Category Archives: Canada

Unknown's avatar A. E. 3:46 pm on February 11, 2020
Tags: #ShutDownCanada,   

The ‘Social Contract’ Goes Up In Flames

If you’ve not yet seen the recent coverage of anti-pipeline road barriers being dismantled by angry locals off Highway 19 on Vancouver Island, B.C., you may want to give it a watch before reading this.

First off, let me express my pride, for want of a better term, that this happened in my old stomping grounds. Many, many hardworking families on Vancouver Island have been hammered by the damage done to our nation’s natural resource sector — first, by the massive layoffs in forestry around the time of the Great Recession, and now, again, by the federal government’s open warfare against the oil and gas industry, which many Islanders had looked to as an alternative. We used to joke that the population of Campbell River (my hometown, just north of this incident) doubled and halved every two weeks with all the folks flying in and out of Fort McMurray.

I was around 14 years old when the local paper mill, the town’s biggest employer, shut down. Over the months that followed I remember seeing groups of friends at school, embracing one another in tears, saying their last goodbyes before some of their families would depart for Alberta’s then-greener pastures. Others still would remain, their households having elected to send dad to the aforementioned oil sands to be away from his family for weeks at a time just to provide for them.

My father, for his part, lost his business in the recession. Not wanting to leave his home of over a decade behind, he spent the next few years working two, sometimes three jobs to keep our heads above water. By the time I graduated high school, there was still little work in Campbell River — so I, too, made my way to the “promised land” of Alberta.

We were all idiots, I suppose.

I’m telling you all this to give an idea of the context in which the events of this video occurred. For every dirty, screeching hippy planting their asses behind an illegal highway barricade, there are surely dozens of ordinary people who are sick to death of this kind of interference in their daily lives. Sick to death of watching their friends and families become so thinly spread across the breadth of this country, desperately tracking down the few remaining parts of it in which there is still work to be found. Just as the recession was not the fault of those who were most drastically affected by it, neither is it their fault that multiple pipeline projects remain trapped in regulatory hell.

And, clearly, it is not their fault that anti-pipeline protesters have upped the ante by blockading the same highways and bridges that every other Canadian needs to get from one place to another — whether or not they themselves are employed in the industry currently slated for death. Hell, even if they were, it is hardly the “fault” of any given O&G worker that any given pipeline might be built — yet, they will be made to suffer the consequences of these blockades all the same.

It’s not their fault that this is happening. It’s not their fault that the RCMP has chosen to do next-to-nothing about it. Nonetheless, when a handful of those sick-to-death people come together to do the work that the police refuse to do, they are the ones who are treated as criminals.

At one point in the video, a protester becomes aggravated by the sight of their carefully-placed barricade materials being tossed rightfully into the roadside ditch by a local who’s clearly had enough of this shit. “He’s removing garbage,” says another local to the weepy protester.

“My sacred items are not garbage,” she counters, with the kind of passion to suggest that the man was throwing a live infant into the ditch as opposed to old tires and rotting plywood. “My sacred items are special!”

Hear that? Those old tires are ‘special’ — sacred, even! Much, much more special or sacred than silly things like — I don’t know — having a job. Feeding your family. Just trying to live one’s life, even as the world around them comes tumbling down in a grandiose hissy-fit.

Unfortunately, I suspect that these protesters — and by extension, their police detail — might be on to something. It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to just “live our lives” anymore, not while they have anything to say about it. As noted by a local in this video, paying your taxes and minding your business doesn’t seem to be good enough these days — not to the police, and certainly not to the protesters. Taking matters into your own hands, however, is also not allowed: that’ll get you arrested.

But hey — the police will be receiving their paychecks as usual, despite their active refusal to protect the public from a minority of extremists. What do they care if hundreds, if not thousands of others will be physically prevented from earning theirs? In fact, missed days of work will be, for some, the least of their concerns — God forbid anyone has an important medical appointment waiting for them on the other side of a blocked-up bridge.

The protesting and road-blocking is still ongoing. CN Rail has just announced that it will be forced to close “significant” parts of its rail network if the protests continue. As the world’s second-largest country, Canada is extremely dependent upon its transportation infrastructure to provide goods across the country. The shortages that could result from this are far from trivial: food, medicine, propane, the list goes on. Already our supplies of these and various other necessities are threatened by the mass quarantine of China, and our ever-creative pipeline protesters have somehow managed to find a way to make the situation even worse. Quite ironically, we can expect the isolated and predominantly Indigenous communities of our rural north to be among the hardest hit by these antics conducted in their name.

With the current state of play, it is only a matter of time before someone gets hurt — physically, as opposed to financially, or indeed “spiritually”, hurt. Hence the ominous quotation now making its rounds across Canadian social media:

“If the government will not uphold the rule of law, it becomes incumbent on citizens to do so.”

Canadians have a reputation for being ‘polite’, often to our detriment. As I’ve argued before, this ‘polite’ demeanor is more likely the result of not wanting to rock the proverbial boat than it is a genuine consideration of other people’s feelings. At any rate, my theory is about to be put to the test once more.

If you don’t want to get involved, that’s too damn bad: these protesters, the police, and indeed the upper echelons of government, have all decided that you don’t get to have that choice anymore. As big as our country is, there is simply nowhere left to run: the roadways are littered with trash. We are now sitting in an un-seaworthy vessel without life jackets, watching some of our fellow passengers crowd themselves onto one side, threatening to flip the thing over. Forget not wanting to rock the boat, because it’s already about to capsize.

Will we rock it back the other way, or will we let them drown us all?

Unknown's avatar A. E. 5:54 pm on November 8, 2019
Tags: #wexit, alberta independence, alberta separation, , gilets jaunes, yellow vests   

A World United in Discontent

On October the 26th, what began as a student-led rebellion against a rise in metro fares culminated in more than a million Chileans across the country hitting the streets in a more general protest of rising wealth inequality — already the worst in Latin America — in addition to low wages, increased costs of living, poor public health care and what they see as a massively outdated and ineffective pension system. [1] Further north, in Ecuador, widespread civil unrest erupted earlier that month, following the government’s decision to end a long-standing fuel subsidy and the subsequent, dramatic rise in pump prices rocking the oil-producing nation. [2] Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Netherlands has played host to considerably less-violent, yet no less disruptive, traffic-blocking protests by farmers in rejection of a recent government proposal to slash Dutch agricultural production by some 50%. [3] And then, of course, there’s the French, who will celebrate a full year’s worth of weekly demonstrations against various government policies, not least including their own eco-tax on fossil fuels, this upcoming Saturday.

