2.65 Billion: It’s Harper’s Fault

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Assorted rightie bloggers are expressing their outrage that Trudeau has committed Canada to spending 2.65 billion dollars helping 3rd world kleptocracies “fight climate change”.

As I said at Kate’s and repeated at BCF,

Idiot.

However, the real problem lies with Harper and the Cons not digging in and discrediting the global warming farce while they had a majority. 20 million tossed at sceptical researchers – ideally led by Steve MacIntyre – and the whole scam could have been buried forever.

Instead, Harper and the Cons pretended that global warming was a thing. They didn’t actually do anything about it; but they did not use their time in government to demolish the Green Blob.

20 million versus 2.65 billion simply because the Conservatives were chickenshits.

Harper might have had an excuse with the minorities. He had no excuse with a majority. He knew the science was bogus and the economics laughable. But he wanted to avoid offending the climate true believers. So he punted the file and we are stuck with 2.65 billion now and carbon taxes and, Lord knows, what else.

A twenty million dollar Commission looking at the science and the economics could have torpedoed the crazier claims of the warmists and built a solid wall of science preventing Trudeau and Dion and the other dimwits from fashionably screwing the economy.

Harper lacked the courage of his convictions on this file and many others. Good riddance.

Red Tide in the Atlantic #ELXN42

CBC – which seems to have a rather nice web presence tonight – is calling Libs elected or leading in 32 Maritime seats. Clean sweep.

This is a much anticipated and predicted result. If there is anything interesting here it is that the NDP got no where.

However, it is a net loss to the CPC of 14 seats which will be challenging to pick up. It is also a loss of 6 to the NDP. Strategic voting? Have to have the popular vote to figure that out but it looks a bit as if the ABC vote went to the Grits. (Handy Wiki map here.)

 

The Burbs #ELXN42

Who has let those dreadful people in?

The night before E-Day and the campaigns are pushing, hard or not, to hit the last few swing seats. Smart war rooms have closed down the news cycle and are throwing what resources they have left at GOTV efforts for the Day. (Really smart campaigns have been working the advanced polls to get as many of their committed voters “in the box” before E-Day as possible.

The media seem to be hedging a bit as the polls are pretty inconclusive – JT up a bit, but then there is EKOS… – but they are all pretty sure Harper screwed himself being seen at a Ford Brothers shindig on Saturday night.

Chris Selley marked the desperation:

And then, there was Saturday night — a brand new low for a conservative party that has abandoned so very many of its conservative principles. Drugs or no drugs, the Fords’ politics is a flailing, nihilist mashup of spite, fantasy and delusion masquerading as “Respect for Taxpayers.” The Tories wear that now. If they lose on Monday, they will have utterly debased themselves doing so. national post 

Young Justin, fresh from discovering that one of his key campaign aides has been peddling advice on how to reach out to the new Prime Minister, went deep Annex on Harper:

Trudeau, asked during an appearance in Montreal about the prime minister’s association with the Ford brothers, said Harper should be “embarrassed that he’s having to count on the support of Rob Ford for his re-election.” national post

The Fords touch a very deep-rooted snobbery which lies at the heart of Canadian politics. Rob Ford’s fall from a weird sort of grace was, from the Annex and the deep bunkers of the CBC and the Toronto Star all the way to the languor of the virtual common room which the Globe and Mail effects, a much needed correction in the Canadian universe. People like the Fords, brash, uncouth, beer-drinking – Labatts not artisanal – get up the noses of the decent people who recycle, cry for refugees and are convinced global warming is the moral challenge of our age.

Oddly the people whining about Harper sharing a stage with the Fords were not going to vote for Harper. The question is will Ford Nation turn out? Harper probably has very little time for the Fords; but he needs the votes they can bring in order to win the suburban ridings which ring the orange and red ridings of downtown Toronto.

Like most Canadian elections, this election is not going to be won in the downtown core of Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver or Calgary: it will be won in the burbs. Burbs where Ford Nation and the bluer sort of Tory feel right at home. The years that Jason Kenny has invested in the Sikh and Chinese and Hindu communities have made whole tracts of the burbs winable CPC seats. An ethnic strategy which recognizes the social conservatism of many ethnic communities is about to be tested.

The Canadian “middle class” does not live downtown. It lives in cul d’sacs and townhouses and Vancouver Specials. For a decade Harper and the CPC have been weaning it away from the Liberal Party. Ford Nation is about aspiration.

