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The coronavirus pandemic is one of the biggest events of our collective lifetimes. You don’t have to take a poll. It just is.

Millions of Canadians without work. Companies going bankrupt. Families in crisis. And, of course, 110,000 of us infected with Covid-19, and more than 9,000 dead.

It has been a cataclysm. It has been a disaster on an unprecedented scale. It has been, per Yeats, things falling apart, and a center that cannot hold. Anarchy, loosed upon our world.

Compared to the Americans – our national pastime – we Canadians are doing better, a lot better. They have nearly four million people infected. They have more than 140,000 dead – many, if not most, due to the delusional psychosis that has seized the death cult that is the Republican Party. Led, as it is, by a monkey with a machine-gun.

So, we Canadians compare ourselves to the United States, which is now more a charnel-house than a country. We feel better about ourselves, pat ourselves on our backs, and then go about the tightrope-walking that is life during a lethal pandemic.

But we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t get too cocky. Because there are other measurements to be applied to our leaders. Not just comparisons of body counts.

Corruption, for instance.

Justin Trudeau has been called corrupt many times in the past. When, for example, he secretly accepted gifts from a lobbyist – traveling on the lobbyist’s helicopter to the lobbyist’s private island. When he was caught, the Liberal leader shrugged. “We,” he said, actually using that pronoun to describe  himself, “don’t see an issue.”

The Ethics Commissioner sure did. She ruled that Trudeau has broken conflict of interest rules four times by succumbing to the Aga Khan’s influence-peddling.

That was followed by the LavScam scandal, wherein Trudeau, his Finance Minister and their underlings pressured the Minister of Justice on 22 separate occasions – to give a sweetheart deal to a corrupt corporate donor to Trudeau’s party. When the Globe and Mail reported what he had done,Trudeau angrily denied it all.

But the Ethics Commissioner again found Trudeau guilty. The Liberal leader had “flagrantly” violated conflict of interest laws, said the Commissioner, by attempting to stop a prosecution of the Quebec-based SNC Lavalin. Said he: “The evidence showed there were many ways in which Mr. Trudeau, either directly or through the actions of those under his direction, sought to influence the attorney general.”

In both cases, Justin Trudeau solemnly assured Canadians that he’d learned he lesson. He promised to avoid all conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Canadians believed him, and re-elected him in 2019.

And now, he is at it again. This time, it isn’t just his Finance Minister and senior staff implicated, either. This time, his wife, his mother and his brother are alleged to have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the serpentine WE organization. His Finance Minister’s children, meanwhile, received jobs from WE.

While seamy and sordid, none of that is necessarily fatal. What makes it lethal, politically, is the Prime Minister and his Finance Minister voting, one, to hand WE a billion-dollar contract without competition.

Two, to do so without disclosing their conflict of interest to cabinet.

Three, to do so without acknowledging that their families had been the recipients of WE’s largesse.

And, four, to do all that in the middle of a pandemic, when Canada is facing a $343 billion deficit due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s that last one that makes WE-gate much worse than LavScam or the Aga Khan scandal: rich people – the Trudeaus, the Morneaus and the cultists behind the WE “charity” – seen to be getting richer during a pandemic. When everyone else is getting measurably poorer.

When Canadians are losing their jobs, losing their homes, Margaret Trudeau is getting a quarter of a million dollars to give some speeches. That, to many of us, is despicable.

Still, some Liberal partisans shrug. During a pandemic, do such things matter? In the big scheme of things, does the $352,000 the Trudeaus received even compare to the billions Canadians have received from their federal government to help them through an unprecedented crisis?

It matters.

When this writer had the honor and privilege of working for Jean Chrétien, we’d frequently hear stories about wealthy interests offering our boss a room at their mansions while he was touring the country. No charge. Just stay for the night, they’d tell him.  In most cases, they were just being hospitable.

