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Christy Clark pulls the plug

Jan 15th, 2025
by Craig.
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In a previous post I stated that Justin Trudeau had finally seen the writing on the wall and decided it was time he scurried away. It only took him a decade, although I suppose to be truthful it was really only the last year of that decade when he tried to cling to power. (I know anti-vaxxers will disagree with my timeline, but they’re idiots.)

So I suppose I should be charitable to Christy Clark for following the example of one of her successors in the BC Liberal Party (now BC United), Kevin Falcon (who folded under pressure) and give her credit for taking only a few months to come to the conclusion that her running for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada was a non-starter. Thank the gods. I wasn’t looking forward to taking on her supposed upcoming leadership race.

However, to reiterate points I’ve already made, anyone so stupid as to think that she could pull the wool over Canadian’s eyes to make them believe that she was a Liberal and not a Conservative does not deserve to be trusted with the leadership of this (or any other) country. She is, to say it again, a bullshit artist, and she only pulled the plug once her claims not to have joined the Conservative Party were found to have been false. Oops, “I misspoke. Sh*t happens. Lesson learned 🤦‍♀️ …”.

Yes, 🤦‍♀️ indeed! Your “sticking with the status quo” — i.e., misleading voters — is definitely a losing strategy! Thankfully you won’t be leading Canadians down that path!

Finally! The CBC calls out Christy Clark

Jan 11th, 2025
by Craig.
1 comment

On the CBC National last night (10 January 2025), the CBC finally called out Clark on her claim to being a “registered [federal] Liberal” and not (“never”) a Conservative. The Conservative Party apparently provided a screenshot (not shown by the CBC) from their system showing that Clark misspoke … to put it extremely politely and generously. She posted something on her Twitter/X feed trying to take back her remarks/comments in some recent (previous) interview with respect to running for leader of the federal Liberal Party. (Video in link below.) Unfortunately, as I’ve commented before, Elon Musk is trying to make X unusable and so I cannot see her recent posts on her X feed (but it was shown on the screen by the CBC), but it was full of bullshit and Clark trying to cover up her l**s — a word I believe I can’t use without risk of a lawsuit. But I believe I can safely use the phrase “bullshit artist” to describe her. (Actually, thanks to the written article on the CBC website, I now have the link to and the text from her post below.)

Well, I misspoke.
Sh*t happens.
Lesson learned 🤦‍♀️ …

I have always been clear that I supported Jean Charest to stop Pierre Poilievre. Not backing away from that. He’s the most divisive politician we’ve seen in years and I felt it was my duty as a Cdn [sic] to stop him in his tracks. I’m thinking carefully about running because he still needs to be stopped. But if we want to do that, our party has to accept change.

Sticking with the status quo is a losing strategy.

My god, if a seasoned politician has to excuse her stupidity and economy with the truth with the vulgar phrase, “shit happens” (and claims she suddenly learned a lesson that is taught in Politics 101 and Honesty 101), then she is quite clearly unqualified to be prime minister of the country. It’s not that I think that politicians can’t be “vulgar” (remember the “[Pierre] Trudeau salute” and “fuddle duddle”?), but she’s covering up her so-called economy with the truth by claiming “shit happens” for fuck’s sake! (Oops, sorry, I was vulgar.) This is a person who can simply not be counted on for anything even remotely approximating truthfulness and trustworthiness!

Listen, Canadians, and especially federal Liberal Party members: Christy Clark is *NOT* a Liberal! She’s a conservative in thought and practice! Sure, she’s saying all sorts of nasty things about Pierre Poilievre the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, but saying that she is against someone or something doesn’t automatically imply that she is for someone or something, specifically the Liberal Party of Canada!

And don’t even get me started on her bastardising the French language, which she was clearly reading off of a teleprompter, and probably didn’t even understand because she got it off Google Translate. I’m not a big fan of the fact that Canadian prime ministers have to speak French, but if someone is going to claim that they speak it then they do actually need to speak it, understand it and converse in it, at least to some extent! Reading (and badly pronouncing) a script does not make you suddenly bilingual!

