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BC General Election 2024: Official results

Oct 29th, 2024
by Craig.
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Vote with an x.

Vote (cropped, Alan Cleaver CC BY 2.0).

The final results of the 19 October 2024 BC General Election are in, and the losers are the voters of British Columbia. Congratulations!

Wait, what? Oh, you were expecting that I was going to celebrate the winner?! Nope, with every election we have I become more and more convinced that the electoral system we use in this province and country was designed by morons. I mean, on the face of it, winner takes all just makes sense, right? You and your friends are deciding where to go for dinner. It has long been my contention that the bigger the group, the more likely it is that you’re all going to end up at White Spot in this part of the world. (Probably Wetherspoons in the UK.) White Spot is a good, run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road restaurant, with something to please just about everyone so, just as I said, the bigger the group the more likely it is that there are going to be people who reject a pizza place, a steak place, an “ethnic” place of one stripe or another, or whatever someone in the group will vote against. So someone in the group says, “What about White Spot?” “Yeah, OK, I guess,” grumbles just about everyone. The steak guy can get a half decent (but overdone) steak, the pizza guy can probably get a flatbread thing, the person who wanted something “ethnic” can probably get something resembling a curry or that has had some curry powder waved in its general direction, people can get burgers, and off you go. Ain’t majority rule great?!

Final 2024 BC general election voting results.

Final 2024 BC general election voting results

And so here in British Columbia the NDP have just squeaked by with a 47-seat majority, an absolute bare minimum majority required in a 93-seat house. (And already the Conservatives are promising to bring down the government! Way to read the room guys!) The 46 seats they had until the recounts were completed over the weekend — actually, they weren’t really recounts, they were the counting of mail-in, out-of-district and other miscellaneous ballots — was one seat short of the majority, and they would have required at least one MLA from another party to pass legislation.

Of course, the NDP are happy! Phew! We can get our agenda done! But the fact is that 55.13% of the province voted against the NDP, the majority of voters! (Sound familiar?! 56.73% voted against the Conservatives.) Don’t get me wrong, of the two main parties in the contest I’d far prefer the NDP to win over the Conservatives who, as I said in my earlier post, are led by a mentally and socially deficient anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who would be premier of the province had the Conservatives won! So thank the gods that they didn’t win, but the issue I have is that everyone seems to think that a minority government is “bad”, when in actual fact a minority government is the absolute best we can possibly hope for in a first-past-the-post system, where it’s usually one dictatorship after another! If you’re using a system where the majority of voters do not get what they voted for, how can you possibly think that that’s the best possible voting system?!

But I’m farting into the wind, because BC voters have twice (or maybe it’s three times, I’ve lost count) rejected some kind of proportional representation system because the maths were “too hard”!

Initial 2024 BC general election voting results.

Initial 2024 BC general election voting results

Let me go back to my White Spot example. Based on my own experience I’m not a big fan of the various food-delivery services out there, but here’s a possible variation on the example I gave: The majority of the group would probably vote against White Spot, not because White Spot is crap (I do love some of their dishes, so I don’t want you to think I have a hate on for them), but because the steak guy would kill for a good steak, and the pizza guy really wants a meat-lover’s pizza right now, and someone really wants a good goat curry. So head for some venue where you can have fun and that will allow you to call in a food delivery, and order from the places that specialise in those foods and eat what you actually want! Maybe it sounds a bit too “pie in the sky”, but you all get to vote on what you want to eat and you all get what you want! In PR, if 40% vote for the NDP, 40% vote for the Conservatives, 10% vote for the Greens, and 10% vote for the Rhinoceros Party, that’s exactly how the seats are divvied up in the legislature (or parliament).

If a group of friends can come up with an arrangement that suits all of them for dinner for the evening, how can a province or country not come up with an electoral system that actually pleases all of the voters all of the time?! I’m not so stupid that I think I know better than Abraham Lincoln but, my god, just about anything has to be better than this farcical first-past-the-post system in which we find ourselves every election cycle where (in this case) 55.13% of the electorate get told to suck it up for another four years. That won’t end well when the revolution happens.

I just wasted my vote in the 2024 British Columbia provincial general election

Oct 13th, 2024
by Craig.
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Vote (cropped, Alan Cleaver CC BY 2.0).