In all four cases, what we are witnessing is a clash between two worlds, and between the vastly differing sets of expectations that accompany them each. In the blue corner, we have the pseudo-Nirvana of Unlimited Progress and the transnational elites whom champion it; in the red corner, we see the great masses of humanity whom have become keenly aware that this vision of the Anointed Ones has been tailor-made to exclude the common folk. Caught in the middle of the conflict we find the national and sub-national contractors tasked with the dirty work of our enforced enlightenment: the politicians, the civil servants, mainstream media and the cultural industry; all eager to play the part of the dodgy referee.

And while so many remain captivated by the action in the ring, a number of fist-fights have broken out in the stands. Of particular interest to us is the ongoing scrap between the two ‘halves’ of Canada, East and West, the more vocal members of each having accused the other of rooting for the wrong contender. Insults are tossed two-and-fro at a breathtaking pace; it has become something of a chore by this stage to keep up with who has called whom what, and why. The minute it appears that tensions between the two factions may begin to thaw, someone is sure to remember some thing or another that someone else might have said, or done, or even suggested, at any point between 20 minutes and 20 years prior to now, and to lob this painful memory like a grenade in the direction of the opposing side. And just like that, the fighting resumes before the smoke has had time to clear.

At some point, however, we’ll need to ask ourselves if this brawl is not itself a mere imitation of the main event we’re ostensibly spectating. Are these regional fractures of ours deepening solely as a result of the numerous, longstanding grievances between us emerging from the shadows once more, or is this simply the mask that we, as Canadians, have decided to don before we, too, step into the arena below? Of course, it is more than likely to be a mixture of the two — surely, many of the students in Chile who first began hopping turnstiles at train stations might have been happy to leave the protests there, and none of them could have predicted that this relatively mild act of opposition would later explode into the much more intense, much more generalized rage against the state machinery now wrestling the country into a choke-hold. But no matter how exactly the fighting might have kicked off, it has now taken on a life and character of its own — there’s no going back now.

Perhaps we Canadians share much the same fate: considering that the rise in Chilean metro fares was, among other factors, instigated by fuel prices [4], and that highly similar concerns have been behind the concurrent unrest in France and Ecuador (the Dutch farmers, meanwhile, can look to the same source behind their woes as can those waging war against high fuel prices — the alleged ‘climate crisis’), it seems only natural that the particular region of Canada dependent on a functioning fossil fuel industry would make the most noise in the face of an administration seemingly hell-bent on following the example set by its French and Ecuadorian counterparts.

But with violent demonstrations, looting, and rampant civil disorder not quite being our thing in Canada, and with the country itself being tens of times larger than all of the aforementioned nations put together, it is perhaps just as natural that our own brand of discontent would manifest itself in a spatially grandiose manner — that is to say, in the form of a burgeoning separatist movement. More to the point, however, one does not have to necessarily agree with the notion of a ‘Western Exit’ to be capable of recognizing the genuine reasons behind its very existence: simply put, it is about pipelines in Alberta — but it doesn’t stop there. Likewise, it is about metro fares in Chile, about fuel taxes in France, about fuel subsidies in Ecuador and about farming quotas in the Netherlands — but in none of these cases do things stop ‘there’, either.

Because as deeply personal as this spat between East and West may feel to us as Canadians, these present hostilities do not exist, nor were created, in a vacuum. Yes, the arguments we use, the names we call each other, and the historical grievances we point to, will all be adorned with our own unique, contextual flair. But we’d be fools to believe that we are the only nation presently tearing itself apart at the seams, and nor should we believe it possible to somehow turn back the clock on all of this and go back to the way things were ‘before’ — whenever we wish that to be.

Much the same can be said for the rest of the world: the cat, as it were, is no longer anywhere near the bag. It has become starkly visible to the citizens of these countries, as well as many others, that the powers that be do not truly have their subjects’ best interests in mind; not only that, these millions of people have realized, in their own ways, the futility behind attempting to root out this problem at the ballot box. The culpable actors cannot be voted out, for so many of them are complicit in these plans that there will always be another around to fill any vacancies. They cannot be held accountable for any of their crimes, no matter the degree of evidence available, because they have given themselves the power to be accountable to no one other than themselves. Thus the people have turned to perhaps the last available and viable method of voicing their opposition: protesting, be it peacefully or otherwise. For many of us in Western Canada, surfing the tide of separatist sentiment — regardless of how realistic the thought may or may not be in practice — appears to be the only meaningful form of protest left at our disposal.

In the grand scheme of things, that this division of ours would crop up along regional lines is simply a consequence of both our size and the distribution of our comparatively miniature population. Truly, it is not the case that the English-speaking Canadians in the West are inherently, drastically different than those in the East, culturally-speaking or otherwise, and there are surely many on either side who may feel they have more in common with those on the other. Rather, we should not view it as a mere coincidence that the catalyst for this split happens to be very much the same in spirit as that behind many of the other ‘uprisings’ taking place across the globe: the clash between two worlds, as represented by the ongoing war on fossil fuels; between that of the (trans-)national elites and that of, broadly speaking, just about everyone else.

Of course, not everyone will agree with my view of the situation, nor would I expect them to. There are those who will contend that Western separation is far from a novel idea, and that its re-emergence was an inevitability independent of whatever happens in any other country. Others may counter that if our present conflict isn’t really based in what region of the country one happens to live in, then the whole argument for separation becomes something of a moot point. I can only ask that they consider the broader perspective: Canadians in the West may be asking for independence in a literal sense, but they are doing so at a time when so many others worldwide are asking for a more metaphysical form of independence — independence from government interference with their lives — and for many of the same reasons. Put differently, we might say that they are seeking out the latter ‘type’ of independence by means of demanding the former. But more importantly, because the roots of this current round of Western alienation are not, truly, unique to Western Canada, this is not a phenomenon that can be dealt with by any single act of concession. Yes, it is about pipelines — but it doesn’t stop there.