But Chrétien would always say no. Back at the office, he’d tell us why: “Those little things add up. They create the wrong impression. So I stayed at a motel.”

And therein lies the moral of the tale, the one that Justin Trudeau has not learned and never will: big political graves are dug with tiny shovels.

With the WE scandal, Justin Trudeau is again digging his.

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Entitlements.

You remember that word, don’t you? David Dingwall, a Liberal politician, once said that he was “entitled to his entitlements.”

Dingwall uttered those fateful words before a Parliamentary committee, convened to determine if – as President of the Royal Canadian Mint – Dingwall had abused his expense account.

He hadn’t. Two audits concluded he hadn’t. But, when questioned about why he should get a severance when he voluntarily resigned from his position at the Mint, that’s what Dingwall said. “I’m entitled to my entitlements.”

He wasn’t wrong, but it was a dumb thing to say. The Conservatives used a clip of Dingwall saying those words in their election ads. They won the election.

Entitlements are the root cause of all corruption. People of lesser means decide they work hard, that they are unappreciated, so they sometimes start dipping into the proverbial cookie jar. They take home stuff that doesn’t belong to them, because they feel entitled.

Rich people are a bit different. They think they are entitled, too, but they think that way simply because they are rich. They breathe a more rarefied air, and their Gucci slippers don’t alight on the same ground as the rest of us. They pocket things that they shouldn’t, because they genuinely believe they are superior beings. And their superiority entitles them to entitlements.

So. Many years after David Dingwall said what he said, entitlements are back. Specifically, entitlements for the entitled.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his mother and brother are rich. So is the family of his Finance Minister, Bill Morneau. By any reasonable standard, they’re all rich. They’re millionaires. They have way more money than you and I do.

But there they were, those rich people, getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars – or getting jobs – from a charity, WE. They got paid to make speeches and appear at WE events, where kids in matching T-shirts would applaud their every utterance.

Now, the rest of us volunteer with charities. We donate our time to charities. We don’t, however, expect to get paid $352,000 by a charity. But the Trudeaus did, and were.

Over a period of years, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party got very, very close to Marc and Craig Kielburger’s cult-like WE organization. If the Trudeau Liberals were the Church of Scientology, WE was their Sea Org.

When they won power, Messrs. Trudeau and Morneau sat in on a cabinet meeting and voted to give Marc and Craig’s WE thing close to a billion dollars to run a program that the federal public service was more than qualified to run. They voted to give Marc and Craig and Co. almost a billion dollars sole-source – meaning, with no competition.

Did they disclose to cabinet that their families had received jobs and lots of money from WE? We don’t know. Cabinet discussions are secret.

But we’ll know soon enough. There are multiple investigations already underway into this stinking, fetid mess, and they will undoubtedly find multiple conflicts of interest. The RCMP, who are also now looking at WE-gate, will find it difficult not to launch a formal criminal investigation.

It’s all very sad and all very unnecessary.

Some years ago, you see, before they became wealthy and powerful, Marc and Craig Kielburger came to see this writer in his office. They were smart and articulate and passionate kids, back then. They fastened their unblinking eyes on me and said they wanted to stop child labour.

They also, as it turned out, wanted introductions to then-PM Jean Chrétien and some of Chretien’s ministers – to get funding, to get influence.

Even back then, even as teenagers, Craig and Marc were on the hunt for the famous and the powerful. It was off-putting and a bit creepy.

I said I’d try and help them, but I never did. They gave me a couple of their books and left.

What happened to those two boys who came to see me, who wanted to stop child labour? How did their little charity turn into something else entirely, with a massive real estate portfolio, with tentacles reaching schools across Canada, and allegations of racism and abuse of power, and a scandal that will not disappear? How did all that happen?

Entitlements, mostly. The entitled always want their entitlements.

And Marc and Craig Kielburger, even back when they were boys, knew how to get the entitled to do their bidding.

With, you know, entitlements.

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Full Canadian Jewish Record story here.