Aspirational, middle class, voters are a huge part of this election. Either the CPC strategy has worked and these voters will stay aligned with Harper and the CPC and their pocketbooks  or it will have failed and those voters will take a flyer on JT.

Chris and Justin are “shocked and appalled” that Harper would take seriously these sorts of people. It will be interesting to see if Harper has made an astute political bet or if Ford Nation is just déclassé bluster.

Enter the Dragon

The French language debate – a rite in which each leader demonstrates his or her grasp of French and Quebec issues – turned up something interesting. Mulcair and Trudeau think the niqab is perfectly suitable attire for taking your citizenship oath: Harper and Duceppe don’t.

Neither, it turns out, do 80% of Canadians and 90% of Quebecers. There’s a fine old fight going on at Dawg’s blog in which Dawg himself says,

The niqab, after all, is just synedoche for the Muslim presence in Canada. In the service of hatred and fear, articles of ethnic clothing are completely interchangeable.

The electorate has become a mob. And how easy it was. dr.dawg

While I certainly don’t agree that the electorate has become a mob, I think Dawg is exactly right when he says that the niqab has become “synedoche for the Muslim presence in Canada” (synedoche means a part which represents the whole (yes, I had to look it up too)).

All of a sudden the people of Canada have the opportunity to express their views about Muslim immigration. Perhaps not directly – after all the niqab is not a particularly good proxy for Islam as it is not required religiously and not all Muslim women feel compelled to wear it – but far more overtly than the topic has ever been broached before.

Dawg ascribes all manner of sinister motives to Harper, his Aussie advisor and the CPC in bringing this up at all. For all I know this may very well be an exercise in wedge politics. If it is then it is about time that this wedge be tested.

Immigration policy in Canada has never really been put to any sort of popular test. Nor has the ruling class’s conviction that the only thing which matters about Islam is Islamophobia. Dawg lines up nicely with the ruling class and, in the lively comments, states,

There IS no legitimate debate about the degree a government should be prepared to extend human rights to minorities. Rights should never be up for debate, and frankly I don’t give a damn what Chantal (Hebert) says to the contrary. dr dawg

Apparently, well over 80% of Canadians disagree with this position.

Partially, I think, the debate turns on whether one sees Muslim immigration as just another instance of immigration or if one sees such immigration, particularly from the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia, as potentially more problematic than other sorts of immigration.

There are thousands of Muslim immigrants to Canada who lead rich, full integrated lives as Canadians. I am thinking particularly of the several hundred thousand Ismailis who arrived as refugees in the 1970s and have gone on to build vibrant, integrated communities all over Canada.

However, there is a growing minority of Muslims who have moved to Canada but who seem incapable of leaving their old countries, customs and culture behind. The burkas at Walmart are one thing, the demand for segregated swimming times another, the terrorism and support for Sharia law yet another.

Over at Dawg’s the argument seems to be that even noticing that there are Muslim immigrants who do not integrate well into Canadian society is bigoted or racist. Which it may well be; but Canadians have the right to at least discuss how they would like their country to evolve. Should we welcome immigrants from parts of the world where anti-Semitism is matter of fact? Where women are treated as chattels? Where support for the barbarity of Sharia law is a religious duty?

Harper – perhaps by design, perhaps by accident – has given Canadians the opportunity to discuss and, maybe, vote based upon their particular answer to the question of whether, in general, we should accommodate the religious, cultural and political demands of Islam.

I suspect he has won the election by giving Canadians that choice.

[And, as a bonus, I rather doubt that there are any Canadians other than the editorial board of the Globe and Mail, who don’t take a certain satisfaction when convicted terrorists are stripped of their Canadian citizenship. Just as few Canadians lamented when various Nazi war criminals lost their citizenship.]

Debate, eh?

Well I watched pretty much the whole thing. One of the 30,000 or so people who did on YouTube.

Justin showed up. Wore pants, albeit short pants, and sounded like a really quite good university debater. Tom was unctuous. Lizzie was, sorry to say, drowned out. And Steve looked very much like the sort of adult one would want to have as Prime Minister. (And I don’t like Steve.)

No one landed a zinger. No one ran over time. Everyone was quite polite and very Canadian. On my Twitter feed one American who was watching the Republican Gong show could not help but compare and contrast and wish the US had something like the pretty solid debate we had tonight.

My one note is this: Trudeau, Mulcair and Harper all talked over Lizzie May. It grated. I kept hoping that Harper would “white knight” Liz and say something simple like “let her finish”, or “Miss May was speaking”. It would have made Mulcair and Trudeau look like the bullies they so clearly are. It would have been smart politics too. Liz put up a credible performance tonight. Yes, of course she is a lunatic; but she was not wrong on C-51. She is a weirdly decent person and that came through.

