend. Because of massive opposition to free trade, we implemented neo-liberalism later than many other countries but just as ferociously. We need a huge rise in progressive social movements to fight further cutbacks, privatization and increased power to the billionaires who are increasingly running our lives.

Will they? Stay tuned.

Image: rabble.ca

DeSantis' Path to Power

At Joe Biden's inauguration, a young black poet, Amanda Gorman, read her poem "The Hill We Climb." Recently, the poem was removed from a school library on the objection of one parent. Greg Sargent writes:

That parent’s complaint, which was obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, was that the poem has indirect “hate messages” and would “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.” In reality, Gorman’s poem calls for bridging our divides to enable our country to live up to its promise, declaring this an incomplete project. The idea that this represents hate and indoctrination is farcical.

If anything, the poem offers a dramatically different message from racial discourse the right usually objects to, i.e., that our white-supremacist past and continuing structural racism render our country irredeemable. The poem says our nation “isn’t broken but simply unfinished.”

The man who made all this absurdity happen -- Florida Governor Ron DeSantis -- defended the school's decision:

“It was a book of poems that was in an elementary school library,” DeSantis told a convention on Friday, though it was in fact one poem. DeSantis insisted the school district in question merely “moved it from the elementary school library to the middle school library,” and ripped “legacy media” for calling this a “ban,” complaining of a “poem hoax.”

That’s a shameless but revealing characterization of what happened. It’s true that Gorman’s poem was removed from the elementary school section of the library at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes and that access was preserved for middle school students.

DeSantis objects to calling what happened a “ban.” But the book was placed beyond the reach of elementary school kids for no reason whatsoever. What message does it send that a school went along with the idea that the poem read by the young Black poet at Biden’s inauguration is inappropriate for children, on grounds that it constitutes hate and indoctrination?

It’s also important to note that in response to complaints from that same parent, the school removed two other titles about Black history: “Love to Langston” and “The ABCs of Black History.” Her main objection to these books? They are “CRT” — meaning critical race theory.

That’s preposterous. Those books were written expressly to introduce kids in lower grades to these topics. As Stephana Ferrell, co-founder of Florida Freedom to Read, told me: “The books celebrate Black history, culture and famous voices in a way that connects with elementary school students.” Isn’t that what we want?

Finally, it’s absurd that all this happened due to such specious objections from one person. The school’s rationale for removing the books is that they’re age-inappropriate, but it doesn’t even say why they’re inappropriate for elementary school kids. It’s obvious that the school tried to split the difference, not removing them entirely but still seeking to make this one parent happy.

American racism is very much alive and well. And DeSantis believes it will get him elected president.

Image: The Washington Post

Bonnie Crombie

Bonnie Crombie -- the mayor of Mississauga -- wants to lead the Liberal Party of Ontario. Martin Regg Cohn writes:

Crombie made big news last week as the mighty mayor who engineered Mississauga’s liberation from Peel Region. Score one for Her Worship, who persuaded the mighty premier to let her people go.

[Doug] Ford is crying foul. How dare Crombie pivot from mayor to premier quite so quickly on his watch?

“You can’t be … mayor and running for a leader,” Ford complained to reporters, peevishly if not indelicately: “You can’t put your butt on both sides of the fence.”

But that is exactly what Crombie is doing. And she is a force to be reckoned with:

Crombie first won election as an MP in 2008, but went down to defeat in the federal Liberal drubbing of 2011. Within months, she pivoted to Mississauga as a city councillor, ultimately winning the endorsement of Hazel McCallion to succeed her as mayor in 2014 (she won re-election last year with more than 78 per cent of the vote).

It’s a safe bet Crombie will be a “game changer,” in Ford’s parlance, for a Liberal leadership race that has so far fallen flat. More than any rival, she can claim name recognition and fundraising cognition; she is good at governing but also not bad at goading, thanks to her years in opposition.

Crombie is a centrist:

“It’s very important that the Liberal party be brought back to the centre, which is where our roots are,” she told the Star. Boasting that she has no baggage from the previous Liberal governments of Kathleen Wynne or Dalton McGuinty, Crombie argued that the party “moved too far to the left” under their rule.

She believes the Liberals’ leftward drift helped drive voters into Ford’s arms. But history records that the McGuinty and Wynne Liberals won majority governments when they ate the NDP’s lunch with a lurch to the left; perhaps Crombie, like Ford, is less preoccupied by today’s New Democratic Party.

Indeed, she seems more focused on geography than ideology. Despite her mayoral antecedents, Crombie is mindful of the Liberal party’s rural deficit ― the party has been in a rut outside the big cities since the McGuinty years.

It's hard to predict the future. But one thing is certain: Doug Ford is worried.

Image: CBC

The American Right To Be Stupid

What's going on in the United States is truly puzzling. Michael Enright writes:

In February, 2013, in one of his first public utterances as U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry told a group of Europeans that in America, people have the right to be stupid.

