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I didn’t know Reese Fallon.

I may have met her, once, when Beaches-East York MP Nate Erskine-Smith – who did know her – held an anti-racism event in our neighbourhood.  Nate had a number of Young Liberal club members there, helping out. Reese was a member of that club.  I remember feeling sorry for these young people, because a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists had shown up and were disrupting the meeting. It was pretty ugly.

So, I didn’t know her.  I do know, however, that she is still being mourned – she isn’t even in the ground, yet – after she was murdered on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue Sunday night.  She was there for a birthday celebration with friends.  One of her friends was wounded and taken to hospital, too.  That’s what I know.  That’s all that most of us know.

Here, too, something else I know: it was appalling, and wrong, for CBC Radio to devote a lot of time, this morning, to the killer.  In one part, they had what sounded like a professional actor breathlessly read the letter his family sent out.  In another part, they had a youth worker who knew the killer come on, and he related how the killer had “a million-dollar smile” and was “humble and reserved.” It went on and on and on like that, for a long time, on CBC Radio.

I don’t know if any those things are true, either.  Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.  Personally, I don’t usually associate having “a million-dollar smile” with people who slaughter children on a city street.

What I do know is this: it isn’t just governments that have a role to play in preventing other Reese Fallons from being executed one night.  The media has a role to play, too.

And that role does not include treating the killer with more deference than the killer’s victims.

Before they – innocent children – are even in the ground.

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Maximum Rock’n’Roll is the premier punk rock magazine, and has been for decades. It is the punk rock non plus ultra.

And MRR has reviewed the first Hot Nasties record in decades – calling it “less abrasive” and “poppier” and even says it recalls Joe Strummer’s 101ers! Wow!

Here’s their take:

And here’s the video for the lead tune – now available on Ugly Pop Records!

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Just ten clams. Nineteen and over. Open until 4 a.m.

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Steve Paikin is a nicer guy than me. As seen here, he is urging people to forgive Kathleen Wynne’s disappearance from the legislature.

I am not so forgiving.

The Ontario Liberal Party was my political home. I was proud to run its winning war rooms in 2003, 2007 and 2011, and to serve under Dalton McGuinty and Don Guy. I was equally proud to work with great people like Chris Morley, Laura Miller and Brendan McGuinty.

Kathleen Wynne – and her Wizard and her Board, the ones who pushed out dissenters and made themselves a fortune in contracts from both the party and the government – have destroyed the Ontario Liberal Party, perhaps for good.

This is Kathleen Wynne’s legacy:

• The loss of party status, and all that goes with that.

• A double-digit debt, one that will be impossible to pay off for years to come.

• The worst election performance in Ontario political history.

• A party that is reviled and despised, and with no sense of what it stands for anymore.

When the microphones and cameras were pointed her way, Kathleen Wynne was charming and exuded warmth. When they weren’t, Kathleen Wynne was just another politician: a ruthless operator, one who was willing to say and do anything to hold onto power. One who believed it was all about her.

To my friend Steve Paikin, then, I respectfully dissent. I say, instead, that this is all that Kathleen Wynne and her loathsome wrecking crew are owed:

Nothing.

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When we have all been reduced once again to ashes – when the web site you now peer at is reduced to digital dust – thinkers will think, as thinkers do: how did Donald Trump win?

Because, you know, he did.

Donald Trump won. He beat us all. He has dominated the politics of this era like no other, standing astride it like a Cheeto-coloured colossus.

As I type this, there are 24 news stories on the main page of CNN’s web site. Fourteen of them are about Trump. The New York Times and the Washington Post’s front pages have six news stories each – and in the Times, three are about Trump. The Post, five of the six.

In Britain’s The Times, just two stories – one about their World Cup loss, naturally, but the other is about Trump, coming to have tea with the Queen. In Germany, the verdict in a homicidal neo-Nazi’s trial is ubiquitous – and then there is Donald Trump coverage, above or near every fold. And so on.

How does one define a political “win” in these uncertain, unpleasant times? With a weighty legislative change? Not really – Doug Ford is showing Kathleen Wynne how quickly those can be undone, like the flicking of a light switch.

Is stirring political oratory a win? Not that, either. Barack Obama’s best-ever speeches came when he campaigned for Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump in late 2016 – but the latter still won, and the former still lost.

Is opposing prejudice and division a win? If only it were so. The forces of hatred, regrettably, are on the march in 2018 around the globe, achieving real power. While the majority of us look on, despairing.

At this point, in this year in this Century, winning is simply defined as sheer dominance. Winning is not just securing power – it is wielding power in such a way that no one else can be heard anymore.

And that is why Donald Trump is the winner: he does not merely dominate the news cycle. He is the news cycle.

A Democrat, of all people, predicted all of this more than 20 years ago. His name is David Shenk, and he wrote a book called Data Smog. It posits that information, once doled out like caviar, is now potatoes – abundant and tasteless. He writes: “At home, at work, and even at play, communication has engulfed our lives. To be human is to traffic in enormous chunks of data,” he writes, adding:

“At a certain level of input the glut becomes a cloud of data smog that no longer adds to our quality of life but instead begins to cultivate stress, confusion, and even ignorance. Information overload crowds out quiet moments and obstructs much-needed contemplation. It leaves us more vulnerable as consumers and less cohesive as a society.”