July 14, 2020 – By STEVE ARNOLD

A new campaign to change the name of Swastika Trail in the township of Puslinch, Ont. will seek to defeat local councillors in the next election who don’t support the effort.

Veteran political operative and anti-hate activist Warren Kinsella has joined the campaign by Township residents who have been trying for years to get the name changed.

This time, however, the gloves are off, Kinsella warned in an interview.

“We are saying to the politicians, ‘if any of you continue to defend this, we will run campaigns to defeat you in the next election. We will make sure that everybody knows you were indifferent to this hateful name being attached to this street,’” Kinsella said.

“It’s not a threat, it’s a promise,” he added. “If you guys are going to let lthis foul, disgusting name continue to be associated with this street, then we’re going to make sure people know you didn’t do anything about it when you could have.”

Kinsella, a Toronto lawyer, former Liberal Party strategist, founder of the anti-hate group Standing Against Misogyny and Prejudice (STAMP) and head of the Daisy Group consulting firm, joined the latest anti-Swastika Trail campaign at the request of long-time resident, Randy Guzar.

STAMP’s past efforts include helping to bring criminal convictions against the publisher and editor of Your Ward News, a free Toronto newspaper that promoted hatred against Jews and women.

Guzar has lived on Swastika Trail for more than 20 years and has seen at least four previous efforts to get the name changed.

The street was named in the 1920s when the swastika was still widely considered an ancient good luck symbol. The private road, owned by a numbered company, is in a mostly rural corner of Puslinch Township, south of Guelph in Wellington County. About 35 families live on the street.

Swastika Trail

The most recent effort to get the name changed started in April 2017 and ended in June 2018, when an Ontario court refused to review a council decision not to change the name.

Guzar and others went to court to challenge how the matter was handled by the council, which had asked the local cottagers association to decide whether to change the name. The association voted 25-20 to keep it, and Puslinch council vote 4-1 against changing it.

The court’s three judge panel, which found that the council had acted correctly, ruled: “There is no doubt that to many people in Canada in the 21st century, the swastika is an abhorrent symbol, reminiscent of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis during World War Two. While council’s decision…likely does not accord with the beliefs of many Canadians…there is no basis for finding that council’s decisions were unlawful.”

Since then, however, three of the five township councillors, including the mayor, have changed. More importantly, both Kinsella and Guzar argue there have been major changes in public attitudes about racism and hatred.

At the same time, there has been a spike in incidents of antisemitism around the world – the centuries old hatred that found its fullest modern expression under the Swastika flag of Nazi Germany.

“What has happened is that the murder of (George) Floyd) and the whole the Black Lives Matter movement has really awoken people to the importance of tolerance issues generally,” Kinsella said.

Warren Kinsella

“For the Jewish community, given the massive outbreak in antisemitism and vandalism, this is the least this community can do. We’re not asking them to give us money. We’re not asking them to do anything other than be decent human beings and remove this name.

“There’s no time in human history when I’ve seen a greater popular response to racism and bigotry than there is right now,” he added. “What has happened this spring, in the middle of a pandemic, is extraordinary and that tells us we’re on the right side, that people are with us and we just have to make them aware of what is happening.”

Guzar argues that while the swastika may be an ancient symbol, it is too closely linked to Nazi-era atrocities ever to be rehabilitated and “does not belong in a multicultural, diverse and tolerant Canada.”

“The swastika is the symbol of the most homicidal expression of hatred that ever existed. It is the literal embodiment of racism and anti-Semitism, homophobia and genocide,” he said. “This is a modern Canada and it’s time that this name be retired.”

Despite changes on council, Guzar said he doesn’t sense a change in attitude.

“From the very first when we started our effort to retire this street name we have had no support from the township and that’s the current flavor today,” he said. “I’m very disappointed in council’s indifference to this name and their use of tax dollars to defend it in court. We would expect our council to stand up and condemn hatred and change this street name.”