Yesterday I went to the District Electoral Office in my area and voted in an advance poll. I did it there and early because I expected an issue with my ID, but thankfully I didn’t have one. (At least that part of the provincial government was working properly, as opposed to the part responsible for my ID.) Anyway, since we’re still using the FPTP voting system inherited from middle ages England, I knew that my vote would be wasted because I voted for the Green Party headed by Sonia Furstenau instead of one of the two main parties, one of which is headed by a mentally and socially deficient anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist.

But oh well. I’ll just consider myself on the vanguard of proportional representation in a province that has its head buried firmly in its ass, having rejected PR in two referenda!

Far-right business hacks at the “National Post” / “Financial Post”

Feb 16th, 2024
by Craig.
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The National Post: Who's the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?

The National Post: “Who’s the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?” (No author.)

With respect to my comment on Eby on Tuesday, I noted a piece in the “National Post” (apparently in the “Financial Post” section) by some nameless entity (see screenshot above) — perhaps the Post itself, or perhaps an individual named “Corcoran” (see second screenshot) — but not marked as “opinion” (see first screenshot) even though it clearly is, titled “Who’s the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?” It’s hilarious that anyone who disagrees with the almighty Bell is considered a “fool” or an “ignoramus”. That’s what’s called an ad hominem attack; if you can’t explain why you disagree with someone, call them a name. The words “fool” and “ignoramus” work. And if you run short of names to call people, just pull up a recent campaign speech (or any speech) by a guy named donald trump to get some more words … although not that many, since the guy has a very limited vocabulary.

But hey, I get it, people disagree! So I’ll raise the bar a little and respond intelligently instead of calling the “National Post” (or Corcoran) “fools”.

I don’t believe anybody — Eby, Trudeau or anyone else — is suggesting that BCE should subsidise their subsidiaries until the end of time. But big business(es), and those on the right in general, are big on the fact that people should take responsibility for their own actions. What a concept! But that only applies to poor people on skid row and drug addicts, not big business. It’s completely unreasonable, foolish even, for us idiots that don’t run BCE and other massive companies to think that BCE should take responsibility for their own misguided, stupid and even foolish decision to attempt to buy up the media industry, and their own foolish decision to run said media industry into the ground with their ignorance! It’s foolish for us to believe that BCE should pay back various levels of government the money that they/us — Canadian taxpayers! — will pay in (un)employment insurance to the unemployed journalists, cameramen, teleprompter readers and various other human beings that will become unemployed.

Of course not! It’s their own fault they’re unemployed! The fools! And if it’s not their fault it’s the big bad government’s fault for forcing us to work within the confines of decent, modern, civilised Canadian society!

“Bullshit”, as described by the “Financial Post”, is quite clearly the domain of big business press releases (viz. “moving forward”, at least for the employees that won’t be moving backwards in lifestyle) … and the fools at the “Financial/National Post”. I hereby award the “Harry G. Frankfurt Award for Demagogic Bullshit” jointly to Corcoran, their shitty newspaper and BCE Inc.!

The Financial Post: Who's the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?

The Financial Post: “Who’s the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?” Corcoran?

Updated, 17 February 2024: Made notes about the possible author of the article in the captions of the screenshots.

Encrapification: My vote for word of the year, even though it’s only February

Feb 13th, 2024
by Craig.
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David Eby

David Eby. (Picture courtesy of BC NDP. CC BY 2.0 Deed. Cropped.)

The frustration of David Eby, premier of British Columbia, was palpable in his “2½-minute tirade” on Thursday (8 February 2024) against BCE Inc., parent company of Bell Media and therefore CTV News and all of its many holdings. But it was his invention of the word “encrapification” that stole the show for me. My web search for the word turned up the above CBC report as the first search result on Friday.

The great thing about the English language is that it is constantly evolving, and that it has building blocks to create words like this. I can’t speak for other languages, of course; I’ve studied several over the years, for which I’m grateful (especially Latin), but besides English there’s only one other (French) that I can say I could speak reasonably well in a pinch, but I don’t know it well enough to invent words in this way.