As his listeners choked on their canapés, he went on to explain. Sort of:

“Now I think that’s a virtue, I think that’s something worth fighting for. The important thing is to have tolerance, to say, you know, you can have a different point of view.”

Recently, it appears that Americans have become tragically tolerant of stupidity:

A recent analysis of IQ test scores indicates that the Intelligence Quotient test scores of Americans has dropped over a 13-year period.

For researchers, this is a troubling reversal of the so-called Flynn Effect, which suggests that IQ scores rose consistently during the 20th century and would continue to do so. However, this does not mean that Americans are stupid.

In a 2006 study of IQ and global inequality in 190 countries, the American levels pretty much averaged those in other industrialized countries.

In his important 1963 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the noted historian Richard Hofstadter traces a suspicion of intelligence back to the founding of the republic by religious fundamentalists. The early settlers were uncomfortable with glorifying any virtue that wasn’t godly.

Hofstadter links the historic rise of religious and evangelical fundamentalism with anti-intellectual bias in all walks of American life, particularly pronounced in the politics of the country.

It appears that when religious fundamentalists rise to positions of power, stupidity becomes a pandemic.

Image: Psychology Today

The Debt Debacle

They're having a fight these days in Washington about paying the nation's bills. It's not about new bills. It's about paying the bills that have already been put on the national credit card. Twenty-five percent of that debt was racked up in the last four years under Donald Trump. No matter. Republicans are horrified by the amount of money their country borrows. Joe Biden is trying to resolve the issue. Jennifer Rubin writes:

For starters, Biden never said he wouldn’t negotiate with Republicans. He never said a debt ceiling bill had to pass before negotiations commenced. For months, he said that he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling but he would talk about spending cuts. He insisted Republicans put forth their own budget — as he did — to lay out the parties’ contrasting visions. Only when McCarthy brought up and passed a spending bill did the president agree to serious negotiations.

The White House insists Republicans moved toward the president in finally passing a spending plan. (The president’s aides pointed to a similar negotiation in 2011 for simultaneous budget negotiations before the debt ceiling was finally raised.) Certainly, the White House did flush out Republicans, although the latter voted on a spending plan, not a complete budget, which would have demonstrated the full extent of the GOP’s fiscal irresponsibility.

But there has been no deal and it's crunch time on June 1st. There are some who say Biden should simply ignore the Republicans and claim they must, under the 14th Amendment, pay their bills:

That, however, includes significant risks, including the loss of support among the usual suspects, notably Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.). White House aides point out that a legal challenge over the 14th Amendment would be inevitable, and while the legal battle played out, the markets would be in turmoil. Indeed, the White House detected some troubling movement in the bond markets recently, though that calmed down once reports of constructive negotiations emerged.

Biden has some wiggle room. He can play good cop and bad cop:

While his emissaries talk to Republicans (who now understand their outlandish budget cuts aren’t happening), a discharge position, a proposal to invoke the 14th Amendment and pressure the 18 Republicans from districts Biden won in 2020 can ensure that Biden need not give away much. That gives him the best chance to avoid imperiling a stunning economic recovery or rewarding Republicans for their temper tantrum.

Time will tell whether that strategy will work.

Image: You Tube

Temperamentally Incapable

Readers of this space know that I have no patience for Pierre Poilievre. I took a break recently, thinking that I had obsessed too much about the man, and that I needed to regain some perspective. But this morning the newspapers are full of Poilievre's refusal to meet with David Johnston. Susan Delacourt writes:

For a couple of hours on Wednesday, Conservatives mumbled that Pierre Poilievre had turned down a chance to meet with Johnston on the foreign-interference issue because of an, ahem, scheduling issue — not enough notice to make the get-together possible.

But clearly some decision was made to be more discourteously candid as the day wound down, when the Conservative leader’s office clarified what it really thought of Mr. Johnston and his position as “special rapporteur” weighing next steps in investigating foreign interference in Canada’s democracy.

This was the hastily scrawled statement about fake jobs, cosy friendships with Trudeau and so on. Then, when Poilievre met with reporters on Thursday morning, he doubled down, saying he deliberately chose not to meet Johnston. “No. He is Justin Trudeau’s ski buddy, his cottage neighbour, his family friend, and a member of the Trudeau Foundation, which got $140,000 from Beijing. He has a fake job and he’s unable to do it impartially, he needs to simply hand it over and allow an independent public inquiry into Beijing’s interference.”

Prime Ministers don't talk like that. The G7 is meeting this weekend. Do we want Mr. Poilievre to represent us on the international stage? The man is temperamentally -- as well as intellectually -- incapable of doing the job.

