A track from SFH’s new album leaks!

It hasn’t been mixed or mastered yet, and the engineer actually cuts the song off at the end.  But it’s rather Hot Nasties-ish, I must say. The addled Gregorian chant at the start? It’s an inside joke, like the whole band is.




The Liberal war room moves to the CPC leadership convention

Fun story in the new Maclean’s, here. I blabbed about how we made sausages. So shoot me.

Kevin Bosch, research director for the Liberal Party, wore a blue dress shirt on Saturday and a Conservative-branded nametag like everyone else. His partner, Braeden Caley, the Liberal Party’s communications director, slinked at the back of the room. On Friday, the pair brought backup of three aides. On Saturday, the squad included two members of Parliament.

Inter-party “observers” operate with three primary missions: to gather intelligence, disseminate propaganda to divide the host party, and, for the recognizable faces like Liberal MPs Adam Vaughan and Francis Drouin, appear in media interviews to give the enemy bad press. On Friday, Bosch and Caley targeted the media filing room and scattered about 40 black folders, jokingly titled “Top Secret,” tempting journalists to read a booklet reminding them of the hypocrisies of Maxime Bernier. They planted erasers around the room, with notes reading, “Andrew Scheer can’t erase the past,” and toy scissors representing Scheer’s cuts to government spending.

“Knowing how thorough Kevin is, my suspicion is he’s probably got information on all the top candidates,” says Warren Kinsella, a former special assistant to Jean Chrétien. “Their hotel and flights are costing the party a lot for them to be there. They’re not just there to do nothing.” Bosch asked not to be quoted. Kinsella says, “They’re gonna be nervous to say [what they’re doing]. Nobody likes to talk about how they make sausages.”

Retired from the disruption gig, Kinsella is more transparent. When he worked for Chrétien in 1993, he set up a “war room” at the leadership convention in which Kim Campbell was a candidate. “We were feeding [Chrétien] rumours and stuff like that we were hearing,” he says. “You’ve got all these people together who nominally belong to the same party. A lot of them hate each other’s guts. We would make use of that.”

Whether they are called “warriors,” “task forces,” or “observers,” troublemakers at the federal level are tolerated for the sake of democracy. Parties almost always give opposition MPs free admission as a courtesy to the media who seek a balance of input. But this weekend, Vaughan and Drouin were outraged to learn they were told to pay for passes, i.e. donate to their enemies. NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice was welcomed for free. Vaughan and Drouin ended up walking in a back door without paying.

This sort of mischief permeates politics at all levels. At an Ontario PC convention in 2007, Kinsella booked a room in the middle of the venue, using the fake name of a law firm. “In the middle of the night,” he says, “we conducted a press conference right there. They were furious. They were livid. They wanted to kick us out but they couldn’t.” At another leadership event, for Ontario PC leader John Tory, who was criticized for being a “rich kid,” the Liberals handed out silver spoons.

Behaviour got extreme in 2011. During the Ontario election, Kinsella’s team got a tip that PC candidate George Lepp, while drunk, had Tweeted a photo of somebody’s genitals—possibly his own—before removing the tweet instantly. Kinsella’s team caught the photo and hung onto it until the candidate’s speech, then sent it to media outlets. “Right when he was going on about family values, we blasted it out,” says Kinsella. (Lepp and the Tories denied the photo was of him and claimed someone had gained access to his Twitter feed.)

 


Frank Carter discovers love

I first discovered the wonder and mystery of Frank Carter ten years ago, when in Britain to see the Sex Pistols’ latest filthy lucre tour.  Frank was on the cover of the NME, because he was the coolest person in the world.  I was intrigued.

Bjorn and me and some other guys went to see Frank and his then-band, Gallows, play with Cancer Bats here in Tee Dot.  Here’s one of their tunes that my kids love.


Cancer Bats actually blew them off the stage, but Frank was just unbelievably captivating and charismatic and all that. He bled and sweat all over everything; he was a frenzied madman, spitting nails and barbed wire. I talked to him later at Gallows’ merch table, where he was happily selling T-shirts. No star affectations with this guy.

He quit Gallows, which was weird, because he formed the band with his brother, who I think stayed with Gallows. Anyway. He formed Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes. To say that they are different from Gallows is the punk rock understatement of the year.

To wit:



Anyway. I’m happy he’s happy. I liked it better when he was a madman and spitting barbed wire, however.


Column: Introducing the Smirker™

TORONTO—Smirk.

The economy. Justin Trudeau. Free speech. His deceased mother. ISIS.

On every subject, no matter how sad or serious, Andrew Scheer would smirk. It was, well, weird. His rictus was so off-putting, we started to forget what he was actually saying.

Which, for him, was pretty fortunate. Minutes after he won the Conservative Party leadership last night, Scheer took to the stage at the Toronto Congress Centre, and proceeded to give a speech that was so stilted, so stiff, it made the worst high school student council contestant sound positively Churchillian.

The only time Scheer stirred the crowd was when he promised to withhold funding from universities where “free speech” isn’t protected.

Never mind that universities are wholly the jurisdiction of the provinces. Never mind that there are indeed instances where universities are perfectly entitled to object to Holocaust denial or the sexualization of children. Never mind all that.