Unknown's avatar A. E. 1:34 pm on October 17, 2019
Tags: alberta, bloc quebecois, BQ, canadian election, canadian leaders debate, , canpoli, election canada, liberal party of canada   

Between Quebec and The Rest of Canada

For many Canadians, the federal leaders’ debate held on October 7 –one of the very few that would see all qualified, federal parties participate — was their first of the campaign, even as close to the Big Day itself that we are now. In fact, this was the only debate that featured every single federal leader and was held in English — despite English being the overwhelmingly more-common native tongue of Canadians from coast to coast, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

In the lead-up to the debate itself, quite a bit of controversy was levied, both in favour of and in opposition to, the inviting of Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC). Given Bernier’s tendency to eschew politically-correct hogwash, it is understandable that the censors at CTV would be considered about including him. Quite arguably, however, it was not Bernier whom the political/media establishment should have been worried about — in fact, I will argue that it was the inclusion of Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the Bloc Québécois (BQ), that had the most damning impact upon the political consciousness of the nation.

Considering that the BQ, though a federal party, fields candidates only in the province of Quebec itself, many may have been understandably puzzled by his presence at the English-language debate. The reason, however, is simple: the BQ is effectively in competition with the Liberals over seats in Quebec, which, in tandem with Ontario, are typically considered to be vital to the overall electoral success of a given party. Not only that, the BQ has been rapidly rising to challenge the Liberals in recent polls. As such, Blanchet was likely given a podium for the sole purpose of giving Trudeau the opportunity to debate him. Yes — while the other four leaders were appealing to the country as a whole, Trudeau attempted to advertise himself to Quebec and The Rest of Canada simultaneously; Blanchet, meanwhile, predictably remained focused on securing support in only the former. The near-open acknowledgement of this unbalanced political dynamic — a poorly-healed scar cut across the entire history of Canadian confederation — in combination with the manner in which it played out over the course of the evening, is, in my mind, virtually guaranteed to go down as one of the biggest mistakes made by the Liberal Party over the course of the entire campaign period.

It all comes down to the simple fact of Blanchet’s unswerving allegiance to the interests of Quebeckers, and — as he himself said — only Quebeckers. Blanchet did not shy away from the fact that he considers Quebec to hold something of a superior status to all of the other provinces (as evidenced by his frequent references to “Quebec and the provinces” during the debate, as if to suggest that Quebec itself is not a “province”); moreover, towards the end of the debate he stated that, to the extent that the interests of Quebec and that of The Rest of Canada happen to converge, the province is happy to cooperate — the implication here being that, should those interests conflict with one another, Blanchet will pursue a “Quebec First” style of domestic diplomacy. In other words, Albertans should not hold hopes for the Energy East pipeline project becoming a reality any time soon, so long as Blanchet has anything to say about it. Although we may both list our nationalities as “Canadian”, it is quite clear that Blanchet considers the desires of some Canadians to be more important than others.

Of course, none of this rhetoric comes off as particularly surprising, considering that the flip-flopping issue of Québécois nationalism and/or sovereignty from The Rest of Canada has, as mentioned, been a hotly-contested topic since before confederation in 1867. And, given that the BQ openly admits themselves to be laser-focused on the promotion of Québécois nationalism, interests, and sovereignty, it is no more surprising that the party’s leader would continue to walk the walk at the federal leaders’s debate.

What is likely to have unsettled a number of viewers, however, is just how blunt Blanchet was about his priorities — Quebec, and only Quebec — and, more crucially, the dedicated manner in which he maintained that Quebec, while more ‘special’ than the other provinces, should nevertheless continue to receive equalization payments from those other provinces. In fact, Blanchet all but openly suggested that Quebec ought to receive more federal welfare than it already does, on the basis of its having allegedly done “the most” in the fight against climate change. In other words, his belief appears to be that Quebec does not have to cooperate with the other provinces if it doesn’t want to, but should still be able to take money from them. Aside from the aforementioned quip about climate mitigation, no argument was provided by Blanchet as to why The Rest of Canada ought to be on board with this, other than the fact that Blanchet said so.

Now, that’s what Blanchet said at the debate — the reaction to what he said, on the other hand, may prove itself to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

To my admitted surprise, Trudeau was the only party leader to push back against Blanchet’s flagrant Franco supremacy during the debate itself, countering that (to paraphrase) “Quebeckers can do whatever Canadians can do, as Quebeckers are Canadians by definition.” Of course, to anyone in the audience that had been paying attention, this was clearly not the case — if any other province had attempted to assert itself and advocate exclusively for the interests of its citizens in the manner that Blanchet had just done for Quebec, they would have been dragged across the coals and denounced as ‘sewing division’ by the mainstream press, rightly or wrongly. If nothing else, the debate served to make it quite obvious to The Rest of Canada that there are, in fact, a multitude of things that Quebec can do and say that the other provinces cannot. I believe that this factor alone — a glaring spotlight cast upon the unspoken agreement that a stringent, highly-effective social hierarchy exists here in Canada — ought to be enough to strike serious doubts regarding the unity of our nation into the hearts of Canadians across the country.

For Alberta, having seemingly taken on the role of the “red-headed stepchild” of the provinces and, beyond being named-and-shamed for its fossil fuel activities by both Blanchet and Green Party leader Elizabeth May, received effectively no attention from any of the party leaders regarding any of the multiple problems it is currently grappling with, the damage inflicted on its increasingly-tenuous relationship with the federal government by being so blatantly degraded as Quebec’s Piggy Bank ought to be fairly obvious. The Rest of The Rest of Canada, meanwhile, ought to be asking themselves, if they haven’t already begun to do so, the very same question that Albertans — and other Western Canadians, for that matter — have been asking for some time, now: Why isn’t there anyone at the federal level who cares as much about the people in my province as Blanchet and the BQ seem to care about those in Quebec? If we really are all equal partners in this national project of ours, why are the concerns of some of us seen to be more worthy of discussion than that of the rest of us?