But Eby is completely right. I used to be all in favour of companies like BCE doing whatever they reasonably could to make more and more money but, as we’ve seen over the years with the likes of Facebook, Google, Microsoft (remember them?!), Amazon, etc., real people are hurt when companies become too big to care about both the people they employ and the people to whom they sell their products and services. I don’t imagine that the CEO of BCE woke up one day and decided to gut the media landscape in Canada, but he has. Eby’s characterisation of what BCE has done reminds me of what Canada Post did on a much smaller scale years ago: When I left college I expected to be quite movious — another great addition to the English language courtesy of Zambian English meaning to move around a lot — and so I rented a post office box. I rented it at the Vancouver International Airport because, working in the aviation business, I expected to be there often and so it would be convenient to be able to collect my mail there when I happened to be at that airport. It was going to become my “permanent” address.

Canada Post had other ideas, of course. They stopped renting new mail boxes at the “Airport Postal Outlet” (as it was known) and then, in a remarkable turns of events that nobody without an MBA could ever have predicted, they then claimed that there was not enough mail going there to support the existence of said outlet! Despite my attempts to “Save the APO“, it was taken away, and thus began my never-ending quest to set up new “permanent addresses”. What a gong show. I have had no fewer than seven “permanent addresses” in thirty-three years, when really, I should have had ONE!

BCE/Bell logos

A few random logos of the involved entities. Trademarks of the respective corporations.

Anyway, back to BCE. The day after Eby made headlines there was another politician who was evidently jealous of the attention that he wasn’t getting, so Justin Trudeau got on the horn (apologies to those of you for whom that phrase has a more lurid meaning!) and called it a “garbage decision” and said he was “pissed off”. Good effort Justin, but not nearly as cool as Eby! 🙂

At least CTV’s newly unemployed former employees will be able to count on Canadians’ thoughts and prayers for a day each year when Bell does their annual “Let’s Talk Day“. Thoughts and prayers certainly helped Lisa LaFlamme a lot when they fired her for letting her hair go grey, just as they helped me when Bell ripped me off for $11.27 for a one-minute phone call!

YVR has more snowploughs! Just as the climate is warming!

Dec 21st, 2023
by Craig.
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I noted, in a recent news report to which I don’t have a link, that Vancouver International Airport (YVR) has learned from their mistakes last year at this time and now has more snow ploughs than they can handle. If “snowmaggedon” happens again, they’ll be ploughing their little hearts out to save the day!

Except, Tamara Vrooman, CEO of YVR, apparently didn’t get the memo that the climate is warming! Talk about the former CEO of a bank (err, sorry, credit union) making misplaced investments! One wonders if she actually hired drivers for all of the snowploughs!

Listen, I’m probably no better a climate scientist than Vrooman, but winter does happen in Vancouver. I know the statistics all point to a warming climate, but I suspect that Vancouver hasn’t yet seen its last snowflake.

In other YVR news (YVR and Canadian airports rank in bottom third of global airports list), YVR sucks! I find this surprising, actually. Despite the fact that the local Mounted thugs murdered a passenger there in 2007, YVR has significantly improved the international arrivals area (where Robert DziekaĹ„ski was killed) and, really, the place is quite nice. Canadian airlines, though, are probably dragging down people’s perceptions of the airport; considering all the stories in the news these days about handicapped passengers being forced to drag themselves (literally in one case!) off of their planes, some of them at YVR, it’s not surprising that perhaps those experiences have sullied the ratings of YVR in particular. Of course, the airlines will point their fingers at the airports and the airports will point their fingers at the airlines, but that doesn’t help anyone when their disability means they can’t disembark an aircraft like all of the able-bodied passengers.

Of all people, Vrooman, former CEO of the “we love people more than you do” credit union Vancity should know that. But she has seemingly gained all of her kudos over the years by suckling the public tit, or (as in the case of YVR) working at a private organisation that is essentially a privatised arm of Transport Canada. I have very little respect for her considering her legacy that I deal with at Vancity.

More whingeing about COVID

May 25th, 2021
by Craig.
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(The date on this post is 25 May, but it was posted on 24 May in the Pacific time zone.)

Forgive me, but I really can’t get away from it. Perhaps I should just stop watching the news.

There are two groups of people in the news these days who really can’t stop whining about the situation in which they find themselves. Look, I get it. Pandemics are no fun, especially when they have decimated or even destroyed your business or almost destroyed your industry. But unless or until someone produces evidence that some government somewhere intentionally inflicted this disease on us, you can’t pick and choose your targets. In this particular part of the world, it is not the fault of the Canadian or British Columbian governments.

Two groups in particular need to keep that in mind: restaurants, and the cruise ship industry.