If you are peering at this opinion column on your phone, you are proof of Shenk’s claim. Every day, every morning, you are bombarded by hundreds of thousands of words and images. So, you do what humans do when they are overwhelmed by data smog: you turn it all off.

The only ones who can break through the data smog are those who are LOUD. Those who are BRASH. Those who SAY OUTRAGEOUS THINGS.

Ipso facto, Donald J. Trump. He does not merely understand Shenk’s data smog theorem – he embodies it.

So what, one may say. Is dominance truly a measure of political success?

Dick Morris, an advisor to both Republican and Democratic presidents, agrees that it is. He even has a phrase to append to it: “managing the dialogue.” If you manage the dialogue, you are winning.

Political debates, for example. A simple way to measure success in a debate is to count the number of debate minutes devoted to your side’s key messages (eg. for a progressive, health or the environment) and not the opposition’s (eg. for a conservative, tax cuts or “getting tough on crime”). You win when your side’s narrative has taken up the greatest number of minutes in any given debate. That’s it.

And that is why Donald Trump is winning: not because of his messages, per se. Not because all of the world has embraced madness, and is tilting towards fascism and nativism.

He is winning because his voice drowns out all others. He is, at any given time, the most-discussed topic on Earth. Because he is LOUD. Because he is BLUNT. Because he KNOWS HOW TO GET YOUR ATTENTION.

For the Democratic Party’s mid-term war room, this means abandoning traditional approaches – scandal-mongering, inappropriate quotes and votes – and dialing the volume up to eleven. It means hitting Trump twice as hard when he hits them even once.

For progressive rivals, like Angela Merkel or Justin Trudeau, all is not lost. If they abandon the progressive’s natural tendency to always observe boundaries and to always be inoffensive – to be colourless, and therefore without passion or values – they can compete with Donald Trump. Trudeau, in particular, is skilled at attracting attention (although, lately, it is the wrong kind of attention).

In the end, however, one immutable truth remains: Donald Trump is the face of this era.

When the rest of us are long gone and forgotten, he will be the one who is remembered.

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A bit from next week’s Hill Times column.  Comments are open.

Donald Trump won.  He beat us all.  He has dominated the politics of this era like no other, standing bestride it like a Cheeto-coloured colossus.

As I type this, there are 24 news stories on the main page of CNN’s web site.  Fourteen of them are about Trump.  The New York Times and the Washington Post’s front pages have six news stories each – and in the Times, three are about Trump. The Post, five of the six.

In Britain’s The Times, just two stories – one about their World Cup loss, naturally, but the other is about Trump, coming to have tea with the Queen.  In Germany, the verdict in a homicidal neo-Nazi’s trial is ubiquitous – and then there is Donald Trump coverage, above or near every fold. And so on.

…At this point, in this year in this Century, winning is simply defined as sheer dominance.  Winning is not just securing power – it is wielding power in such a way that no one else can be heard anymore.

And that is why Donald Trump is the winner: he does not merely dominate the news cycle. 

He is the news cycle.

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Donald Trump has said – and this week, in Brussels he will say yet again – that Canada and other nations don’t pay our way in NATO.  He will say we need to pay more.

There are 28 members of NATO. Its budget is is hundreds of billions, annually. The United States of America contributes most of that. The United Kingdom, France and Germany are also big contributors. Canada?

Canada is in the bottom third of NATO members, alongside Slovenia and Luxembourg, and others with bankrupt and/or struggling economies. By agreement reached in 2014, NATO members are supposed to be devoting two per cent of their nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) to defence. Canada doesn’t, and consistently hasn’t.

During the Republican primaries and during the U.S. presidential race, Donald Trump would be asked often about defence by journalists looking for some crazy new Trump statement to report. Trump wouldn’t disappoint.

So: “We are getting ripped off by every country in NATO, where they pay virtually nothing, most of them. And we’re paying the majority of the costs.”

And: “We’re spending a tremendous — billions and billions of dollars on NATO. We’re paying too much! You have countries in NATO, I think it’s 28 countries – you have countries in NATO that are getting a free ride and it’s unfair, it’s very unfair.”

And, this gem, which gave plenty of Western leaders heartburn, and which transformed Donald Trump’s presidency from something that was mildly amusing to something that was deeply terrifying: NATO was “obsolete,” he said.

And: “The U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.”

That statement about NATO’s obsolesence, uttered during an interview with a German newspaper, was a shock. “[NATO is] obsolete, first because it was designed many, many years ago,” Trump said. Secondly, he said, it’s obsolete because “countries aren’t paying what they should.”

His first point, like so much that Trump says, was certifiably insane. With Trump’s boss Vladimir Putin massing troops and guns on the border of assorted Baltic states, NATO is needed more now than perhaps ever before. But on his second assertion, that NATO is compromised because many countries aren’t paying what they should?

On that, Donald Trump is not entirely wrong.