Some of the other, very important issues featuring in this election which were either glossed-over or ignored entirely over the course of the debate include, but are not limited to, the rising rates of crime, and violent crime in particular; the opioid epidemic; the perilously overwhelmed immigration system; the ever-worrying state of the national economy; our disputes with China, no less their continued detention of Canadian citizens; and our country-wide shortage of health care professionals. These are all issues that affect Canadians in B.C. as much as they do Canadians in Nova Scotia — but these, for whatever reason, were not considered to be topics worthy of much attention.

The province of Quebec, meanwhile, was given its very own seat at the table, purely by virtue of Trudeau really, really needing to win some seats there. Not only that, its very name was invoked almost twice the amount of the next-most popular term, “climate”. Quebec, and all things Quebec, was quite well represented in the discussion, indeed — if only The Rest of Canada could have said the same. But as much as the political class may ultimately aim to win-over all Canadians, they especially need to win over the ones in Quebec.

Meanwhile, as the hands of the clock strike ever closer towards midnight, Trudeau has since switched tactics on the Quebec campaign trail: rather than appealing to Quebeckers to choose the Liberals over the BQ, he has begun to ask them to vote Liberal in order to stop the Conservatives from winning too many seats overall. That’s right — by means of a gruesomely hypocritical about-face, Trudeau now wants Quebec to be the deciding factor in how The Rest of Canada will be governed. Of course, owing to the present distribution of parliamentary seats, this has always been the case to some extent, as Ontario and Quebec hold the highest numbers of them — 121 and 78, respectively — over all the other provinces. What is different this time, however, is that Quebec is now being made to choose explicitly between two, possible positions within the confederation: Quebec as Part-of-Canada; or Quebec as Part-of-But-Separate-From-The-Rest-of-Canada.

Certainly, they have a difficult choice to make. Unfortunately, neither option offers any hope of repairing the damage that has been wrought upon the country by a century and a half of selective, provincial favoritism. It should be said, however, that we shouldn’t really fault the people of Quebec for wanting to vote for the guy who will stand up for their interests — surely, if The Rest of Canada had the option, they might very well do the same. Time will tell, but perhaps this catastrophe of a leadership debate (and election campaign, more generally) will help to provide the impetus for the right parties and leaders — provincially, if not federally — to rise to the challenge of giving their respective constituents precisely that privilege. At any rate, the possibility no longer appears to be as far-fetched as has previously been assumed.

Unknown's avatar A. E. 5:33 pm on October 1, 2019
Tags: , , freedom of the press, media censorship, news media censorship, press freedom   

From the Inside, Looking Out

So, here’s the thing.

I, like many Canadians, had for many years bought into the widespread misconception of democratic governance constituting some kind of political ‘end-state’; some pinnacle of societal achievement, in no need of further perfection and essentially impervious to most threats, such that it could be brought down only by a sudden disaster of an exceptional character and/or foreign occupation by a non-democratic state. Without even knowing his name or his record, I had nevertheless managed to fully imbibe Francis Fukuyama’s theory of “the end of history”, wherein governance by liberal democracy appears virtually synonymous with the attainment of a society-wide state of nirvana. Fukuyama has long since walked back this claim in a variety of ways, but this particular myth appears to pervade ostensibly liberal, democratic societies to this day, and perhaps has even been doing so since long before Fukuyama first put the phenomenon into writing.

Partly owing to this blessed ignorance of mine, for many years I had no reason to feel as if anything bad was happening in my own, liberal democracy. I went on to spend five years in university learning from, and speaking to, people who were experts on the subject of tyranny — if not because they had studied the topic for years, then because they themselves had lived through the experience. Even before this, I have always been drawn to literature, fictional or otherwise, first- or second-hand, dealing with the stories of those people unfortunate enough to have to try living under an oppressive and hostile state regime. I always wanted to know how things could ever get to that point — surely, one does not simply wake up one day and suddenly realize that something has gone horribly wrong. There must be warning signs; events and circumstances that might indicate the devious direction one’s country is headed towards.

All the while, my interest in such things had something of a voyeuristic aspect to it. As much as I shuddered to think of what I would have — or could have — have done in a similar situation, my musings on the matter were only slightly less ignorant than those that could be offered by someone with decidedly less interest on the topic. One way or the other, all of the first-hand tales in the world could not change the fact that I, myself, had never been in such circumstances. Crucially, this allowed me to retain a degree of separation from the horrible realities that others had endured; it did not, I believed, ever have to enter my reality. After all, it was not my brother who was dragged, kicking and screaming, out of his apartment building at three in the morning, never to be seen again. It was not my father who was shot in front of his family for refusing to hand over his farming equipment. And above all, it was not me who had to live with the memory of these things; who could vividly re-tell the events contained within, as if they had happened yesterday; who would never be able to forget them, even if I wished to do so. Though the empathy I felt for their suffering may have been genuine, their sorrow was not truly my burden to bear: I could leave this re-constructed world of terror at any point, and return to the one that did not scare me quite so much. Ultimately, I had the choice not to think about those things.

A lot of things have changed, since then. I’m no longer sure when it first was that I realized there was something rotten about the state of Canada. Certainly, it was some time around the Indian Voyage fiasco early last year that I knew for sure the country was not being led by our best and brightest. By then, the trans-Atlantic network of suspiciously well-dressed and well-fed “refugees” flowing between New York state and the Quebec border had been quite well established; this had made me angry at the time, so perhaps the end of my optimism had come even sooner than the India trip. I don’t really remember, but it doesn’t matter either way.

Fast forward to this past week. On Wednesday, a journalist, who is by no means a stranger to his seasoned colleagues whom hail from other news outlets, was repeatedly denied access to the Liberal Party campaign bus, on the alleged basis of not having the proper accreditation as a member of the media. This rationale works well as a cover-story to the public ear, because most members of the general public are not aware that accreditation is nothing like a process of “certification” or even “licencing”; rather, it is the simple act of demonstrating that one has contributed content to the news media in some manner (i.e., is a journalist), and receiving a slip of paper meant to serve as recognition of that fact. That’s it. For someone such as this particular journalist, accreditation is only a Google search away.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Effectively, this journalist was denied accreditation to board the bus, on the basis of not having accreditation to board the bus. As his colleague explains, “This is the equivalent of showing up at the DMV to get a driver’s license and them telling you that they can’t give a license because you’re not a licensed driver” — a perfect Catch-22. As the story goes, this journalist was later detained by police for following behind the bus by car; he says he had no choice but to do this, as none of the journalists who were on the bus, much less the campaign war room, were willing to tell him or his outlet where it would be pulling over next. This, in a country where, provided you meet the appropriate racial description, you can shove your hand down the pants of a 14 year-old girl and get away with it — don’t try to follow the Liberal campaign bus, though, because the police will get right on that! Later, on the other side of the country, he was denied entry (again, by local police) into a public building where a Liberal campaign event was taking place — not as a member of the media, mind you, but as an ordinary, curious member of the electorate. Just like you and me.