But seriously, I started my tirades against Clark (with respect to the Liberal leadership) only last month, but it’s beyond preposterous that anyone can seriously consider her a contender. She hasn’t even actually entered the race, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to take her herself seriously! She’s falling apart before she even positions herself at the starting line. I can’t seriously consider the possibility that she will even embarrass herself to have a go.

Christy Clark Twitter/X post: "Sh*it happens."

Christy Clark Twitter/X post: “Sh*it happens.”

Christy Clark is NOT a Liberal!

Jan 6th, 2025
by Craig.
1 comment
Christy Clark.

Christy Clark

I should let the title stand on its own, especially after the comments I made at the end of “OMG, the entire continent of North America is a joke!“, but I really don’t know what the pundits in the media are smoking when they keep suggesting that Christy Clark is a contender for the leadership of the FEDERAL Liberal Party! I’d sure love to know whether or not she has ever been a card-carrying member of the federal Liberal party, but her politics are very clearly Conservative! Among other reasons she’s not qualified for the leadership of anything bigger than the neighbourhood cookie club is the fact that she put the Province of British Columbia in the position of defending itself for her and the BC Liberal Party’s anti-democratic and unconstitutional decision to ban collective bargaining (or parts of it) by teachers in BC; this resulted in millions of dollars being spent on lawyers and court time that could have been spent on BC citizens and their children, which was lost when the Supreme Court of Canada handed Clark and her government their asses on a silver platter when they decided against the government (and therefore Clark) in the case!

Any suggestion that Christy Clark is qualified for the position of the leader of the federal Liberal Party is ill-informed, apparently by people (political pundits on TV and radio) who have never been to British Columbia and are probably still of the opinion that BC is still some political backwater.

Trudeau finally reads the writing on the wall

We’re talking about Christy Clark because Justin Trudeau has finally (and predictably) seen the light and set a time for his resigning as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and as the Prime Minister of Canada. I don’t “hate” Justin Trudeau as the weirdos with their “F🍁CK TRUDEAU” flags and bumper stickers that have infected this country like a virus do; I just strongly disagree with his virtue signalling and the extent to which he is a hypocrite, as is evident in how he treated Jody Wilson-Raybould and a number of other female ministers in his so-called gender-balanced cabinet.

The coming federal general election

In previous posts I have predicted a majority win for the Conservative Party in the next election. Although I used to be a conservative, I no longer recognise the current Conservative party and am never likely to vote for it or one of their candidates. That doesn’t make me a liberal, or a communist.

The only reason I predict their forthcoming sweeping majority is because that is how elections in Canada have worked for decades, if not for their entire existence. For as long as I have lived in Canada, power has swayed back and forth between the Liberals and the Conservatives. And usually power switches simply because whoever today’s prime minister is falls out of favour with the electorate, as Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper before him have done. It’s not because I fervently desire for Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

What I do fervently desire is a new electoral system that actually makes the outcome reasonably unpredictable! And that brings me to one of the main reasons I so fervently dislike (but not hate) Justin Trudeau, and that is his electoral promise in 2015 that the general election that year would be “the last FPTP election in Canadian history”! And yet here we are, a decade later, with two more general elections under our belts (both of which Trudeau won using the system he swore to end), and we’re still using the antiquated system from the Middle Ages!

Updated, 2025-01-06: Minutes after posting this I ended up on Clark’s Twitter/X feed where she stated on 21 October 2024, “I am a proud Liberal voter, registered Liberal, and former Liberal Premier.” Hmm, so there you go, I am supposedly wrong. And yet, I stand behind every word I wrote above (and have written in the past) that her politics are conservative, despite her calling Pierre Poilievre (Conservative Party leader and future Prime Minister) “divisive” and making other negative statements about him … which I completely agree with! As for her claim of being a “Liberal Premier”, I take issue with her understanding of liberalism.

OMG, the entire continent of North America is a joke!

Dec 21st, 2024
by Craig.
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(OK, sorry, I had to start two blog posts with “OMG” just to show that Canada isn’t the only basket case on the continent. And I apologise for excluding Greenland, Mexico and the Caribbean from the definition, but I’m sure that in this case they won’t complain!)

