‘SFH Kinda Suck’ is out!

Me and Simon of Ugly Pop picked ‘em up at Precision Pressing this afternoon – and they look great! Coloured vinyl too! You can get yours over at Ugly Pop’s website!

To celebrate, in true SFH fashion, I filmed the first official video, below, for ‘TV Show.’

Special bonus: Finn drops by to pogo!




From the archives: Dear good people of Sudbury

[Originally published January 2015.]

You’re in the middle of a by-election and whatnot, but this shouldn’t take long. Stay with me.

The notion that Kathleen Wynne – one of the most honest politicians you could ever care to meet – would ever, ever need to offer a job or an appointment to a former candidate to step aside is this:

It’s crazy. Crazy.

Here’s why: as leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, she doesn’t need to offer anyone a consolation prize, or an appointment, or even the time of the day. The reason why is right there, in black and white, in the constitution of the Liberal Party of Ontario: candidates can get appointed “in the sole and unfettered discretion of the Leader of the Ontario Liberal Party.” Section 11.8, folks. Check it out.

What does it all mean? Well, it means that the Opposition want you to believe that Kathleen Wynne didn’t have the power to do what she did, and that she therefore broke the law when she did something she didn’t have the power to do. But she always had that power. Ipso facto, no rule broken.

Still with me? Good. Head hurt? Mine too.

If this whole thing reminds you of the “scandal” about “deleted email” that wasn’t a scandal at all – ie., the emails still exist, and are in the Ontario government server out in Guelph – it should. It’s the Opposition, and probably the OPP, trying to manufacture a scandal during a by-election they stand an excellent chance of losing.

Let me sum up with this: to break a law, you need a law to break. Here, the only law that is relevant is one that gave Kathleen Wynne the power to do, you know, what she did do. Period.

So. There you go, good people of Sudbury: the truth. May it guide you between now and election day.

Sincerely,

Warren

P.S. One more thing. Section 11.2.5 says anyone who “engages in conduct or a pattern of conduct which shows lack of respect for other people” shouldn’t be a candidate. I’d say secretly taping a bunch of people, then broadcasting the results all over Kingdom Come, ain’t terribly respectful. But that’s just me.


Recipe For Hate is being featured on Apple’s iBooks!

Check it out: Apple is promoting Recipe For Hate on their iBooks web site!

My ever-patient Dundurn Press publicist, Kendra, says that Apple has decided to promote pre-orders of the book on their Sneak Peaks pages.  A short download of the book is there, too, to encourage folks to check it out.

Is this a big deal? I’m told it is: “iBooks is available in 51 countries. It ranks second in the U.S. for reading devices/reading apps, after Kindle…that’s still a lot of readers you’re missing if you are not publishing on iBooks. In Canada, iBooks is also ranked second, but not to Amazon; Kobo is the number one reading app/device in Canada. In the UK Amazon’s Kindle and iBooks are neck and neck. In Australia, iBooks is the number one reading device. Canada, the UK, and Australia are three English-speaking countries where you are losing sales if you are not publishing on iBooks.”

Among other things, it reminds me (again) that the book business has certainly changed in the 25 years since Unholy Alliances was published: back then, publishers still did big book tours and there were actual book sections in newspapers.  Now, however, book tours have become pretty rare, and book sections have effectively disappeared, too.

In the coming weeks, however, we are going to have an old-fashioned book launch for Recipe For Hate in Toronto, to which you are all invited (see below), there will be book tour-type visits to Ottawa and the West and around T.O. and in the U.S., and there will be lots of events (and if you want me for a speaking event, email me at wkinsella@gmail.com).


Column: when do you cease to be a country?

She’s on the bus! The second she pulls down that veil, arrest her!

When do you cease to be a country?  When do you stop being a people, a nation?

Romeo LeBlanc, who I loved, had an answer.  “When children sleep on the streets,” he said to us once.  “When they have nothing to eat.  That is when you are no longer a country, and when you become something else.”