One of the other things I have always wondered about tyrannies of the past is whether or not a substantial part of the population was ever on board with it. Surely, one would expect that many would be made to go along with the narrative; but were there any among them who genuinely bought into the lies they were peddling? Depending on the particular regime, the answer to this varies considerably — sometimes, yes; other times, no. At any rate, most are not permitted the space to openly voice any disagreement, and the general public is left only to wonder.

Well, as it turns out, there is something to be said for the power of denial. Witnessing the passionate creativity with which any and all concerns regarding the legality, credibility, or indeed the necessity of the events outlined above have been effortlessly cast-aside by multiple members of the public, is truly a sight to behold. It’s the kind of mental run-around that could only be successfully orchestrated by those who really ought to know better — which is why I call it denial, rather than pure ignorance.

In all fairness, I can understand where they’re coming from: this land, our land, is not supposed to be a place where those things happen. Thus, there has to be some legitimate reason to refuse a journalist — conspicuously, one belonging to one of the few genuinely right-wing media outlets that remain in this country — entry to Liberal campaign events — right? There simply must be some kind of explanation for this. Because, if it turns out that there isn’t one, then that means that we live in a country where the ruling party can prevent a credible member of this press from covering their campaign events during an election, simply because there is a high chance that said journalist will disagree with the party’s position; maybe even in written form. Which, if it were true, would imply that we really, really don’t have such a thing as a free press in Canada. And that just can’t be the case — right?

Right?

No — you know what? That journalist can’t be a “real” journalist if he wasn’t allowed to cover the Liberal campaign. Maybe that’s it. Maybe, he was a journalist at some point, but he isn’t now. I’m not really sure how that would be determined beyond the aforementioned accreditation system, but surely the sitting party has a reliable way of doing it — this is their job, after all; who are we to question their performance? And, you know, even if the NDP thought his credentials were good enough to cover their campaign events, that doesn’t mean that the Liberals didn’t make the right decision — different party, different policy. What do we really know about any of this? We didn’t see how he was driving — maybe they were worried about being followed by a car. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? After all, some very important people were on board that bus; their safety really ought to come first. Maybe, then, they figured the guy was trouble when he tried to enter a different event as a member of the public, and they denied him entry just to be on the safe side. I mean, we really should be asking why this “journalist” was so persistent in the first place: do you really have to ask the Prime Minister questions, like, that badly? Like, come on, man; just do what you’re told and stop causing problems.

Right, so, there’s nothing really amiss here. This guy is just salty that he wasn’t allowed in, and he’s probably exaggerating the details because of that. That makes sense — much more sense than his version of the story, where he wasn’t allowed on the bus “just because.” None of this really means anything, then. No need to be upset. No need to fan the flames any further; we really ought to just forget about the whole thing. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Let’s not worry about it anymore.

We still live in a liberal democracy — this is Canada, after all. The true north, strong and free. There’s no tyranny in Canada, nor should we ever expect it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to cause trouble, so it’s best to ignore them. Things really aren’t that bad here.

…right?

In truth, I don’t know. I don’t like any of this; I don’t like where we’re heading, and I don’t really like to imagine what could happen further down the road. I would rather not try to speculate as to how it could get that bad here, or what that would mean, or what it might look like. In fact, I would rather not think about those things at all. Now’s about the time that I would really, really like to go back to playing the role of an audience member, to be observing the events of someone else’s world, and not be a part of it myself.

If only I still had the choice.

Unknown's avatar A. E. 2:18 pm on August 21, 2019
Tags: plastic industry, recycling, recycling industry, yyc   

The Recyclables Market Just Ain’t What It Used to Be

Here’s some sustainability madness from my neck of the woods: $330,000 in two years of storage expenses later, the City of Calgary has been forced to admit that they have thus far been unsuccessful in finding willing markets for the garbage we’re selling; as such, they will now need to spend an additional $130,000 to have 20 thousand tons of recycled, ‘clamshell’ plastic containers shipped off to a landfill, thus bringing the tab for this particular fiasco up to $460,000 with nothing but embarrassment to show for it.

This news comes after the City chose to find $60 million dollars’ worth of budget cuts in emergency services (fire, police, ambulance — you know, important things); public transit, including the low-income discount for monthly passes; “lower disaster preparedness at the emergency management agency”, whatever that means (doesn’t sound good!); affordable housing programs, and much more — not, however, in their own pockets, with (taxable) compensation for City Councillors still frozen at $113,352.63 annually. Instead, they laid off 115 of the city’s other employees, though how many of those were among the 30% of hired employees whom also rack in more than $100,000 a year has not been disclosed.

I could go on — we could talk about all the boring at best, downright ugly at worst public “art” pieces that the city has paid hefty price tags on to commission; we could, of course, have a look at the failed 2026 Olympic bid that still managed to cost us several millions of dollars just to entertain the thought, before voters (thankfully) shot the proposal down. But this time, the city’s blunder isn’t exactly unique to our particular, rag-tag team of mostly useless politicians. This problem happens to be one that has been repeated in numerous other cities, both in Canada and elsewhere, many many times over. And, so long as the people holding the reigns continue to maintain a different interpretation of reality as does the rest of the planet, we can be sure that this problem will keep cropping up, here and elsewhere, as it has been doing for the last decade or so.

If you ask the City of Calgary, of course, this is all China’s fault. As the city’s website on the subject explains, “China’s decision to tighten their recycling markets [in 2017] left many cities including Calgary in a tough spot.” Up until then, you see, China had been just one of a handful of North America’s designated dumping grounds in the Asia-Pacific region; of the 15 billion tons of recyclable material exported by the United States in 2016, 9 billion tons of it ended up in China. Other countries selected for the honour have been Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Taiwan; all of which have, like China, since taken steps to restrict the quantities and qualities of recyclables that may be exported to their shores.