USA

All I’m going to say about the USA though is that their “experiment with democracy” isn’t going so well. I’m not even referring to their electing an admirer of dictators and “strongmen” who is expected to turn his back on the rule of law; I’m referring to their inability to manage to govern their country without facing a government shutdown, seemingly every few weeks but in reality it seems to be every couple of years. I mean, I understand that the legislative side of the government needs to vote money for the administrative side of the government to be able to do the jobs defined by the legislative side of government, but really? I suppose the United States does have a record of slavery — which is the only way to describe being forced to show up to work for no pay cheque (“check” to you Americans) — so what’s the big deal with bringing it back temporarily every few years? I don’t get it.

And after 248 years — almost a quarter of a millennium — why not “experiment” with the executive side of government? This notion of a president and a vice president is so old-fashioned, so the administration-elect is experimenting with a new triumvirate: I’m not sure how to characterise it, as it seems to be rather unofficial at the moment, but it looks like it goes something like this:

  • Super (unelected) president: Elon Musk
  • President: donald trump
  • Vice president: JD Vance

Or maybe it’s like this:

  • Unelected president: Musk
  • Vice president: trump
  • Tea boy: Vance

(South Africans [including Musk] and southern Americans will nod their heads sagely at my thinly veiled racist term for Vance, which is entirely appropriate for the take-over of America by the citizen of the Third World country to which I’m referring. [And yes, you can quibble with me on my definition of the “Third World” here too, but since 1994 South Africa has been clamouring at the door of the club.])

So cute! He thinks he's steering!..

So cute! He thinks he’s steering!.. (Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I went to their website to try to find appropriate licensing and attribution information, but they blocked me.)

Canada

The turmoil in Canada continues as well!

  • First of all, the antiquated electoral system of this country means that I will *GUARANTEE* that next year we will be bowing and scraping to Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre. Anyone — including Justin Trudeau! — who thinks otherwise is clearly smoking something very potent. I was talking to someone today who suggested that if the Liberals get a new leader they might do a little better than if Trudeau was leading them, but in my mind that may mean three seats instead of two. The coming defeat of the Liberals will rival or perhaps even outshine John Turner’s in 1984.
  • I have no doubt that perhaps, back in the day, Trudeau may have had a vision for where he wanted to lead the country, but it’s as plain as the nose on my face that today he is only thinking of himself. If he is indeed “reflecting” on his future as has been suggested, somebody also needs to suggest he give Joe Biden a call to get a lesson on humility and thinking of his country first. Of course, that didn’t work out too well for Biden and his party, so I suspect that Biden is the last person Trudeau will call for advice. Or maybe Trudeau is hoping for a snow storm this Christmas or over the New Year, and he will take a walk in said snow storm in the same way that his daddy did in 1984.
  • I rarely agree with anything Poilievre says, but how can one disagree with his current characterisation of the Trudeau government as a “chaotic clown show”? Someone on the CBC’s “At Issue” panel (probably Andrew Coyne) described the new cabinet, shuffled yesterday, as “Fanatics, loyalists and members of the prime minister’s wedding party.” Of course, the deliverer of the “clown show” remark then made it clear that the clown show will continue when he becomes prime minister because he also suggested that if he writes a letter to Santa Claus (or the governor general) he could get his Christmas wish of becoming prime minister sooner! God help us all.
  • To me the Trudeau government has become like that old, second-hand car you used to own. It’s completely unreliable, you know that the chances of it failing to get you to work tomorrow morning are far greater than 50%, but you somehow think that you can will it to get you there! Sound familiar?!

But the main issue I want to get to that has been bothering me for months now is all of the idiots who keep uttering the name Christy Clark as a possible successor to Trudeau! What are you people smoking?! (Sorry for all the marijuana references, but we’re talking about politics after all!) Yes, she was the leader of the BC Liberal Party, but the BC Liberal Party was a liberal party in name only! I distinctly remember Raef Mair questioning Gordon Campbell on this issue during an interview on Mair’s CKNW talk-radio programme many years ago, when Campbell became the leader of the BC Liberals, or was running to be. Mair asked Campbell to define “liberalism” with reference to the name of his party, and Campbell simply couldn’t do it! Mair may have been a bit of a pedant in that moment, and perhaps the definition of liberalism has changed over the centuries — or maybe it comes down to the different definitions of “freedom” that those on the left and right sides of the political spectrum use — but the fact of the matter is that in the years since Campbell became the premier (followed by Clark) up until the party folded earlier this year, the BC Liberals were — as described in the Wikipedia article on the party that replaced it, BC United:

conservative, neoliberal, … occupying a centre-right position on the left–right political spectrum … a “free enterprise coalition” [drawing] support from members of both the federal Liberal and Conservative parties … the main centre-right opposition to the centre-left New Democratic Party …. Once affiliated with the Liberal Party of Canada, the British Columbia Liberal Party became independent in 1987.