In an e-mail exchange Puslinch Mayor James Seeley “politely” refused to comment. Paul Wysznski, whose company owns the road, could not be reached for comment.

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Politics is like rock’n’roll: everything has been done before.

Take the Conservative Party, for example (please). Their leadership contest is ripping their party apart.

The Liberals did it first, however. Jean Chrétien won the Liberal leadership in 1990, and he won majority governments in 1993, 1997 and 2000, too. But Paul Martin and his cabal didn’t care.

They wanted Chrétien gone. So when Chrétien had a minor health scare, Martin’s minions hissed to compliant reporters that Chrétien was dying. When he didn’t die, they pounced on every misstep – and there weren’t many of those, frankly – and muttered darkly to compliant reporters.

When the sponsorship mess happened, Chrétien called in the cops. He cleaned house. His government was supported, as a result, by 60 per cent of Canadians.

Again, the Martinites didn’t care. Once Chrétien retired, they decided to hold an inquiry into sponsorships. One of them – now, amusingly, a “political analyst” for Bell Media – said: “This public inquiry is going to pin it all on them.”

Instead, Chrétien fired off a few golf balls into the epicentre of the inquiry and Martin’s PMO, collapsing both. The Liberal Party of Canada would thereafter spend a decade in the political wilderness – because Paul Martin and Co. called in the cops on their own political party.

Some 16 years later, Erin O’Toole has decided to do the same thing. A few days ago, the Conservative leadership candidate’s team made a formal complaint to the RCMP.

Alleging criminal conduct by Peter MacKay’s leadership campaign.

The allegation is that some factotums in MacKay’s operation got access to top-secret recordings of meetings in O’Toole’s operation. Super-duper secret stuff was purloined, it is alleged.

To regard this as a crime, of course, we would need to first believe that the O’Toole leadership campaign had ideas that were worth stealing. That is a big assumption, we know, but let’s assume they did and they do.

So, the RCMP, as they always do, confirmed they’d received the criminal complaint. As they always do, the Mounties said they were talking to some people about the allegations. And, as always, they haven’t said anything else, because the RCMP don’t like to be used as political pawns.

But let’s also assume, for a minute, that the Mounties actually charge members of MacKay’s inner circle. Does that mean the former Nova Scotia cabinet minister couldn’t still win the Tory leadership?

No. He could still win it, and he’d thereafter be pursuing a scorched-Earth campaign against all things O’Toole. And the beneficiary would be Justin Trudeau.

Or, let’s imagine that O’Toole’s gambit doesn’t work, and MacKay’s team are exonerated. The above scenario would be the same: a bloody purge of O’Toole and his gang by the victorious MacKay folks, and Justin Trudeau riding the resulting Conservative civil war to another majority victory.

Or, try to imagine that O’Toole somehow wins. (Hard, we know, but try.) MacKay and Co. will remain on the sidelines, for years, sabotaging everything O’Toole tries to do. Winner? Justin Trudeau.  

Take it from a veteran of the Chrétien-Martin leadership wars – whose nadir, as now, was one camp calling the other camp criminals – these things never end well. Back then, the main beneficiary was Stephen Harper. This time, whichever way it goes, it’ll be Justin Trudeau.

When the Martin guys did what they did, we Chrétien guys commenced hating their guts. Some of us still do. Deeply. That tends to be the reaction when someone falsely accuses you of a crime.

Anyway: if a crime has been committed, let the cops do their job. But don’t use the criminal law as a political club.

Erin O’Toole could have saved himself a lot of trouble by simply calling Jean Chrétien and asking for advice. I know what le petit gars would’ve said, too.

He would’ve said this: politicize your differences, Erin.

Don’t criminalize them.

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James Sears, the white supremacist “doctor,” is back. More here.

This material has been distributed in East Toronto. I’ve forwarded it to the police.

Stay tuned.