You may be wondering why we were ever imposing our bits of plastic, glass and scrap paper on our neighbors across the Pacific to begin with, and rightfully so. As it turns out, the reason for this is very much the same as that behind why all the aforementioned nations, and China in particular, have begun to draw the line: most of the recycled material that ends up in a sorting/processing facility, here or abroad, is unfit for reuse without considerable amounts of processing; not only that, there is far too much material being recycled for these facilities to reasonably handle, and not enough market demand for even those materials that do meet the standards set for resale. [1] It is therefore quite understandable that these countries, who do not appear to be in possession of any technologies better than ours are at turning trash into treasure, would be unwilling to manage the problem for us.

So, we’ve been sitting here all this time, diligently recycling all that we could under the false belief that these materials were being taken somewhere — even if that somewhere happened to be China — to be magically transformed into whatever it is a given material can be reused for. Instead, it’s been shipped across the ocean to be picked-through for valuables, with much of it ultimately being burned in Chinese landfills, thereby releasing surely large amounts of CO2, along with all of the other toxic chemicals that are released by burning plastic, into the atmosphere. Were someone to do the math on it, I’m sure we’d find it comparatively better, in terms of limiting CO2 emissions, to have burned these materials right here in our own landfills, than to have additionally burned all of the fossil fuels needed to power a fleet of cargo ships across the Pacific so that some other country could do it for us. Great work, everyone!

Considering just how long all of this has been going on for, it beggars belief that we, in the West at least, would not have at least tried to find some form of use for these materials long before we ended up with the present surplus. Quite obviously, there’s no point in hoarding them in storage facilities, as the City of Calgary has done for the last two years on the taxpayers dime, if there’s not really any particular way to be rid of the materials in such quantities that doesn’t entail their burial in a landfill or being put to the torch. According to a study commissioned by the Canadian government, just nine percent of the country’s plastic waste was actually recycled in 2016; virtually all the rest of it ended up in landfills. “Innovation” in the sector, as far as what we actually do with the recyclables is concerned, does not appear to have caught up to manifest reality — again, why no one thought to figure this out back in the 70s, when the whole “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra really began to kick off, is beyond me.

One way or the other, something’s gotta give: either we figure out a way to generate less first-use plastic, paper and glass; or we figure out a way to use these recycled materials at home, rather than shipping them off to Asia while patting ourselves on the back and pretending like we’re actually doing something of any tangible benefit. If it turns out that neither can be done, then we need to take a good hard look at the state of the recycling industry — or perhaps even at the very notion of recycling, in its entirety — and make a decision as to whether or not we’d be just as well off throwing most of our recyclables in the trash, if they’re just going to end up in a landfill anyway. As it currently stands the recycling situation is, as many of its proponents like to say, unsustainable.

Unknown's avatar A. E. 3:01 pm on April 25, 2019
Tags: , canadian culture, , minnesota nice, nordic culture   

Canada: The Heart of “Nice”

An audio version of this post is available here.

My mother has a theory as to why Canadians and, by extension, Swedes, Norwegians and Finns, are known for their at-times excessive levels of politeness, hospitality, and “don’t rock the boat” mentality: all these peoples spend their winters in bone-chilling temperatures, and even if you don’t particularly like your neighbours there’s not going to anyone else around to dig you out of your house in the event of a blizzard; so you’d better try your best to get along with them regardless. My mother further argues that Canadians are the most polite of all, owing to our British heritage – she may not be an anthropologist, but I can’t help but feel that she may be on to something.

Whether it’s environmental or ancestral – or both – it cannot be denied that we circumpolar dwellers can, at times, strive to be too kind for our own good. The evidence of this happening in Sweden, Finland and Britain has been done to death, but critical commentary on the Canadian conundrum is comparatively lacking. My hunch is that this is owing to two things: the first is that Canada is, ultimately, somewhat irrelevant on the world stage in terms of day-to-day affairs – like New Zealand, it takes something of a disaster for our happenings to make international headlines; the second is that in Canada it has become somewhat of a taboo to make generalizations as to our own values, behaviours and cultural quirks. Although we know that we do have them – even our politicians have a hard time denying that – Canadian society has become so paralyzed by the manufactured fear of “excluding” someone or another from the broader conversation, we’ve had to resort to shutting the thing down entirely. Canadians are so polite, in fact, we have seemingly lost the will to stand up for ourselves when challenged to, even when the very fundamental principles of our society are under threat.

In person, that is. Under the spotlight we are as tepidly passive as the situation requires, but it is what you do in the dark that speaks the truest to one’s character. Herein lies the other side of Canada, of Canadians, from east coast to west; a phenomenon better known (as usual) by its American incarnation: “Minnesota Nice.”

Minnesota Nice refers to a stereotype of behaviour attributed to, well, Minnesotans. Wikipedia defines its aspects, in short, as follows: “polite friendliness, an aversion to confrontation, passive-aggressive behaviour, a tendency toward understatement, a disinclination to make a fuss or stand out, emotional restraint, and self-deprecation.”

To my Canadian readers: sound like anyone you know?

It should be noted that Minnesota played host to a great deal of immigration from Germany and Scandinavia during the 19th and 20th centuries; anyone who has seen either version of Fargo will likely have noticed the unusually high percentage of characters with Scandinavian surnames. It is thought that this heritage may have contributed to the development of Minnesota Nice mannerisms, as there is arguably a fair deal of overlap between this type of behaviour in a small subset of North Americans and that of the Scandinavian cultures at large. For further evidence to support this we might look to what is called the “Law of Jante” (Janteloven in Danish), something of an unofficial “Nordic code of conduct” that was first put into words by the Danish-Norweigian novelist Aksel Sandemose in 1933, but that has already existed on the basis of unspoken agreement for quite some time before.

As the novel that first featured these “laws” was satirical in nature, the aforementioned tendency toward self-deprecation is, itself, palpable through Sandemose’s choice of phrasing. The Ten Rules of the Law of Jante are these:

1. You’re not to think you are anything special.
2. You’re not to think you are as good as we are.
3. You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.
4. You’re not to imagine yourself better than we are.
5. You’re not to think you know more than we do.
6. You’re not to think you are more important than we are.
7. You’re not to think you are good at anything.
8. You’re not to laugh at us.
9. You’re not to think anyone cares about you.
10. You’re not to think you can teach us anything.