By all accounts, the health restrictions that have kept restaurants closed over the last couple of months will be relaxed tomorrow, Tuesday 25 May. (See date note above.) But that’s not good enough for the restaurant owners! No! They want advance notice! These idiots need to realise that advance notice isn’t the issue; it’s everyone getting the same amount of notice. So if the government of BC states tomorrow that restaurants can open again, what more could you possibly want? Were you thinking that there’d be a queue of diners at your place on Tuesday for breakfast? Give your fucking head a shake! If it’s going to take you a week to order food and schedule staff, then it means that you and your competitors won’t open for a week. Or, if your competitors are better than you and therefore more deserving of being patronised, they’ll beat you, and you’ll earn a day or a few day’s less revenue than them. That’s your fault, not the fault of the BC government.

On today’s Global News, the President and CEO of the British Columbia Restaurant and Foodservices Association, Ian Tostenson, stated that “the most important” consideration is predictability for the industry! It almost sounds like he’s catering to the likes of the owner of Corduroy, the idiot anti-masker who flouted health rules and was closed down. Tostenson has, admittedly, done a fairly decent job of being more moderate, but placing “predictability” for restaurant owners above the health of the population is completely idiotic. As I’ve said before, COVID isn’t taking calls right now, so without the disease’s cooperation, there won’t be any predictability. The government doesn’t control COVID; COVID controls the government.

Cruise ship, Canada Place, Vancouver

Cruise ship, Canada Place, Vancouver. (Picture courtesy of PxHere.)

And then there’s the cruise ship industry. The Canadian government has barred cruise ships from Canadian ports until sometime after this summer, or perhaps early next year. (The notice seems to be missing from the Government of Canada travel advisories website, or it’s buried, so I don’t know the exact date off the top of my head.) In the meantime, the United States has passed a government bill that no longer requires cruise ships leaving US ports (e.g., Seattle) to stop in a foreign port (i.e., one in Canada) before sailing onto Alaska. To be frank, although I’ve known about this law for some time, I don’t know the details of it, including why it came into existence. However, I suspect that it was a requirement of these ships being allowed to transit through Canadian national waters.

But guess what folks? There’s a pandemic!

The US government has stated that the authorisation to bypass Canadian ports is temporary. I don’t have any contacts in the US government, but if they say that, why can’t we accept them at their word? If the American population is largely fully vaccinated, and they want to open up domestic travel, then why the fuck would we stop them?! Why would we get in their way?! And why would Americans want to stop in a country that now has a higher infection rate than they, at one time, did? It’s the Canadian government that is stopping those cruise ships from stopping in Victoria, Vancouver and (possibly) Prince Rupert, not the American government! The American’s are completely within their rights to attempt to get their economy back on the rails, without any interference from a foreign authority. If the American government won’t repeal this law at some point in the future, then Canada can always bar cruise ships from Canadian waters entirely, forcing them to sail 200 nautical miles to international waters before heading to Alaska, or pass a law requiring them to stop if they want to use Canada’s waters — despite what idiot politicians may or may not utter.

End of rant. Get a grip people. History will not look too kindly on you morons.

Response from my MP about slow roll-out of COVID-19 vaccine in Canada

Feb 10th, 2021
by Craig.
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So two weeks after I wrote to my MP and MLA about the glacial roll-out and extraordinarily pathetic vaccination goal of the Canadian government, I heard back from my MP, Kenny Chiu. He is in Opposition, so really, his reply was just an agreement with my position. His assistant included a statement from Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner; except for the hyperbole about “overflowing morgues” and “lies”, it may be the only time she and I will ever be in agreement!

We’re still in a state of stasis in Canada, with vaccine delivery numbers abysmally low. Again, don’t get me wrong; I don’t think we all will or should be vaccinated by next week. But gimme a break, the goal of vaccinating all of us by a month after the summer ends, while the variants gather steam and India vaccinates eight Canadas, is just crazy talk. Unbelievably, Trudeau keeps harping on about that goal, as if it’s the best goal in the world! I keep coming back to the crux of the matter: What could possibly be more important, right now, today?!

No reply yet from my MLA, Kelly Greene (or, of course, Trudeau or Horgan), and at this late stage I’m not holding out much hope for one.

From: “Chiu, Kenny – M.P.” <Kenny.Chiu_AT_parl.gc.ca>
To: Craig Hartnett
Subject: RE: Reasoning for slow roll-out of COVID-19 vaccine in Canada
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:58:33 +0000

Good afternoon, Mr. Hartnett,

Thank you for writing the office of Kenny Chiu, member of Parliament for Steveston-Richmond East.