Their name reminds me of something my Grade Seven teacher (Mr. Cuttel) told the class one day, that he found it ironic that countries in the world that were widely known as being anything but democratic seemed to like using the word in their names to cover up their lack of democracy, e.g., German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), etc. Perhaps the BC Liberal Party was using that logic!

If you don’t live in BC and just can’t quite grasp the nomenclature, I strongly recommend you read the CBC article “Why the B.C. Liberals are sometimes liberal and sometimes not“, with a video with excellent (i.e., corny) sound effects by Richard Zussman, who now reports for Global BC. It’s really not that difficult; as illustrated above, people can call their countries whatever they want, and those countries are named by political leaders who lie just as much as political leaders everywhere on the spectrum.

If Clark even runs in an expected leadership race I’ll be surprised, but if she does and wins, I’ll be handing in my licence to run this blog.

BC's Liberal Party does not equal Canada's Liberal Party.

BC’s Liberal Party does not equal Canada’s Liberal Party (CBC)

Updated, 2024-12-22: Some minor changes (mostly formatting), plus added the screenshot of the CBC video to which I link. Also, apparently this is the third post title I’ve started with “OMG” recently! All because of politicians!

Updated, 2024-12-26: Added Mike Luckovich’s very appropriate cartoon from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, along with an explanation of how I tried to access their website to obtain appropriate licensing and attribution information, but that their website blocked my computer’s configuration. Kinda defeats the purpose of having a website, but what can I do?

The hilarity (not!) of donald trump’s childish remarks

Dec 18th, 2024
by Craig.
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One thing I have noted for years is the habit of many people on the right to make every argument personal and to resort to name calling. This is particularly illustrated by the juvenile known as donald trump, whose name I refuse to spell with initial capital letters because he doesn’t deserve even that much grammatical respect.

His latest tact of referring to the country of Canada as the “great state of Canada” — as Americans are wont to do when referring to their states grandiloquently — was mildly amusing the first time if only because we ourselves often refer to ourselves as the 51st state, but with the second and subsequent repetitions it just became moronic. Hey don, you might have got a chuckle the first time (and the second time when you placed a Swiss mountain in Canada), but we’re all yawning now.

But with respect to calling people names, your moronic reaction to the resignation of Canada’s finance minister is beyond the pale. First of all, I realise that you have absolutely zero respect for any woman other than for her purpose of having a pussy to grab, but characterising her (and even having an opinion on her domestic actions) as “totally toxic” because she did an excellent job of representing her country (not sub-national state) of Canada in trade negotiations with your country just rings of your being a well-documented poor loser. Non-Americans are often told by you and your acolytes to STFU and keep our opinions of America and American politics to ourselves, so I suggest you take your own advice.

The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau. Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada. She will not be missed!!!

The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau. Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada. She will not be missed!!!

Fuck you, you piece of shit. I can guarantee that this citizen of Canada is very happy that we are not governed by the likes of idiots like you.

OMG, the Canadian government is in a completely PREDICTABLE shambolic shambles!

Dec 16th, 2024
by Craig.
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Justin Trudeau.

Justin Trudeau

In 2015, Justin Trudeau blithely and mockingly informed us that it was 2015. Among other things — the most noticeable and consequential to me and to Canadians in general — he put on his pink “I’m a feminist” T-shirt and promised that the election he had just won would be the last first-part-the-post (FPTP) election.

Within about six months he had conjured up some lame excuses for why he was completely and incontrovertibly going back on the completely fake promise that he would change the electoral system. Next!