In the novel’s context, “we” refers to the residents of the town of Jante. In the sociological context, “we” refers essentially to society at large — to anyone who’s not “you.”

With the possible exception of #9 (our country’s robust social safety net screams We care about you! Even if the excessive wait times and rampant abuse of the system suggests the opposite), the sentiment behind these laws can be felt throughout numerous aspects of Canadian culture: be humble and don’t stick your neck out; don’t try to speak for anyone but yourself; and, somewhat more recently, check your privileges before you go on highlighting your personal achievements – in other words, don’t highlight them at all.

If we’re being perfectly honest, this kind of mentality is seen almost exclusively among Anglophone Canadians of European descent. That’s not to say that it can’t be found among Canadians of differing ancestry, only that I, personally, have not seen anywhere near the same level of excessive humility and non-confrontation among them as I have among European, particularly “old-stock” Canadians. If the reader feels that none of this applies to them, they are free to exclude themselves from the generalization – but it cannot be reasonably denied that there are large swaths of the Canadian population who do behave in this manner. My own opinion is that this mentality has played a large role in leading us to this social, political, and cultural mess that we now find ourselves in. We’ve been trying to sweep these problems under the rug for so long, we’ve come to a point now where we can no longer walk across it without tripping.

Take, as an example, the following excerpt from a Maclean’s article on anti-immigration sentiment in Canada, aptly titled “The Rise of an Uncaring Canada”:

“There are a few inconvenient facts that don’t often seem to sink in with the anti-immigrant crowd. To name a few, that Canada needs immigrants in order to maintain economic solvency, that Canada has international obligations, as well as moral ones, to take in refugees, and that our total refugee intake is small compared to other G8 nations.”

Do you see the similarities? Don’t think you know more than we do. Don’t think you are more important than we are or, in this case, than anyone else on the planet is. Stop complaining; things are much worse elsewhere. Underneath it all is something of a smug-suggestion that anyone who disagrees with the presented opinion is, well… an idiot, or heartless, or even a heartless idiot. We must not forget, even if it does not work on us as individuals, how successful this guilt-tactic has been for preserving establishment rule – it’s been so for decades.

Now, Canada at large has seen comparatively less cultural influence from Scandinavian settlers than has Minnesota, to be sure – but perhaps we should be wondering about the conditions that led to such a mentality developing among Nordic societies in the first place. Was it the harsh, cold winters leading to a survival imperative to get along at all costs? Is it something that can perhaps be traced further back into the psyche of our Germanic, tribal ancestors from long ago? Is it something else entirely? We may never know for sure. But to be frank, the why doesn’t quite matter so much as the need for us to acknowledge and understand this aspect of our culture, to become fully aware of our own behavioural tendencies and, in doing so, come to harness them for our benefit – if such a thing can be done.

Where Canada appears to deviate significantly from this Minnesota-Jante paradigm is in terms of active, rather than passive aggression: outside of the ice rink, we are (socially speaking) woefully adverse to “throwing down,” as it were. I myself have often wondered if the reason why any good hockey game sees at least a punch or two thrown from both sides of the rink, if not a full-on dog-pile, has anything to do with some sort of pent-up rage and frustration within us as a people. It may similarly explain the Canadian tendency toward complaining endlessly about a given issue in the company of our close peers, only to turn around and behave as if everything is perfectly fine; or at least fine enough that we can’t really be bothered to go about trying to change things. This may have something to do with our nation’s political history as well: for the most part, over the last 150 years, our opinions (particularly in the west) regarding anything have been seen by the Laurentian elite as largely irrelevant, and have been treated as such accordingly. Canadians are no stranger to the art of complaining without being heard, but what is worse is that we are unable to harness this frustration in the pursuit of actually doing something productive about our sorry state of affairs – we wouldn’t want to impose, you see. What if we’re just overreacting? What would people think!

But perhaps this is beginning to change. As much as we may look to our southern neighbours, wishing that we had the gall to march, protest, and throw things with the same, patriotic passion as the Americans are won’t to do, we have to remember that we are not actually Americans, despite all of our media saturation in their pop culture, politics and various other domestic affairs. Our revolution may not be televised, but the wiser among us no longer trust the Canadian media to cover anything of importance that happens in this country, anyway. We do not have nearly as many soapboxes to stand on as Americans do; all the more reason why it is so important for us “dissidents” to spread the message through whatever avenues we do have at our disposal.

Hope for the future may come in the form of the “Blue Wave” that is now sweeping across provincial politics. As of yesterday, six of our ten provinces have now openly rebelled against the progressive hegemony – Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Alberta, and Prince Edward Island – thus taking a seat at the table with Saskatchewan, which has been under conservative management for some twelve years already. True to form, Quebec has decided to do the whole “conservative politics” thing differently, which ought to surprise no one; nevertheless, the rest of the converts stand together in opposition to the present status quo. No one trapped within the ever-shrinking progressive bubble seems to have seen it coming, but to the residents of these provinces it makes perfect sense: no, Canadians will not protest outside of CBC headquarters or organize weekly rallies and marches with the same intensity as Americans might, even if they are endlessly slandered by various pundits and op-eds calling us all sorts of terrible things, but again – we are not Americans. We are Canadians; we are polite; we will do things our own way. We will smile and nod and apologize in person, no matter how much it pains us to do so, but as soon as the opportunity arises we will complain about the encounter as much as is required to make us feel a bit better about ourselves.

And there’s no better place to complain than from behind the privacy of a voting booth.

This is why I tell people not to trust polls in general, but particularly those of Canadians: we have no problem lying in someone’s face to preserve the necessary illusion of collective agreement, and polls seem to be no exception. For better or for worse, there is a duplicity about us that cannot be ignored; you simply cannot trust a Canadian to be perfectly honest about anything that isn’t about their own shortcomings. This, too, is similar to the infamous Swedish phenomenon of “consensus culture”: we are loathe to rock the boat, to say or do anything too much against the current consensus, but once someone or something gets it started, once the masses begin to see that they are not alone in their thoughts – that theirs has become the new consensus – they are all too eager to get onboard.