“Remember J. Philippe Rushton?” I shouted at my TV set. “The Western University professor who taught that blacks had smaller brains, and who asked his students about their genitalia for his ‘research?’ You okay with that kind of ‘free speech,’ Scheer, you perpetually-grinning harlequin?”

It got worse. At one point, he talked about how important it was to be able “to have a debate about any subject.”

Any subject. Smirk.

We all knew what he must be talking about. The shockingly large social conservative contingent—the ones who had propelled anti-gay, anti-abortion candidates like Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux to near the very top of the Conservative leadership ballot—wanted abortion and gay marriage banned again. And Scheer was saying: “I’m your guy. We’ll have a ‘debate’ about any subject, including that stuff. Wink, wink.”

Knowing smirk.

Before he exited the sprawling convention centre in Toronto’s west end, Scheer—who had voted against gay equality whenever the subject came up in the House—claimed that abortion and gay marriage weren’t up for debate “under my leadership.” But the damage had been done.

Everyone knew what he truly meant, however, because everyone knew who had put him over the top. So said Postmedia’s John Ivision: “If Scheer wins, it will be because of social conservatives.”

Other media were on to him too. A while ago, the indefatigable Rosie Barton went after The Smirker on her CBC show. Here’s a segment:

Barton: “But do you, yourself, believe [in gay marriage]?”

Scheer: “I, it’s, look, I don’t—it’s absolutely—our party dealt with this issue in Vancouver and, you know, there was a specific policy plank in our platform, and I think members decided, a lot of social conservatives who, you know, have differing views on that decided, look, if it’s not something that’s ever going to be changed, it’s been this way for 10 years—I have my own personal beliefs and, you know, my own faith background, but at this point in time with the Conservative Party of Canada trying to build a national viable coalition, it’s not something that—”

Barton: “But that sounds like, you’re just going to, you’re going to live with it. You’re going to live with the fact that gay people can get married; it’s not, but it’s not something you believe in.”

Scheer: “Look, it doesn’t matter, like if people have personal views on things, there’s a lot of things that divide us as Conservatives and there’s a lot of things that unite us. This is one of those issues that—it’s a—it happened in 2005, you know I was a Member of Parliament at the time, I voted my conscience.”

Get that? “It doesn’t matter.” And: “I voted my conscience.” And: the most weaselly, slippery answer any politician has given since Brian Mulroney was returned to the salons of the Ritz-Carlton.

“His conscience.” Smirk.

The shorthand on Andrew Scheer, when anyone paid any attention to him at all, was that he was “Stephen Harper with a smile.” You’d hear it a lot.

How, exactly, is that a winning formulation, pinstriped Tory boys and girls? Stephen Harper was beaten, soundly, by that guy you all mostly hate but whom Canadians mostly like. Did you think it was because Harper didn’t smile nearly enough, and Justin Trudeau smiles a lot? Seriously?

To the Conservatives, Scheer, however, was the least objectionable of an objectionable lot. Chong liked carbon taxes and had become a bit player in a psychodrama about breastfeeding. Bernier angered the lobby representing millionaire Quebec dairy farmers. Raitt was, well, a woman—just like Hillary! Emails!—So they picked Scheer, the grinning former Speaker of the House of Commons.

Not that it matters now, but here’s one thing to consider: Andrew Scheer was the worst Speaker in generations. He was pathetic.

One time, Scheer refused to let the opposition ask questions about—wait for it—the Harper government’s spending of taxpayer dollars. NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, flabbergasted, put it best: “If the Speaker of the House of Commons is going to try to shut down questions about government business from the leader of the official opposition before he even hears the end of the question, then we’ve entered new territory, and I’m telling you right now I’m not going to be told to sit down on questions that have to do with the public and that have to do with government business.”

That was the dimpled Andrew Scheer: quite alright with cutting off the “free speech” of those he opposed. Mr. Free Speech, only in favour of free speech for those with whom he agrees.

Anyway. The SoCon multitudes have made their choice. They wanted Trost or Lemieux or—failing that, per John Ivison—they wanted Andrew Scheer.

They got him.

Smirk.


From tomorrow’s column about The Smirker

To wit:

“Barton: But do you, yourself, believe [in gay marriage]?

Scheer: I, it’s, look, I don’t – it’s absolutely – our party dealt with this issue in Vancouver and, you know, there was a specific policy plank in our platform, and I think members decided, a lot of social conservatives who, you know, have differing views on that decided, look, if it’s not something that’s ever going to be changed, it’s been this way for ten years – I have my own personal beliefs and, you know, my own faith background, but at this point in time with the Conservative Party of Canada trying to build a national viable coalition, it’s not something that …

Barton: But that sounds like, you’re just going to, you’re going to live with it. You’re going to live with the fact that gay people can get married; it’s not, but it’s not something you believe in.

Scheer: Look, it doesn’t matter, like if people have personal views on things, there’s a lot of things that divide us as Conservatives and there’s a lot of things that unite us. This is one of those issues that – it’s a – it happened in 2005, you know I was a Member of Parliament at the time, I voted my conscience.”

Get that? “It doesn’t matter.” And: “I voted my conscience.” And: the most weaselly, slippery answer any politician has given since Brian Mulroney slunk back to the august salons of the Ritz-Carlton.

You made a big mistake, Conservatives. You’ll never believe that of me, but you’ll believe it soon enough.