Romeo said that to those of us in the Liberal Party war room in 1993.  Back then, Conservative leader Kim Campbell had been asked by a reporter about an apparent Tory plan to gut social programs.  “An election is no time to discuss serious issues,” she was quoted as saying.

LeBlanc, like the rest of us in the war room, had been angry.  The statistics – the recent ones in particular – suggest that that, on any given night, 35,000 Canadians sleep on the streets.  Children are among them.  And, every year, more than a quarter million people are forced to use homeless shelters at least once.

All of us under LeBlanc’s leadership agreed with him: when one child is hungry, and sleeping on a grate on a downtown sidewalk in February, you aren’t a real country yet.  You are something else.  Something less.

In 2017, if we think about it, there are too many other examples like that.  Ways in which we fall short.

In the United States, of course, there is plenty of that. Donald Trump – who has been shown to be, again and again, a liar and a racist and a coward and a pig – has remade America.  His executive decisions and his policies have made the air and the water dirtier.  He has barred women and children seeking refuge from famine and torture and death.

He has pushed laws that will make the super-rich richer, and leave everyone else to bear the burden.  He said he will build a wall to keep out Mexicans, who he calls rapists and murderers.  He has worked to eviscerate a program that made health care affordable for 30 million Americans who previously had none.

If Romeo LeBlanc were still here, he would say that any one of those things have not just rendered the United States of America less of a country – they have ended it.  But he’d probably say that Canadians shouldn’t start feeling all that superior to our neighbours to the South, either.

So, last week, Quebec’s government nudged us towards the abyss.  Their Bill 62, you see, makes illegal the wearing of niqabs or burkas by women offering or receiving public services.  The target, notwithstanding what Quebec’s allegedly Liberal government claims, is Muslim women.  A previous version of the law would have banned the display of any religious symbols by public servants – crucifixes by Christians, yarmulkes by Jews, turbans by Sikhs.

Justin Trudeau, to his credit, has denounced such racist laws in the past – but has yet to do anything about it in the present.  So too new NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, who has been clear in his opposition.  The Conservatives, meanwhile, had wanted to pass a raft of similarly Islamophobic “laws.”  But they were voted out of office before they could get away with it.

Speaking of the Conservatives, they contributed to the diminution of Canada last week, too.  They announced that someone named Hamish Marshall was going to run their next federal campaign.

Why would such a thing hurt Canada?  Because Marshall helped to found, and fund, an avowedly racist media organization called Rebel.  Rebel achieved notoriety, in recent weeks, for publishing statements that their luminaries were “sick of” Holocaust “brainwashing.”  And: “much less than six million” were slaughtered in the Holocaust.

And: “left-wing, commie, socialist Jews” killed “millions” in World War II’s aftermath.  And: columns titled “Ten Things I Hate About Jews.”  And: at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville where a woman was murdered by a white supremacist, one Rebel celebrity said there has been a “rising” in what she called “white racial consciousness.”

The aforementioned Hamish Marshall ran Conservative leader Andrew Scheer’s campaign out of Rebel’s offices.  And, when a Globe and Mail reporter asked Scheer about that, he ran away.  He actually ran away.

Finally – and this we must never forget – we cease to be much of a nation when 4,232 First Nation women and girls are murdered, or go missing.  And when the federal government spends untold millions to launch an inquiry into those murders – and it becomes such a sham, such a mockery of justice, that the father of Trudeau’s Justice minister (himself a hereditary chief) calls it “a bloody farce.”

There are other examples, but we don’t have any more room to describe them.

And if he were still here, perhaps Romeo LeBlanc would say we still don’t have much of a country, either.

2017: good times.

 


“The Charter protects all Canadians, every one of us, even when it is uncomfortable.”

Justin Trudeau said that, back in July, when he was asked about his government paying $10 million to Omar Khadr.  It’s a quote: “The Charter protects all Canadians, everyone of us, even when it is uncomfortable.”

And here’s what Justin Trudeau said three months later, when the Quebec Legislature passed a racist law, a “law” that everyone agrees targets Muslim women: “It’s not up to the federal government to challenge this.”  That’s a quote, too.