As for the world’s biggest feminist label he assumed without the consent of any actual feminist on the planet — except, perhaps and laughably, his now ex-wife — he has long exposed the truth, that he is anything but. This was clear in the way in which he cast Jody Wilson-Raybould aside like yesterday’s trash, and now, how he has done exactly the same with the last female cabinet minister of any consequence, Chrystia Freeland (see below).

But I’ve been mulling this blog post over in my mind for weeks. The crux of it is that, with reference to Trudeau’s going back on his promise to replace the FPTP electoral system, he has an electoral system in which his defeat is pretty much guaranteed. Guaranteed! The rats are abandoning ship, and those that are too stupid to jump are rearranging the deck chairs! Trudeau could (and should!) have resigned the leadership of the Liberal Party a year or months ago to allow a successor the ability to have a chance to maintain a reasonable Liberal presence in the House of Commons, instead of being left with the same two seats with which the Progressive Conservative Party were left after the 1993 election.

In her letter of resignation, Freeland referred to “costly political gimmicks”. This has to be, possibly among other things, the “GST holiday” that came into effect on 14 December. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) referred to it as a “gong show”, and it is. It has forced businesses to invest an inordinate amount of time and energy — during the busiest time of the year — in reconfiguring their point-of-sales systems to zero the tax rate on the limited number of goods on which the tax has been removed. It’s a joke! It shows a complete ignorance of the part of Trudeau and his government of how business works. It’s a sad, sad situation in which Canada finds itself.

The plans I had for this post were pushed up and significantly truncated as I thought I had more time. I find it bizarre that the Government of Canada finds itself in almost the exact same situation today as the governments of Syria, Germany, and South Korea! We’re a joke!

Here’s Chrystia Freeland’s resignation letter:

Chrystia Freeland

Chrystia Freeland. (Brian Ferraro/NPR)

Dear Prime Minister,

It has been the honour of my life to serve in government, working for Canada and Canadians. We have accomplished a lot together.

On Friday, you told me you no longer want me to serve as your Finance Minister and offered me another position in the cabinet.

Upon reflection, I have concluded that the only honest and viable path is for me to resign from the cabinet.

To be effective, a Minister must speak on behalf of the Prime Minister and with his full confidence. In making your decision, you made clear that I no longer credibly enjoy that confidence and possess the authority that comes with it.

For the past number of weeks, you and I have found ourselves at odds about the best path forward for Canada.

Our country today faces a grave challenge. The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 per cent tariffs.

We need to take that threat extremely seriously. That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war. That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment.

That means pushing back against ‘America First’ economic nationalism with a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring. That means working in good faith and humility with the premiers of the provinces and territories of our great and diverse country, and building a true Team Canada response.

I know Canadians would recognize and respect such an approach. They know when we are working for them, and they equally know when we are focused on ourselves. Inevitably, our time in government will come to an end. But how we deal with the threat our country currently faces will define us for a generation, and perhaps longer. Canada will win if we are strong, smart, and united.

It is this conviction which has driven my strenuous efforts this fall to manage our spending in ways that will give us the flexibility we will need to meet the serious challenges presented by the United States.

I will always be grateful for the chance to have served in government and I will always be proud of our government’s work for Canada and Canadians.

I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues as a Liberal Member of Parliament, and I am committed to running again for my seat in Toronto in the next federal election.

With gratitude,

The Honourable Chrystia Freeland, P.C., M.P.

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.
1 comment
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!

It’s past time for electoral reform in Canada

Feb 13th, 2022
by Craig.
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I don’t want to draw too long a bow here, but the current protests in Canada highlight the fact that our electoral system is broken. The current government is in power despite not winning a majority of the votes in the last (2021) election. The Liberal Party won only 32.62% of the vote, while the Conservative Party won 34.34% of the vote. (And while the New Democratic Party won 15.98% of the vote, they won only 25 seats, while the Bloc Québécois [who only run for seats in one province!] won 32 seats with only 7.63% of the vote, less than half as many votes!) Anyone with a brain would tell you that a system which produces these numbers is flat out broken!