Image: Radio Canada.ca

Enforcing Ignorance

In the United States, there is a movement -- and it's gaining momentum -- to make students ignorant. Exhibit A is the state of Florida. Jennifer Rubin writes:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who earned two Ivy League degrees, has apparently decided that making Florida schools and universities the laughingstock of the country is good politics. The Republican already went after public school teachers with his “don’t say gay” bill, championed an effort to prevent instruction about history that might upset students (make that White students), and banned Advanced Placement classes in African American studies. Now, he has decided to shred the curriculums of Florida’s public universities, inviting students interested in unapproved subjects to go to California (!) or other states that don’t control what can and cannot be taught.

This week, he signed a bill banning state spending on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in public universities. The Post reported: “These programs often assist colleges in increasing student and faculty diversity, which can apply to race and ethnicity, as well as sexual orientation, religion and socioeconomic status.”

Worse: “The law also forbids public colleges from offering general education courses — which are part of the required curriculum for all college students — that ‘distort significant historical events,’ teach ‘identity politics’ or are ‘based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, or economic inequities.’”

Who decides what “distorts”? How can the state prohibit instruction about, say, the consequences of Jim Crow in a U.S. history survey class? Well, that’s up to the regime DeSantis has installed. We now see the full extent of the governor’s authoritarian impulse to control independent sources of information and to eviscerate professional standards that provide the basis for challenging state action and abuse of power.

Thomas Jefferson believed that no democracy could survive without a well-educated citizenry. Obviously, Desantis is not interested in democracy. And he's put the people in place who share his objectives:

If newly installed University of Florida president and former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse had an ounce of integrity, he would resign in protest of this wholesale annihilation of academic freedom. (The Chronicle of Higher Education, however, reported recently that, a month into his tenure, “Sasse has made few public appearances and declined a number of interview requests from local media.” His obsequiousness to his partisan boss and contempt for academic independence should surprise no one.)

DeSantis is not alone in the assault on academic freedom; he is simply the highest-profile MAGA figure attempting to suppress freedom and dissent. The American Association of University Professors recently documented 57 bills in 23 states aimed at undermining academic freedom. The AAUP explained: “The current round of legislation reinforces a right-wing communication effort to attack public colleges and universities on the grounds that they are ideologically outside the mainstream, hostile to conservative views and focused on indoctrinating students into 'woke’ ideology.” The report added: “These bills are only one piece of a broader campaign to remake public higher education that includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ hostile takeover of the New College of Florida.”

Anti-democratic, nationalist movements have historically attacked universities as hotbeds of elite and foreign influence, seeking to bend instruction to the will of the state and turn academics into handmaidens of state propaganda. Right-wing pundits who have whined incessantly about the disfavored status of conservative academics (largely because of peer or student pressure) have had precious little to say about state-driven attacks against academic freedom from a petty autocrat. (Their caterwauling about political correctness on campus is the sort of projection and victimology that seeks to cast oppressors as victims and tyrants as saviors of Western culture.)

And DeSantis is making noises about running for president.

Image: The Washington Post

Not The Facts

Americans think that the economy is terrible. That's strange -- because the data suggests things are pretty good. Paul Krugman writes:

Since December 2021 the U.S. economy has added almost six million jobs while the unemployment rate has fallen from 3.9 percent to 3.4 percent, a level not seen since the 1960s. And no, unemployment isn’t low because Americans have dropped out of the labor force: The percentage of adults either working or looking for a job has declined, but that’s almost entirely a result of an aging population, and labor force participation is right back in line with prepandemic projections.

To be sure, the return of serious inflation after decades of quiescence rattled everyone, and not just because it reduced real incomes. (Real wages fell during Ronald Reagan’s second term, but people felt pretty good about the economy anyway.) One benefit of low inflation is that it gives people one less thing to worry about; according to the American Psychiatric Association, inflation was a major source of stress during 2022.

But inflation, while still elevated, has come way down. The inflation rate over the past six months was 3.3 percent, compared with 9.6 percent last June. The price of gasoline, a major political talking point last year, is now more or less normal compared with average earnings.

And people have noticed. In October, 20 percent of Americans named inflation as the most important problem facing the nation; that’s now down to 9 percent.

So what's happening? Facts don't seem to matter:

The general rule seems to be that Americans are feeling good about their personal situation but believe that bad things are happening to other people. A Federal Reserve study found that in late 2021 a record-high percentage of Americans were positive about their own finances while a record low were positive about the economy. We don’t have results for 2022 yet, but my guess is that they’ll look similar.

A newly published study shows that who holds the White House has huge effects on views of the economy; this is true for supporters of both parties, although the effect appears to be about twice as strong for Republicans. The study also finds, however, that these changes in reported views don’t appear to have any effect on actual spending — that they reflect “cheerleading,” as opposed to “actual expectations.”

Beyond that, there’s good reason to believe that media reports about the economy have had a strongly negative bias. One thing that has gone really, really right in America lately is job creation, yet the public consistently reports having heard more negative than positive news about employment.

The propagandists are having a field day. Americans are paying attention to them -- not the facts.

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