Stirring words about the Charter back then, mealy-mouth cowardice now.  What’s changed?

Well, time has gone by.  To be sure.  In that time, the planet’s leading Islamophobe, Donald Trump, has made serial attempts to pass similarly anti-Muslim laws.  During that time, however, Justin Trudeau has made clear he disagrees with Trump. “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada,” he tweeted, the first time Trump tried to bar refugees from Muslim countries.

In recent months, too, expressions of hatred targeting Muslims (and Jews, and others) has surged in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.  Right around the time Trudeau was giving everyone a civics lesson about the Constitution, in fact, Statistics Canada revealed that hate crimes against Muslims had exploded by 60 per cent, when compared to previous years.  The problem has gotten worse, not better.

So, Trudeau’s whiplash-inducing reversal on the applicability of the Charter to difficult cases isn’t because of (a) the passage of time, or (b) because things have gotten any easier for Muslims.  No, it has to be something else.

All it can be, of course, is this: seats.  Quebec has 78, and Justin Trudeau won 40 of them in 2015.  He thinks that, if his government challenges the National Assembly’s indisputably racist law, he’ll lose some or all of those seats.  That’s the only reason he isn’t matching his previously-inspiring words with action.

Talk minus action equals zero, one of my Canadian punk rock friends like to say, and that is what Justin Trudeau and his government presently amount to: zero.

Either you believe in the Constitution, or you don’t.  Either you believe people have an inalienable right to peacefully express their deepest religious views, or you don’t.  Either you are against hatred, or you aren’t.

You know what makes me want to puke about all this?  It’s that, in the months he has been in power, not even a racist like Donald Trump has dared to pass a law telling women what they can wear.  Not even him.

I am so disgusted by the federal Liberal Party – by its gutlessness, by its venality, by its dishonesty – that words (almost) fail me.

Oh, and for you Liberals who are moved to write in, and defend what Justin Trudeau has done because of politics: don’t bother.  Because, when a veil-wearing Muslim Mom with two little kids is kicked off a Quebec City bus in January, when it is forty below, your fucking bullshit about “politics” isn’t going to keep her and her kids very warm, is it?  No, it isn’t.

Somewhere, this morning, Donald Trump is reading his clippings, and nodding.

“Attaboy, Justin,” he’s saying.  “Attaboy.”


Recipe For Hate is out!

Was just at Dundurn Press (and I’m now at the Patrician Grill to celebrate, where else) and they gave me a pile of copies of my new book, Recipe For Hate – and the good folks there told me that they’ve received a historically-huge order of the book from the US!

Off to the Windsor Bookfest tomorrow, and also to teach a creative writing class at Windsor’s Walkerville Collegiate! Hope to see you there. 

Here we go!


Dear Conservative readers of this web site 

It’s been several hours, and I still think this is the stupidest political move I’ve seen in months – and that’s saying something. Why, you ask?

  • The Conservatives are tying themselves to every crazy/offensive thing Rebel does between now and the election. And, believe me: there’ll be plenty.
  • The Conservatives are fulfilling a Liberal prophecy about them: namely, that their new leader really is a nutty SoCon who is beholden to the alt-Right.
  • The Conservatives have taken, and will take, a massive hit for a “strategist” who could only eke out a razor-thin win for Scheer, after 13 ballots, no less. What has he ever done, in effect, beside creating a platform for the racist alt-Right in Canada?

Hear that sound? That’s the sound of Messrs. Trudeau and Singh dancing a jig, still astonished by their continuing good luck.

Blandy Scheer: still making Joe Clark look good.


The Rodents, the Filters, the Slinks: RIP Gord Downie

Those were some of the early names of the Tragically Hip. They got their start in the early Eighties in the nascent Kingston punk scene.

A lot of bands got their start in punk rock (and some of us never left). I always felt the Hip’s Downie had that don’t-give-a-fuck punk ethos about him.

RIP to him, the Rodents, the Filters and the Slinks.