Sunday Post

Things become gong shows due to a phenomenal lack of critical thinking and it is not always from the place one expects:

At first, comparisons to wartime seemed a bit silly. All we were being asked to do, after all, was stay indoors. As the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic 100 days ago, the commanders had everything under control: the borders, the epidemiology, the strategy, support for shuttered businesses and their employees. Traditionally, wartime puts those of us left on the home front to work whether we like it or not. This was entirely the opposite: the worst we would have to put up with — in theory, assuming government aid was as advertised — was the indignity of idleness. Collective inaction would flatten the curve, the forces of COVID-19 would be beaten back, and summer would be saved. Peace in our time.

And then it instantly turned to quagmire. Canadians watched slack-jawed as COVID-19 breached our most fundamental defences. You don’t need Sun Tzu’s perspicacity to inform people arriving in Canada of their responsibility to self-isolate, and exactly what self-isolation means — go directly home, do not stop for groceries, do not receive visitors. I just did it, right there, in half a sentence. But we couldn’t manage it: Where information was distributed at all, it was excessively complex even as it failed to deliver the central message. 

But why, considering the plodding and stupefying pace at which the government works, would Canadians place their complete trust, even their lives, in the hands of corrupt and stupid members of Parliament and any organisation or country it latched onto?

Quite simply, mental, moral and physical laziness. Critical thinking takes work (even if it was taught) and action takes even more work and patience (letting a government run the wheels of political industry ensures that nothing gets accomplished). Why bother?:

Complacency about our freedoms in Canada is not well-founded. There are things to be careful about, quite apart from the way government abbreviated our rights during the COVID-19 pandemic panic – hopefully, but not certainly, temporarily. There are fundamental causes for concern.

First, Canadians are generally unduly and dangerously deferential to authority. We often defer to status and presumed expertise – to judges, bank presidents, medical experts, university professors, senior bureaucrats and other assorted pundits and sages. After all, despite the fact that these people’s views are sometimes vague, suspect and contradictory, they must be more intelligent and better informed than we are. Otherwise, how did they get to their positions?

Our well-known politeness and civility accentuate our deference to authority. Of course, as we look around the world – at the divisive and confusing Brexit debate in Britain, for example, or at Donald Trump’s shambolic and angry United States – we might congratulate ourselves on a Canadian restraint that helps avoid debilitating and absurd excess. But this is not a straightforward calculus. 

Excessive deference and restraint only bury ideas that have merit and marginalize their advocates. They alienate dissenters from the mainstream political system, limiting participation in public debate and the flow of contrary ideas. They promote easy acceptance of things that an engaged populace should be quarrelling about. They leave us vulnerable to those to whom we defer and the direction they would take us.

We freely elect those who govern us, that is true, but our political process and constitutional structure is seriously flawed. Our first-past-the-post electoral system gives little room to smaller but important political parties that garner significant percentages of the popular vote. The prime minister and the executive branch of government dominate the elected legislature in the lawmaking process. This has been particularly evident during the pandemic, when vast amounts of money have been spent and radical programs put in place with minimal parliamentary oversight. Ordinary members of Parliament? The first Trudeau described backbench MPs as “nobodies” when they were not on Parliament Hill. They scurry around, taking orders from the prime minister if they are members of the governing party, powerless and irrelevant if they are not. Parliamentary procedures and devices – omnibus bills, for example – emasculate parliamentary debate. And the country’s constitution is lopsided, giving the provinces complete power over cities, where most Canadians live, depriving municipal governments of the authority and financial resources to do what their citizens want and need.

People are concerned about China ... something-something-something:

Reacting to China’s thuggish actions of charging Canadians Michael Kovrig & Michael Spavor with ‘spying,’ Trudeau expressed mere ‘disappointment.’

**

Canada’s defeat in its bid for a United Nations Security Council seat, coupled with China‘s decision to charge two arbitrarily detained Canadians with espionagem marks the worst week for Canadian foreign policy in recent memory, says one former ambassador to Beijing.

(Sidebar: this defeat.)

Not bloody likely.

Justin's dad's love for China, his love for China, donation from Chinese businessmen, the failed trade trip to China, trying to replace the US with China, Meng Wanzhou, the Liberals' lucrative comfort with China - take one's pick. China isn't a massive paper dragon with which Canada must to battle. It is an ideological cash cow to be leeched off of.