As Canada did not receive any of the Pfizer vaccine this week, it has lead to significant delays and stoppages in Canada’s vaccine distribution.

A recent statement from vaccine manufacturer Pfizer indicated that some European countries may not be as hard hit by the delivery delays as Canada has experienced and will continue to experience.

Canada sits at just 1.44% of its population vaccinated, well behind the pace of other nations.

Our nation cannot secure jobs, we cannot secure our economic recovery, we cannot secure the future without vaccines. Conservatives are deeply frustrated by the government’s on-going failure to procure and deliver vaccines for Canadians.

As such, Canada’s Conservatives are calling on the Liberal government to:

1. Tell Canadians what specific steps they are taking to make up this shortfall;
2. Tell Canadians honestly when they can reasonably expect to be vaccinated;
3. Disclose Canada’s precedence against other countries in the vaccine delivery schedules for the contracts they’ve signed; and
4. Deliver an emergency plan that gets vaccines to Canadians.

Please know MP Chiu is working with his colleagues to support Canadians and hold the government to account for their ongoing mismanagement of priorities during this pandemic.

I wish you and your family good health, please stay safe and continue follow all necessary guidelines to help restrict the spread of COVID-19. We can make it through this together.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Daviau
Parliamentary Assistant
Office of Kenny Chiu M.P.
Steveston—Richmond East
Shadow Minister for Diversity, Inclusion and Youth

177 Confederation Bldg., House of Commons
Office | 613-992-1385
E-mail | Jennifer.jennekens-daviau.831@parl.gc.ca

P.S. I have included for your reference a recent statement delivered by our MP Michelle Rempel Garner on this topic. See below.

************************************

Canadians Need a Vaccine. Now.

CALGARY, AB – The Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner, Shadow Minister for Health, issued the following statement regarding the Liberal government’s failure to get vaccines for Canadians:

“Before Christmas, Justin Trudeau said Canadians would be at the front of the global line for a vaccine. This was clearly a lie.

“Canadian provinces are running out of vaccines and are pleading for the federal government to get more. Meanwhile, people in Israel are getting their vaccines ten times faster than Canadians. The United States is on track to vaccinate the equivalent of our population before most Canadians will get the chance. But Canada only has a federal Liberal government finger-pointing on who is responsible for a slow vaccine delivery roll-out and a severe lack of widespread rapid or at-home testing options.

“It doesn’t matter how many doses the federal Liberals supposedly ordered; the reality is that they’re not here now.

“Morgues are overflowing. People are under curfew. Outbreaks in long-term care homes continue. Small businesses are permanently shuttering. Suicides and domestic violence levels are skyrocketing. The pandemic has reached levels we’ve never seen before. It didn’t have to be this way.

“Canadians deserve better than sitting in lockdown, under curfew, civil liberties removed with COVID-19 case numbers skyrocketing, while refrigerator trucks are brought to morgues and provinces are waiting for more vaccines. The federal Liberals have had months to take the leadership role Canadians are counting on to get these things done.

“We are calling on Justin Trudeau to get provinces vaccines to deliver. Every day that we delay getting vaccines to vulnerable Canadians puts more Canadian lives at risk.”

Reasoning for slow roll-out of COVID-19 vaccine in Canada

Jan 16th, 2021
by Craig.
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This week I sent the following email to my Member of Parliament (MP, Kenny Chiu) and my Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA, Kelly Greene), copied to the Prime Minister of Canada and the Premier of British Columbia. I’m not expecting a substantive — or any! — reply from any of them, to be frank. However, if I do I’ll update this post or make a new one.

From: Craig Hartnett
To: kenny.chiu_AT_parl.gc.ca, kelly.greene.mla_AT_leg.bc.ca
CC: pm_AT_pm.gc.ca, premier_AT_gov.bc.ca, letters_AT_nationalpost.com, sunletters_AT_vancouversun.com
Subject: Reasoning for slow roll-out of COVID-19 vaccine in Canada
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2021 21:09:28 -0800

Dear Mr. Chiu and Ms. Greene,

I write to both of you with respect to the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine in Canada. From my point of view, it seems that (currently) acquisition is a Federal responsibility, and administration and deployment a Provincial one. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe my concern should be addressed to both levels of government.

