Busted

Wake at cabin this morn to see (a) open cabinet (b) open bag of dog bones and (c) Daisy looking completely innocent. Hmm.


My take on Duffy, from a year ago this week

Quote:

While myriad controversies—always nouns, always with “gate” appended as a suffix—always transfix the commentariat, they always leave Mr. and Mrs. Frontporch cold. The Duffy “scandal” is no exception.

That is because scandal-mongering, like the Senate itself, is a thankless task (and taskless thanks). With perhaps the notable historic exception of the Watergate break-in, it doesn’t really work anymore.

There are three reasons why:

1. The media/political punditocracy refer to everything, pretty much, as a scandal.

2. Regrettably, if you were to ask Joe and Jane Frontporch—and someone really should, one of these days—they would tell you: they already believe that everyone who wields power in Ottawa/Washington/wherever is an unindicted co-conspirator, i.e., a crook. Ipso facto, news reports to the effect that a politician has allegedly committed theft, fraud, and breach of trust aren’t news at all. They are, instead, like weather reports: they happen every day, they are rarely good news, and there is nothing Joe and Jane can do about them.

3. Joe and Jane Frontporch have heard the hysteria and histrionics about “scandals” way, way too many times. Way. And, consequently, they now don’t believe any of it until the good Senator is led away in handcuffs and a fetching orange pantsuit.

In the real world, the real scandals are things like not having a job, and being unable to pay the bills. The real scandals are seeing your ailing parent curled up on a bed in a hospital corridor, waiting days to get seen by a doctor. The real scandals are governments spending untold billions on security—only to thereafter shrug when some deranged, lone wolf fanatic slips through their labyrinth of scanners and spies, and commit terrible crimes.

Those things, to Joe and Jane Frontporch, are the real scandals.

Not, to put a fine point on it, Mike Duffy. That, they feel, is just another sad case of Ottawa talking about Ottawa—and not the real scandals, in the real world.


Boxed in

Snippet from next week’s Hill Times column.  I’m getting…concerned.

…here was the highest office in the land, issuing an official-looking media statement beneath the Great Seal of Canada, no less, that “The Prime Minister will train at Gleason’s Gym.” No questions, just be there to take his picture. Don’t be late.

Some of us, sitting in the cheap seats outside the ring, have written about Justin Trudeau’s sheer mastery of image. In my view, there is no politician alive who is as adept at visuals. Words equal information, but pictures equal power, and Justin Trudeau – grinning out at us on the cover of GQ, this week – knows that better than anyone.

But.

But are you starting to feel, like me, that this stuff is getting pushed a bit too far? That there is a danger, here, that he is dancing too close to the klieg lights, and is about to fall into the orchestra pit?


Update on that neo-Nazi rag

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Image from this morning’s Twitter feed of YWN editor James Sears, a.k.a., “Dimitri the Lover.”

The latest on Your Ward News, the racist, homophobic, misogynistic, Holocaust-Denying neo-Nazi rag that Canada Post distributes over half of Toronto:

  • Opposition is growing, and the ad hoc effort against the “newspaper” and Canada Post now involves everyone from longtime prominent Conservatives to the NDP and organized labour
  • The Toronto Police Service and the minister responsible, Judy Foote, have offered no help whatsoever – but other police agencies, and other Liberals, are actively working to stop Canada Post’s wilful dissemination of hate
  • Many legal/political initiatives are underway, with more to come – and groups ranging from Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies to the National Council of Canadian Muslims are actively lending support
  • A local feminist organizer has put together a petition, below, to be presented in the Ontario Legislature by Liberal MPP Arthur Potts and in the Commons by Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith…print it off and get others to sign, then scan and send to me here!

Petition - Canada Post Delivery Petition


The crucial New York-Manitoba results analysis you’ve been waiting for

Some of us – okay, me, Michael Diamond and Brian Kelcey, and that’s it, pretty much – flipped back and forth between the coverage of the New York primary and Manitoba election last night.  Out of that, some important similarities and dissimilarities can be observed.