Harper could easily have called the other boys to order and demonstrated the real leadership his campaign is trying to project. He didn’t.

It was not a fatal error, but it was an opportunity missed.

Dog Days

In my business summer is quiet, very quiet, too quiet. Exciting as it is that there may be an election called tomorrow it does nothing for that sense of sleepy summer days.

So I threw a proposal out yesterday which could make for a good deal of fun. And there are two others waiting for people who are also doing the long weekend thing.

But summer time is about spending a bit of time actually off duty. Relaxing. Having a beer in the hot afternoon. Taking most of Friday off. Swimming in the lake. Watching the full moon rise all orange with a bit of smoke and cloud.

If Harper calls an election tomorrow he knows virtually the entire country will ignore the call until after Labour Day. All he is really doing is shutting down the third party advertisers and bleeding the campaign treasuries of his opponents. It is a shitty thing to do but it is one of the prerogatives of the Premiership.

This promises to be a very odd election. Going in Harper has an economy in a weird form of freefall, a decent but deeply unexciting record, a dollar which is oversold and an electorate which is mildly hostile. The last is the most interesting thing. For all of the “I hate Harper” sentiment reported in the media the word “hate” is likely too strong. A better way of putting it might be that the electorate wish there was a better, more inspiring, leader on offer. Justin looked hot until people actually listened to him. Mulcair has never looked hot.

The Harper haters are legion and they win the social media game going away. However, there are all of a couple of thousand people who check in with #cdnpoli with any regularity and while this and other hashtags will inform the dimmer sections of the MSM it is unlikely to have much actual effect. If, as I suspect, JT is destined to be an also-ran, the question in this election is whether or not Mulcair can fit together all the Canada’s into an “anyone but Harper” wave. It is a difficult trick. It is not enough to hit 35% of the popular vote, that vote has to translate to seats. Somehow the NDP has to reach the aspirational middle class out in the burbs.

Harper has made a study of the burbs. He knows the hockey mad dads and the security mums. He knows all about New Canadians who want to get on the ladder to success and, if they can’t make it, make sure their kids can. In a sixty day campaign Harper can hit the burbs and talk about lower taxes and better government. He can paint the NDP as the public service unions’ poodle. He can run against the insanity which is the Wynne government.

The Tories have been a deeply uninspiring governing party. In a sense their principle claim will be that the ship of the Canadian state has not yet sunk under their command. Which, realistically, is an accomplishment but it is not extraordinary. Harper is not going to suddenly become a “great Prime Minister” in the next sixty days. Instead, I suspect he will run a cautious campaign in which he and his government will make something of a virtue out of their blandness.

I can’t imagine any voter going to vote will be fired by a great passion for Harper or the Tories; rather, this election will be won if voters see the alternatives to Harper as riskier than he is. In choppy seas there is a lot to be said for the patient, cautious captain who knows his ship and crew intimately.

What this election lacks is an actual issue. There is not a single thing which, in the dog days of summer, will grab the electorate. Senate Reform? Please. Climate Change? Over. The Budget? Plus/minus a billion it’s balanced. National Unity? Is that even a thing any more? Immigration? What are you, a racist? Gay Marriage? Done Deal. Jobs? Not yet. Scandal? Only if you live in the Annex. Security? Cuts Harper’s way and will be ignored.

So the only actual issue is whether or not people “hate” Harper enough to vote for the unknown. Can’t quite see that myself.

Election Fever! Liberal Collapse Edition

Supermoon Rising – Liberals Setting – Election Coming

In my little resort town the yahoos are drinking hard and yelling now that it is too dark to run the jet skis – but with a full moon rising that may not last.

The idea that we are only a day or two away from the thrills and chills of a long writ and a Fall election has yet to make the rounds at Timmy’s and, even after it is called, it will be a week or two before this solidly NDP neck of the woods pays much attention.

The economy is crappy. But the boys are still hauling logs down the road in front of my place. The old guys I drink with once in a while, NDP to a man, will, occasionally rise to a joke about Justin. But they just hate Harper. Incoherently, viscerally, they hate him. They have hated him for the decade he’s been in power and they are not going to change now.

Mulcair is not Harper and that is really all that matters.

On the grander scale, outside the “yokels with pitchforks” demo there are plenty of Harper haters. The question for the NDP is, “Are there enough?”