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Free political advice: always look both ways.

It’s a sunny, warm June day in 1990 in Calgary.  Along with Eleanor McMahon – one of Jean Chretien’s press assistants, and a future Ontario cabinet minister – I’m on the sidewalk outside the Delta Hotel on Fourth Avenue.  Eleanor and I are on our way somewhere, to prep for another successful Chretien leadership campaign event.  Eleanor behind me, I step off the sidewalk.

And I step into the path of a yellow Calgary cab, moving fast.  

Tires screeched.  Horns blared.  Eleanor screamed.

Later on, in a room at the Calgary General Hospital, Eleanor told me that I had flipped through the air “like a rag doll,” and landed, hard, on the pavement in front of the Delta.  “I thought you were going to die,” she said.

Later on, while recuperating at my parents’ Calgary home, Jean Chretien phoned.  “So, young man,” he said, “was Paul Martin driving that taxi?”

It hurt to laugh, but I laughed anyway.  The leadership vote was a day or so away, and we were going to win it, big time.  Some days before, before my appointment with the bumper of a taxi cab, I had asked Chretien advisor Eddie Goldenberg about “our second ballot strategy.”

Goldenberg laughed.  “We don’t have one,” he said.  “We’re going to win on the first ballot.”

And we did, we did.  Sitting in the Chretien campaign box in Calgary’s Olympic Saddledome with my Dad – surrounded by Chretien loyalists like Keith Davey, Sheila Finestone, Sergio Marchi, Beryl Gaffney, Lawrence MacAulay, Shirley Maheu, Dennis Mills and many, many others – we got the results of the first ballot on June 23, 1990.

Chretien had won the Liberal Party leadership with almost 60 per cent of the delegated vote.  His nearest rival, Paul Martin, took only 25 per cent.  The also-rans – Shela Copps, Tom Wappel and John Nunziata – secured only 15 per cent of the vote put together.

I struggled to my feet using my crutches, overjoyed.  I had been volunteering for Chretien for many months, writing speeches, overseeing his campaign correspondence, assisting in low-level strategy.  Now that the leadership campaign was over, I would return to my legal practice.

Chretien had other plans.  Back in Ottawa, reaching me again on the phone, he told me he wanted me to work for him.  I was shocked.  I never wanted a job, I told him.  I was always planning to return to my litigation practice.

“You can be a lawyer anytime, young man,” the newly-minted Liberal leader said.  “I’m offering a chance to work for me and have some fun.”

So I took him up on his offer, as his Special Assistant, but it wasn’t a lot of fun at the start.  We ran headlong into the Meech Lake Accord, the Oka crisis, and Martin-friendly Liberal MPs quitting caucus to join the nascent Bloc Quebecois.

Chretien would experience a health scare, staff churn, and caucus rumblings, and – later – the Persian Gulf crisis.  Other Opposition leaders may experience a honeymoon in the wake of their win.  But we didn’t.

“You’ve made a big mistake throwing away your legal career to work for Chretien,” some legal and political friends would tell me.  “He’ll never be Prime Minister.”

Well, as I would later delight in telling those Chretien critics, he did okay, didn’t he?

Forty years of never losing an election.  Wrestling the deficit and debt to the ground.  Defeating a burgeoning separatist movement in a nail-biter.  Keeping Canada out of the ill-considered Iraq conflict.  And, along the way, doing what no other leader had done: winning three back-to-back majority governments.

He was – and always will be, to me – the best Prime Minister.  Since he retired in 2003, I’ve seen it many times when I’ve walked on the street with him, in Vancouver or Toronto or Ottawa: Canadians mostly love Jean Chretien.  “Come back,” they say to him, asking for selfies.  “You’d win!”

And he would, he would.  His successors, as Chretienites like to say, always make him look good.

Oh, and as I walked with him on one of those streets one sunny day, Chretien laughed and pointed at me.

“Look both ways this time, young man!”

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