So while the majority of Canadians have been vaccinated, and understand short-term pain for long-term gain, it’s not rocket science to figure out how the noisy band of malcontents that have descended on Ottawa, Coutts, Emerson and Windsor (among a number of provincial capitals) have managed to attract such a following. I still believe that the majority of Canadians do not support them, and I also still believe that these protests are being driven by right-wing extremists from both Canada and the United States, but this doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of Canadians, 67.38%, did not vote for the party currently in power.

Much ink has been spilled on the assertion that the only ones to gain from a change in the electoral system to one that includes some form of proportional representation would be the NDP and the Greens. There’s no doubt about that, but (a) opposing electoral reform for that reason is short-sighted (and mean), and (b) that doesn’t imply that the two major parties (Liberals and Conservatives) can’t benefit themselves.

I also believe that Justin Trudeau and the Liberals don’t want to enact electoral reform, not because it would help the NDP and the Greens, but because they see how fractured the Conservative Party is, and that allowing proportional representation would allow the Conservative Party to split (the People’s Party of Canada already did), yet ultimately form government because two or more conservative-leaning parties could easily win a majority (or at least the biggest bloc of seats) and form a coalition government. So ironically, if the Conservative Party would just take their collective heads out of their ass and stop parroting the Liberal line that they can’t do electoral reform, they might actually gain from it … and significantly!

The beginning of civil war in Canada?

Feb 13th, 2022
by Craig.
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I’m not trying to be alarmist with this title, but the actions of a minority of Canadians are having very negative effects on their fellow Canadians. Some have gone as far as to refer to it as “terrorism”, and if you’re in Ottawa in the middle of it and you can’t sleep at night because of the blaring of horns, that adjective is all too real to you. It’s a classic torture technique to deprive your captive of sleep, and the residents of Ottawa in the vicinity of the occupiers of the city are indeed captives, as are the people being laid off because their employers can’t receive the deliveries they’re expecting across our borders.

So if your actions go beyond simple “peaceful” protest and start very negatively affecting the lives of your follow citizens — whether that effect is death or something slightly less drastic, like depriving them of sleep and income — how is that fundamentally different from an actual shooting civil war? The protestors make the point that if they don’t have this great an effect their point will be ignored. Well, they may be right. However, if you’re such a small minority and your demands are so great — as seems to be the case here — then your point, your demands, should be ignored! Every single one of us in a civilised society has to live within the confines of behaviour accepted by the majority. Anyone who has ever read Lord of the Flies learnt the alternative in high school!

How did we get here? As I said in my last post, this ostensibly started out as a trucker protest by people who opposed “vaccine mandates”. However, it has clearly morphed. The thousands of participants are clearly not the 10-15% of truckers who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Others have glommed onto their protest. Who are the others? That seems to be the biggest unanswered question here, and I sure don’t have the answer. The current federal government is a minority government, which means that most Canadians didn’t vote for them, Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party. Personally speaking I am one of them, but as much as Justin Trudeau irks me, and as much as I have written against him and his leadership on my blog, I support his stance against this array of yobbos, and I think their calls for him to be jailed are abso-fucking-lutely ridiculous.

But why do these people honestly think that they can make this demand? Because they’re extremists who all talk to each other in their own little social-media bubbles. People on both sides of the political spectrum make this mistake and come to different extremist conclusions. In addition to coming to the conclusion that they can call for the overthrow of a duly elected government before the next scheduled election, they advocate for the jailing and execution of the politicians, and the “lying media”, the “fake news”. It’s just bizarre. No matter what beliefs you hold, you cannot reasonably come to the conclusion that you can effectively segregate the population and eliminate every last person who disagrees with you. That guy standing next to you on the protest line likely has a slightly different position to you on any number of issues, so should he/she be executed too? If you answer “yes”, who will be left standing next to you?! Nobody, that’s who.

I used to think that America was on the verge of civil war, and we reasonable people in Canada would be watching the refugees streaming across the border into our civilised country. However, it’s becoming clear that many Americans, mainstream politicians (e.g., Trump, Cruz) and underground right-wing extremists, are treating Canada as the fifty-first state. And we may actually be! The people behind the protests are the sheep of the American right-wing movement (and they even carry their flags!), and they are blindly (and very rapidly!) importing American civil-war politics into a country that simply doesn’t need that garbage!

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