The coming election, whether called this Sunday or a few weeks from now, will be all about whether or not the NDP can attract enough Liberal Harper haters to win. The seeming collapse of Justin – well deserved but is it real – puts a segment of the Liberal vote into play. (The dimwits in the Maritimes will vote Liberal as a matter of limbic function.) In a hundred ridings across Canada Liberals will either stick with the sinking ship Trudeau or they will jump. If they jump the question is which way.

There are plenty of left Liberals but, to be fair, they are the dumbest and likely to be most loyal to Justin. Much as they hate Harper they love the idea that the Liberal Party really is the natural governing party of Canada.

Liberals of convenience – principally the New Canadians who see the Liberal Party as a way of paving their future – are a wild card. Politically they trend conservative, culturally they have no particular stake in the identity politics of the left simply because so many of them are doing so well. There is no particular reason to believe that Chinese Liberals or Sikh Liberals, when they realize that the good ship Trudeau is holed beneath the waterline, are going to jump to an anti-business, anti-growth party like the NDP. More to the point, there is no hard evidence that New Canadians loathe Harper with quite the passion that the media and political class do. In fact, years of Conservative outreach to the New Canadian world may actually pay off.

Business Liberals, the lawyers, dentists, doctors, bankers and such like who liked the Liberal party for the social cachet are unlikely to jump to the high tax alternative of the NDP. There are BMWer leases to pay and private school fees to cover. While they may never admit it, I suspect about a 4:1 Con split of the Business Liberal class.

Liberal youth, official women, green zealots, will not be coming over to the CPC. They hate Harper. But a fair number of them are dim enough to shoot right past the NDP and vote with their hearts for loony Green candidates. These people are dumb as planks and the very concept of voting strategically is well beyond their comprehension level.

A true implosion of the Liberal vote will obviously favour the NDP. But riding by riding it is not obvious that the NDP will take a lot of seats. If the New Canadian vote goes to its interest, the collapse of the Liberal Party could well enhance Tory chances in many ridings the Grits took in the last election.

People are now shooting off fireworks and bear guns…Election fever is a distant thought under the blue super moon shining across the lake. Sunday is still two drinking days away.

Security

NDP leader Tom Mulcair 

Apparently the Lying Jackal is stuck in an airport and he writes,

Bottom line, as noted above: most of the job in politics, now, is simply getting people to pay attention. My hunch is that the hue and cry about that CPC/ISIS/JT ad has helped to achieve the mission’s key objective: i.e., to get the electorate to pay attention in the sleepy Summer months and agree, yet again, that Justin Trudeau “just isn’t ready” to deal with the Satanic horrors that seemingly occur daily in this world.

That may make you mad. That may leave you outraged. But it’s unlikely you were ever part of the audience the CPC had in mind when they did the thing up on some staffer’s computer, for about ten bucks.‎

Oh, and why was I stuck in the WestJet waiting area, for hour after hour?

Because the airline had been targeted by a bunch of bomb threats in recent days, that’s why. ‎People getting hurt jumping out of planes, planes getting grounded so the cops can search for bombs.

Hope and fear: they work.

Fear works particularly well when, you know, it corresponds with reality. lying jackal

He is referring to the now notorious CPC ISIS ad. Which will, having done its job, be forgotten by October. But there is a larger picture emerging which the CPC will be mining for the next few months. It is about headlines.

Greece Collapses/China’s Markets in Freefall/Vancouver Housing Prices in Orbit/Ontario Bond Rating one grade above Junk/Fire Engulfs West/Drought!/ISIS battles Egypt/Refugees Flood Italy/Iran Outwits Obama/Putin outwits Obama/Mexicans outwit Obama/Missing IRS emails found on Hilary’s Private Server (OK, I made that one up)….

Write your own. If they are not true they soon may be.

At the moment the world is a rather hostile and confusing place. Central banks and governments are out of bullets when it comes to the next financial crisis. Canadian housing prices – in Vancouver and Toronto – have hit heights where even the people who own the houses are beginning to wonder if this is all a bubble. There are real terrorists in the world and they certainly have the capacity to land on European and likely North American soil.

Much as Canadians may loathe Harper, and many do, the question of security, broadly defined, is a huge factor in the next election. Taking a flyer on Justin is emerging as a non-starter. Mulcair? Perhaps if the economy was booming or the terrorists back in their caves he’d be a grand alternative to Steve the Dull. But right now?