Like the vast majority of Canadians, I (and to the best of my knowledge, my family and friends, to whom this email is blind-copied) have been following provincial health guidelines. I and we are not heroes for doing this, but we have trusted our health officials and interrupted our lives accordingly.

It is not a surprise to me that life did not “go back to normal” a week after the first vaccine was approved. I’m not that stupid. However, it shocks me to hear that India plans to vaccinate 300 million of its citizens by July, while Canada’s lofty goal is to vaccinate an eighth as many people (38 million) by September. (I do note that 300 million people is only about 22% of its population; I also note that both figures are just projections.) Israel — a much smaller country I do admit without the geographical and meteorological challenges of Canada — has already vaccinated one million people, about 11% of its population. (These Israeli numbers are already out of date; they have now vaccinated 25% of their population, over two million people!)

I’m not engaging in “vaccine nationalism” here, but these figures tell me that there is absolutely no sense of urgency on the part of Canadian governments to vaccinate our populace. On newscasts, doctors and other medical officials have told us that vaccination is a complicated, multi-step and time-consuming process, but if the danger was more clear and present, I suspect those bureaucratic obstacles could be cleared in short order.

If we can mount Federal elections across this vast country in a span of twelve hours, why the hell can’t we mount the same effort — with volunteers also carrying out complicated, multi-step tasks and record-keeping — to get our population vaccinated sooner? I’m not suggesting we can vaccinate the entire country in one day, and I realise that we have to wait our turn for supplies of vaccines, but the September time line seem utterly and ridiculously low, especially when compared with India’s goals.

What’s more important? Vaccinations, fewer deaths and a recovering economy, or paperwork and record-keeping?

Canadians are tired, and it shows in the numbers. We’re also tired of politicians over-promising and under-delivering. According to the CBC, Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin has “conceded Canada’s vaccine supply will be rather ‘limited’ for the first three months of this year ….” This goes against all of the talk of prominent politicians, not the least of which is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau! Sure, Mr. Trudeau has promised we’ll all be vaccinated by the end of September, but as shown above, two months before that date India will have vaccinated eight Canadas!

Canada needs more imagination and determination than we are currently showing. At the very least, the country should consider employing the military in the process, but there are other ideas out there too.

I believe that Canada needs to work overtime to pick up the pace. What are you doing to impress upon our Prime Minister and Premier that they’re not doing enough?

Yours sincerely,

Craig Hartnett

Richmond BC

Cc:

  • Prime Minister of Canada, The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau
  • Premier of British Columbia, The Honourable John Horgan
  • National Post, Editor
  • Vancouver Sun, Editor

Bcc:

  • Family and friends

Following this, I received this email from one of my correspondents:

The story all along has been that everyone would be vaccinated by September. Given that the approved vaccines require two doses one would infer that ‘vaccinated’ meant that everyone would have received two shots. Story has changed today — now it is that everyone will have received one shot by September. This country is run by a bunch of fucking retards. They turned down extra Moderna doses and that option has now gone and ordered more Pfizer doses. Well, we know where that went today. So Trudeau kept on about how many millions of doses they had contracts for but they don’t seem to be worth the paper they’re written on because fuck all is showing up. We are behind Slovenia for god’s sake (maybe that has something to do with Melania).

As for the twits who, with no medical background, keep on about extending the time between shots — they should all be fired and people with brains put in as replacements.

My reply:

I mocked Michelle Rempel — Conservative, attention-loving, blonde MP from Alberta — when she called Trudeau et al. “incompetent”, despite the fact that it was the Conservatives who let vaccine manufacturers close up shop here years ago, but maybe she was right!

I was blown away when Hillier speculated about extending the time between shots, and I told […] he sounded like trump! And then, to my surprise, “experts” all over government were agreeing with him! It’s a bloody joke!

Trudeau keeps going on about meeting the September promise, with no mention of how pathetic that goal is!

The coming US civil war

Oct 30th, 2020
by Craig.
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Quite frankly, I have lost my will to write this piece. It’s now as obvious as the nose on my face to just about everyone how bad the situation is in the United States. I don’t need to assemble all the facts and lay them out along with my prediction.