This China and this leeching:

China’s Communist regime is determined to block probes into the origins of the novel coronavirus. And influential Western scientists are going along with Beijing’s effort to suppress any inquiry. They’re declaring “solidarity with the scientists and health professionals of China,” as a letter signed by some two dozen experts in the journal Lancet put it.

**

Australian academic Clive Hamilton says a legal challenge by a wealthy British businessman who advocates closer economic and diplomatic ties to Beijing has halted the release in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom of his new book, which is critical of the Chinese Communist Party.

Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World was scheduled for release digitally Thursday in the U.K. and the U.S. and July 1 in Canada, with hardcover distribution to follow.

But a defamation lawsuit by businessman Stephen Perry has put it on hold.

In Canada, Toronto-based Optimum Publishing International has printed copies of the book ready for release on July 3 but will not distribute them to bookstores until the legal issue is resolved in the U.K.

Not getting the UN seat still smarts:

On the lighter side of this story, what do you think it means for Mr. Trudeau? Well it means he’s wasted a hell of a lot of time, and a hell of a lot more money on a useless bid to join a morally bankrupt institution. And he has squandered relations with other countries by muting Canada’s voice on other matters, particularly China’s role in the current pandemic. Not to mention that the energy, time and money put into this vain and futile effort, if expended on a worthier goal — say freeing the two Canadian citizens, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, now in a Chinese jail, undergoing we know not what indignities and pain — might have had a positive outcome.

At best the seat at the UN Security Council was sought as a kind of “trinket,” a kind of showpiece to allow Trudeau to claim his superiority over the Harper administration. This government, in fact, is all about showpieces and trinkets, shallow gestures and little substance.

**

Five years later, what the Trudeau Liberals are forgetting, or don’t want to admit, is that the people who were trashing Trudeau’s bid for a seat on the Security Council leading up to the vote were luminaries of the Canadian and global left.

At least three petitions submitted to the United Nations General Assembly prior to the vote, signed by hundreds of so-called “progressive” individuals and organizations, either said Canada under Trudeau didn’t deserve a seat on the Security Council, or were highly critical of his record on everything from climate change to what they called his support of Israel.

Among the signatories were such global and Canadian luminaries of the left as David Suzuki, Greta Thunberg, Noam Chomsky and Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, along with academics, climate scientists, environmental and labour activists, artists and more.

Their petitions portrayed Trudeau’s government as everything from a major arms exporter, to a lackey of Israel, to a war monger, to an environmental laggard, to a promoter of pipelines and fossil fuel subsidies, to a persecutor of Indigenous Canadians.

Oh, burn.




Gropers of a particular feather stick together:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday his party takes “extremely seriously” any allegations of sexual harassment but didn’t say whether his previous “zero tolerance” policy remains in place as new accusations against a Liberal MP came to light.

**

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wouldn’t address new allegations that a Member of Parliament currently facing serious criminal charges was previously allowed to seek re-election as a Liberal despite a sexual harassment allegation.

Marwan Tabbara, who represents the Ontario riding of Kitchener South-Hespeler, left the Liberal caucus this month after it was revealed he was charged in April with criminal harassment of a woman, break-and-enter, and assault against the same woman and a man. ...

On Friday, Trudeau did not deny new allegations reported by CBC that the Liberal party knew of an earlier allegation of sexual harassment made against Tabbara.

Tabbara was approved to seek re-election as a Liberal in 2019 despite the party’s internal investigation into allegations of inappropriate touching and unwelcome sexual comments against a female staff member during his initial 2015 election campaign, CBC reported, attributing the information to anonymous party sources.

Yep, it's summer:

Around noon Friday, Henry said he was made aware of something happening at the adjacent former federal Camp Ipperwash – signed back to the Kettle and Stony Point First Nation in 2016 pending cleanup, after the land was expropriated and 16 families were displaced in 1942.

Henry said he saw one of five cannabis shops on the former camp lands – still under the control of the Department of National Defence, and where pushes for clean drinking water and housing infrastructure have so far gone unheeded, he said – on fire.

Seventy years ago, a war to split one nation started. This year, it was scarcely remembered:

Wreaths were laid and the call of a single bugle rang out near Parliament Hill this morning as a subdued ceremony was held to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War.

The ceremony, attended by a small group of Canadian and Korean officials and a handful of surviving veterans from the conflict, was the first of its kind in months after COVID-19 forced the cancellation of numerous military commemorations.

Because it's Fathers' Day:

A statue of Pierre Elliot Trudeau has been vandalized in the city of Vaughan.

Vandals painted blackface on the statue.

HA!