This week, Justin Trudeau has attempted to curry favour with Trump – by deploying more Canadian Forces troops in Latvia, and by keeping them for another four years.  It is unlikely to sway Trump, however.  There are two reasons for that.

One, Trump – as noted – is arguably right that Canada needs to devote more of its GDP to NATO.  Not two per cent, necessarily, but more.

Two, Trump isn’t going to Brussels to praise NATO – he is going there to bury it.  That’s what his benefactor Vladimir Putin wants; Trump will comply.  And complaining about the funding of NATO is a clever ruse – it undermines the military alliance indirectly.

And, you know? It just might work.

 

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Could Justin Trudeau lose the next election?

Well, sure he could. In strictly existential terms, you are always facing political death. The distance from hero to zero is very slight. Ask Kathleen Wynne.

After Trudeau won big in 2015 – after he came from a remote and distant perch in the House of Commons, from third place, to a first-place finish and a majority government – shell-shocked Tories could be seen walking around the Hill, muttering to themselves: “He’s good for eight years.”

I even heard that from rabid Trudeau-haters, people who had previously been cabinet ministers: eight years. The Opposition parties were leaderless, rudderless, hopeless. They’d been consigned to the political wilderness for a decade, possibly more.

Well, that was then, this is now. And, nowadays, Mr. Chewbacca Socks doesn’t look so invincible anymore, does he? The Force, not so strong with him.

A poll, in and of itself, is meaningless. The pollsters get stuff wrong all the time. But when you put a bunch of them together, they start to tell a tale. And the tale they tell should keep the Liberal leader up at night.

Case in point: CBC’s Calculator Boy is Eric Grenier. CBC calls him a “polls analyst,” but really what Grenier does is add up the poll numbers, and then divide. That sort of tells him, and us, where things are at.

For Trudeau, they’re not necessarily pointing towards oblivion. But some sort of a defeat, increasingly, looks possible. Ask Grenier.

“The Trudeau Liberals have a lot less to celebrate than they did in previous summers,” Grenier wrote just before Canada Day. “With little more than a year to go before the 2019 federal election campaign kicks off, the Liberals are facing a closer race than a first-term majority government might expect. The party’s lead in the polls has disappeared and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing pressure from both the Conservatives in Quebec and the New Democrats in Ontario.”

Way back when, at the commencement of the Dauphin’s Sunny Ways Dynasty, he held a nearly 20-point lead over his opponents. His approval ratings were stratospheric.

Now, not so much.

The governing Grits are now locked in a statistical death match with the Tories – and, on some days, said Tories have even been ahead. The Conservatives – led by the remarkably unremarkable Blandy Scheer – have been kicking Trudeau’s keester in the fundraising department, and recently humiliated him in a Liberal-held riding in Quebec, Trudeau’s last provincial stronghold.

The reasons for the less-than-sunny days are myriad and manifold. Apart from cannabis – which hurts them in the aforementioned Quebec and among minority communities – Trudeau has not had a single major legislative victory in three years. Not one. His go-soft strategy for handling Donald Trump has contributed to the demise of the TPP, the Paris Accord, and has NAFTA edging its way towards the morgue.

Other causes, in Trudeau’s Summer of Discontent: he overpromised and under-delivered – with indigenous communities, and with the mythic middle class. He seemed more preoccupied with selfies and baby-balancing than he was with stuff like the dimensions of the deficit (big), or the dimensions of business confidence (small).

And: the India trip. And: the Aga Khan. And: he groped a journalist.

All of it has produced a confluence of conundrums: Justin Trudeau is now arguably treading in his father’s footsteps. From a big Trudeaumania victory (for his Dad in 1968, for him in 2015) to a big come-down (majority to minority for his Dad in 1972, from a majority to minority and possibly worse for the son in 2019). Could it happen?

Sure it could. His father’s first term was a veritable flood of legislative and political achievements: Pierre Trudeau promoted and protected NATO, advocated for bilingualism and multiculturalism, transformed Parliament, boosted francophones in the public service and the military, reformed and expanded Unemployment Insurance, rewrote tax laws, and increased the family allowance for the first time since 1945. In comparative terms, the younger Trudeau’s policy achievements have been a tiny trickle.

Voters know it, too. And that is why they have been discreetly edging away from Justin Trudeau, and embracing a decidedly lackluster alternative, in the form of Blandy Scheer. They have measured Justin Trudeau, and found him wanting. More sizzle than steak, etc.

Can he turn it around? As noted at the outset, of course. Nowadays, per Ferris Bueller, political life moves pretty fast. One day, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario is mired in a massive #MeToo scandal, and self-destructing. Just 134 days later, the same political party won a huge majority in the Ontario election race.

Justin Trudeau, similarly, can surprise us all. He still possesses charm and likeability in abundance. As handsy as he is, he is not unintelligent. His party has a formidable team of organizers and fundraisers in every region. He regularly benefits from being underestimated. And his two main opponents lack his political skillset, to say the least.

That all said, Justin Trudeau could still lose. And, at the moment, he is losing.

Not by much, but enough.

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