  • Premier-to-be Brian Pallister is really tall.  So is Hillary Clinton bestie and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.  Pallister is 6’8″ and de Blasio is 6’5″. Conclusion: tall people did well last night.
  • Manitoba has 1.3 million people living in 250,946 square miles.  New York State covers 54,475 square miles, and has 19.8 million people in it.  Conclusion: you are more likely to find inexpensive parking in Manitoba.
  • Pallister was a powerful provincial cabinet minister from 1995 to 1997, and then he wielded no real power after that.  Hillary Clinton was a powerful Senator from 2000 to 2008, and didn’t hold elected office after that. Conclusion: both were insiders and then were sort of outsiders, and – as of last night – are well on their way to becoming powerful insiders again.  Kind of lame, I know, but you get what you pay for, etc.
  • Some people liked to compare Pallister to Trump.  They even made a web site.  It didn’t work.  Both got big wins last night. Conclusion: being Donald Trump, or being someone who is supposedly like Donald Trump, didn’t matter.

Here’s some helpful graphics, too.  The New York Times one is prettier.  Get with it, CBC.


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In this week’s Hill Times: Attawapiskat, and leaving home

CALGARY – What do you do when times get really bad where you are, and when your loved ones are at risk?

Well, you either stay where you are, and hope that things finally get better. Or you move.

Around here, that question isn’t an abstraction. Around here, a majority of Calgary’s residents came from somewhere else, to get a piece of Alberta’s (formerly) limitless promise – better jobs, better services, better opportunities.

That’s why my own family came here, in fact: to escape Quebec’s cultural and language wars. We stayed three decades. This is home, still.

Presently, many Calgarians are agonizing about moving. The bottom has fallen out of the energy industry, and things aren’t going to get better anytime soon. So, for the first time in three decades, many Calgarians are pulling up stakes and heading elsewhere. Nova Scotia, Ontario, BC.

Anywhere they can get a job. Anywhere they can give their families a semblance of a future.

That dilemma – should we stay or should we go – is arguably a bit easier for Calgarians to resolve. They came here to get away from tough times, and they’re now readying to leave here to escape tough times. They know what families have to do, sometimes.

But what if your culture is wholly different? What if you were brought up to believe that you were, quite literally, part of the land beneath your feet? That you and the Earth are interchangeable?

In Attawapiskat, unlike Calgary, that’s what some folks may be feeling. Residents there know people are saying they should leave. That they should get away from the grinding, bottomless misery of the place.

But, but, but: to leave the reserve is to leave behind a part of who they are. Because the reserve isn’t a place. It’s them.

The issue came up in the House of Commons last week. My former boss, Jean Chretien, was on the Hill to meet someone, and the media caught up with him. They wanted to ask him about the state of emergency at Attawapiskat – about a youthful suicide pact that had been overheard, involving 13 kids. One of the kids was just nine years old.

They wanted to ask Canada’s best Prime Minister about the 39 recorded suicide attempts since the start of March. In a place with only 2,000 people in it.

Here’s what my former boss said to them: “People have to move sometimes. Sometimes it’s desirable to stay if they want to stay, but it’s not always possible.”

That doesn’t mean the reserve should be shut down or relocated, he said. “You can not have a statement that is generic, you know… it’s one case at a time.”

Chretien is father to an aboriginal boy. He is widely regarded as the best Indian Affairs minister Canada has ever had. He has spent time – lots of it, during and after politics – in remote places like Attawapiskat. And he always taught all of us on his staff to strive to improve the lives of the people who were here first.

But that didn’t stop the NDP from implying Chretien is a colonial antediluvian monster. An “assimilationist.”

Fresh from stabbing their leader in the back in Edmonton – fresh from immolating themselves by embracing a document that would economically emasculate Alberta and not a few other places – the NDP tried to change the channel on their own problems. Theirs is the party that represents Attawapiskat in the House of Commons, you see, and they would prefer you not remember that.

So they went after Jean Chretien.

Said NDP MP Niki Aston: “A former prime minister of Canada, when asked about the suicide epidemic in Attawapiskat, perpetuated such assimilationist views in suggesting that First Nations people should just leave their communities.”

She went on: “These views are unacceptable.”

Hearing this sort of thing from the NDP – from the party whose founder favoured eugenics, and the sterilization of some of the selfsame people Ashton claimed to be defending – was almost enough to make one throw up. But piety is standard operating procedure for the NDP. They’ve represented Attawapiskat for years in the House of Commons, and it’s difficult to think of single thing they have done to improve lives there.

They would prefer, instead, that the people of Attawapiskat stay where they are. And vainly hope – yet again – that things will somehow get better.

The time for waiting is over. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, per the cliché, is the definition of insanity.

The people of Attawapiskat were here first. We – the ones who took away their culture, their language, their religion, their land – owe them.
And if that means paying for them to move to a better place, then so be it. In places like Calgary, they know what that is.

It’s not assimilation. It’s protecting the ones you love.

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Michael de Adder’s view is like mine.