The oil patch is trying to adjust to $50-60 oil prices. We’re running a significant trade deficit. The Canadian dollar is weak. We’ve had a couple of lone-wolf, ISIS inspired, if not directed, terrorist attacks. Is this the time you want to trade the bland, but largely competent, Harper for the untested Mulcair and his band of one term MPs?

The CPC does not have to sell Harper. We know exactly what we are getting. But the NDP has to sell Mulcair and, as they do, they open up his flanks to the doubt ads the CPC will run. We know Justin isn’t ready. Is Mulcair? Plant that question in the minds of a nervous population and Harper wins in a romp. Not because people like him, not because people embrace the CPC’s limited vision for Canada, rather because in conditions of uncertainty “change” is terrifying.

 

The Divide

Canadian, eh?

“Canada’s diversity is our great and unique strength,” Trudeau said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“We are the one country in the world that has figured out how to be strong, not in spite of our differences but because of them. So, the prime minister of this country has a responsibility to bring people together in this country, not to divide us by pandering to some people’s fears.”

Harper’s approach “frays away the edges of our multicultural fabric … (by) stoking and pandering to fears rather than allaying them,” he added.
What’s more, “it’s unworthy of someone who is prime minister for all Canadians.” justin trudeau

Trudeau is reflecting a view that somehow Canadians who oppose special treatment for Muslims are afraid of Muslims.

The alternative view is that Canada should treat all of its citizens equally and pander to none.

By making unnecessary – the veil is not a religious requirement of Islam – accommodation for particular classes of citizens and potential citizens we are creating the conditions in which there may well, in time, be something to fear as there is in France, England, Denmark, Holland, Germany and many other European nations.

Refusing to allow a Muslim woman to take her citizenship oath wearing a political statement is making it easy for a political cult to infest Canada. There are many Canadians who are uneasy with the demands political Islam makes. Excluding a woman who refuses to unveil will make Canada seem a bit hostile to political and cultural Islam. Good. Let people who want veiled women and sharia law go somewhere else. Canada neither needs nor wants them.

Trudeau thinks we have figured out how to be strong in spite of differences. We have; but none of the differences which prior groups of immigrants have brought to Canada include explicit political loyalty to a supremacist cult. The veil is an explicitly political act and, frankly, a direct insult to the nation the veiled woman and her family wish to emigrate to.

The divide in Canada is between those of us who see Islam as an overtly expansionist political organization with a thin veneer of religion and those, like Trudeau, who deny the express teachings of the Koran, the Wahabbi supremacy and the anti-asimilationist rhetoric that is modern Islam. Trudeau seems to be under the impression that there is nothing to fear, nothing to reject in Islam. He is wrong and by attacking Harper for recognizing the profound political importance of the veil, he is demonstrating just how unfit he is for office.

Happy Dominion Day!

Sure we have a logo for a flag and Pride has taken over the festivities in TO but, what the heck, Canada is a pretty amazing country and I am proud of her.

There is always room for improvement. There are always busy bodies who want to impose their version of “the good” at the cost of our freedom. But, far too gradually, we are pushing back.

We won on s. 13. And now the feds are making it more difficult for rent a protestors to hijack critical resource projects. We are winning – largely by default – on the global warming scam. (When was the last time you heard a Canadian politician actually do anything about the not very scary AGW file?)

At the federal, though not the provincial, level politicians are coming to grips with the fact that fiscal prudence is actually sensible in even the middle run. No, Harper has not moved quickly enough to reduce the size and cost of government. Perhaps he will as the Opposition falls further into disarray. (What is to be done about the profligate provinces is intractable. BC seems to have some clue but Alberta seems determined to blow its natural advantages. And what is going on in Ontario? Racing Quebec to bankruptcy is not a very clever strategy.)

Where Harper has really shone is on the foreign affairs file. If you begin with the position that Israel is, realistically, the only nation in the Middle East with which Canada has any affinity, the rest is straightforward. Stay the Hell away from disasters like Syria, stand up to Islamic bullies, provide safe haven to the victims of the more medieval Muslim elements.

But here is what PM Harper said today on Parliament Hill:

They’ve set an example for the rest of the country, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said.

“When floods forced so many from their homes, communities dug deep, neighbours helped neighbours and people sheltered complete strangers,” he said.

“That’s the spirit that makes Canada the best country in the world. The best, bar none.”…

“Canada is not just any country, but a people determined to do right — a fact that makes me proud as we approach the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of our country,” he said.

“Compassionate neighbours, courageous warriors, and confident partners, a bastion of freedom in an un-free world, a standard-bearer of goodwill, in a time when too many choose to hate, a land of hope in a sea of uncertainty.”

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