There are so many sides: you have a president who foments just about every negative, anti-government grievance a paranoid American can think of, whether it’s against the Internal Revenue Service, Democratic state governors (viz. Michigan/Whitmer/kidnapping/”liberation“), the US Postal Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Fauci himself personally, whatever organisation(s) is/are in charge of running elections (and collecting all of those “fraudulent” mail-in ballots), masks and the “China virus”, and Blacks, Latinos, anyone whose ancestry can be traced to a “shithole country”, killed and captured war veterans … the list goes on and on and grows by the day; you have ordinary Americans who just want to get on with their lives; you have members and supporters of the Democratic Party who would like nothing more than to get rid of the guy; you have the National Rifle Association; you have The Lincoln Project; you have supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement; and on and on that list goes too. What has been and is happening in various major American cities (especially Portland) are, in fact, small civil wars, just very disorganised and disjointed.

On 3 November, election day, Americans may not get the decisive results they are used to as quickly as they’re used to. This is apparently because about half the number of people who voted in the 2016 election have already voted by mail and in advance polls, and those votes won’t all be counted on election night. Trump has already sown the seeds that some will see as a green light to action of some sort, by claiming that, if he loses, the election will have been “rigged”. Any delay in the results will be seen as time for machinations to rig the vote. It will be the only possible explanation for his loss. And if you’re a “good, patriotic” American with a gun, a stockpile of ammunition and a few friends, what would you do? The country is riddled with those nutjobs; hardly a day goes by in America without some mass murderer or spree killer doing his thing.

You know, it amazes me; generally speaking, people get better at something the more they practise it. Some Americans love to refer poetically to what they call their “experiment” in democracy. (After a couple of centuries, you’d figure it wasn’t still an experiment!) And yet, to this day, they have those in power doing everything they can to make it difficult for people to exercise their democratic right to vote. We recently had an election here in British Columbia, and I voted in an early poll. I was in and out of the polling station within five minutes (including parking and walking from and back to my car), and yet, night after night on the news we see queues miles long of Americans trying to vote in their early polls. You really need to be dedicated! And in Texas, their governor has limited election drop boxes to one per county; one county had advertised twelve drop boxes over their 2000 square miles! Of course, it’s all in the name of “enhance[d] ballot security” and “the integrity of our elections,” not vote suppression at all. In most democracies the election authorities will go out of their way to make it so easy to vote they’ll even wipe your ass while you do, but in the American “experiment” they go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible!

The US might not exactly be one of Trump’s “shitholes”, but it sure is a shit show!

Election speculation, 2020

Sep 15th, 2020
by Craig.
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Sigh. There’s just no limit to the depths to which politicians will sink. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic (if you’ll excuse the redundancy) and Canadians have elections or threatened elections left, right and centre. OK, three elections out of a possible fourteen federal, provincial and territorial elections isn’t exactly a lot, but if one does it, the rest of the politicians might follow … like lemmings, or a virus maybe. As Blaine Higgs — who was heading a minority government in New Brunswick, perhaps the “right” (in more ways than one) in the “left, right and centre” — succeeded in winning a majority in New Brunswick, half the rest of the country will pile on the bandwagon. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of every province and territory, but generally speaking they’ve followed science and their public health officers (unlike in certain other painfully obvious countries) and they are reaping the benefits in their poll numbers. Even Doug Ford in Ontario, if you can believe that!

Which bring us to the left (again, in more ways than one) of the country here in BC. Apparently John Horgan also thinks the time is right to convert his minority government into a majority. The speculation has reached a fever pitch, and for all we know we’ll see the writ dropped today, by some accounts. Horgan better hope that our COVID-19 numbers don’t get any worse than they are; schools have just gone back, and we still have to see how the Labour Day long weekend and the schools affect those numbers.

Which brings us to the centre. (Weird how the language works here.) Justin Trudeau also wants to convert his minority federal government into a majority. The aforementioned fever pitch hasn’t been reached in Ottawa yet, but the smirk on Trudeau’s face tells the story. The pandemic has been a boon for him and his friends, well, until his stupidity resulted in the WE Charity folding its Canadian operations last week. (No loss in my book. Why do people get excited about adults jumping up and down like idiots and demeaning themselves on stage?) His poll numbers, too, are through the roof, and he’d love to take on the new Leader of the Opposition, Erin O’Toole. But he too better hope that the pandemic numbers don’t get worse before an election (he talks as if he’s had a handle on it since day one), as it seems that hypocrisy and material failures in his leadership don’t seem to stick to him.

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