The glaring downside to this tendency of ours is that we are easily manipulated through it: all it took for progressive insanity to capture us in droves was the complete domination of our media by its promoters, executed purposefully over several decades. We have been led to believe, falsely, that the progressive consensus is in the majority – thus we had no choice but to go along with it. This time around however, there is another world of opinion to be found. On social media, just as it would among trusted friends and family, the real consensus began to form: people are angry, tired, and frustrated; and it is far easier on our cultural psyche for us to tweet, blog, or vlog about it than it is for us to march, scream, and throw things in the streets. It is clear from all of the mainstream media’s hullabaloo over “fake news” and “election interference” that the establishment elite have since realized the danger that social media poses to their continued grip on power: in a country as thinly-spread and regionally isolated as Canada, any means that we have of talking to one another outside of the progressive filter serves to undermine their carefully-constructed illusion of widespread agreement with their agenda. Once enough voters realize that it is socially “safe” to dissent, the dominoes begin to fall.

The battle is far from over, and even the current crumbling of the Liberal base may not lead us anywhere worthwhile at the end of the day: our political system remains deeply corrupted, and our federal conservative party’s positions amount to no more than the adage of “progressives doing the speed limit.” It is not clear that the wider, more existential concerns that we have for the fate of this country will, or even can be addressed. It may be hard, at times, to feel hopeful for a country whose politicians seem to be seriously entertaining the idea of “putting a price on plastic” – but pessimism, too, is something of a Canadian cliche.

Now more than ever is the time to spread the word; to find our allies and raise hell alongside them. We have to take the conversation out of our living rooms and further into the public space. Even those less technologically-inclined Canadians, those who still watch the news regularly (imagine!) will, at some point, have no choice but to notice the massive blow that has been dealt to the Liberal brand at the provincial level; no choice but to acknowledge that the times are indeed changing. Some will welcome it, others may not – but my feeling is that there are more out there who will be receptive to change than we may have previously thought possible.

Now is the time to find out if I’m right.

Unknown's avatar A. E. 3:44 pm on March 26, 2019
Tags: espionage, Pierre Trudeau, soviet defectors, soviet union, ussr   

Yuri Bezmenov, Interview with G. Edward Griffin: Canadian Government assisting USSR?

This man, ex-KGB defector from the USSR, Yuri Bezmenov, is known in many online circles for his lectures given on subversion (some under the alias “Thomas Schumann”); specifically, how Soviet propagandists subvert foreign nations in favor of socialism, via the gradual breakdown of societies and the replacement of traditional morals and values (among other tactics).

Today, however, I am providing you with a transcript of a couple of minutes from an interview Bezmenov gave to G. Edward Griffin of the John Birch Society. In this excerpt, Bezmenov claims that, after living in Canada for some time and working as a journalist with the CBC, both the CBC and the Canadian government collaborated with Soviet officials to provide them with intelligence that exposed Bezmenov’s true identity as a defector. He talks further about receiving veiled threats from USSR operatives while in Canada. Bezmenov later ended up living in the US; I would imagine that this incident would likely be why.

The following is from roughly 18:05 – 21:18 of the interview, which you can watch in full here. Grammatical edits have been made in [brackets], the transcript is otherwise verbatim.

GRIFFIN: Have you had any threats on your life, or any —

BEZMENOV: Yes, in about five years, [the] KGB eventually discovered that I [was] working for Canadian Broadcasting… See, I made a very big mistake, I started to talk – I started working for [the] overseas service of CBC, which is similar to Voice of America, in [the] Russian language… and of course, [the] monitoring service in [the] USSR picked up every new voice… every new announcer, would – they would make it a point to discover who he is. And then [after] five years, sure enough, slowly but surely they discovered that I am NOT Thomas Schumann, that I am Yuri Aleksandrovich Bezmenov and that I’m working for Canadian Broadcasting and undermining the beautiful detente between Canada and [the] USSR. And the Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Yakovlev, made it his personal effort to discredit me; he complained to Pierre Trudeau, who is known to be a little bit soft on socialism and, um… the management of CBC behaved in a very strange, cowardly way, unbecoming to representatives of an independent country like Canada. They listened to everysuggestion that the Soviet ambassador gave and they started [a] shameful investigation, analyzing content of my broadcasts [for the] USSR. Sure enough, they discovered that some of my statements were probably too… [they] would be offen[sive] to the Soviet Politburo. So I had to leave my — my job. And of course, [they made] subtle intimidations; they would say something like, “Please cross the street carefully, because, you know, traffic is very heavy in Quebec,” and, um… fortunately, I know about the psychology and the logic of activity of the KGB and I never allowed myself to be intimidated. This is the worse thing, this is [how] they expect a person, the defector, to be intimidated: once they spot that you are scared, they keep on developing that line and then eventually, you either have to give up entirely and work for them, or you — they neutralize you, they — they would definitely stop all kind of political activity, which they failed to do in my case because I was stubbornly working for the Canadian Broadcasting. And, uh, in response to the intimidations I said that, look, this is a free country and I am as free as you are, and I also can drive very fast and gun control is not yet established in Canada, so I had a couple of good shotguns in my basement, so… [you’re] welcome to visit me someday with your Kalashnikov machine guns. So obviously it didn’t work, intimidation didn’t work. So they — they tried [a] different approach, as I described, they [tried an] approach on the highest level, on the level of Canadian bureaucracy, and…

GRIFFIN: And on that level they were successful.

BEZMENOV: On that level they were successful; on [an] individual level they failed, flat.

If this account is true, that would mean that the first Trudeau government was “soft” enough on communist regimes to be willing to assist the USSR in exposing a Canadian citizen as a defector. That is quite damning.

One has to wonder how deep that relationship may have run.

Unknown's avatar A. E. 11:47 am on March 22, 2019
Tags: , government transparency, transparency, Trudeau government   

Google Transparency Report, Requests from Canada: 2015 – March 2019

The following reports detail the amount of requests to remove material received from the Canadian government by Google. All of the data presented below was collected on the 21st and 22nd of March, 2019, and can be accessed here.

Total Requests

The spike preceding the gradual increase from Jan 2016 onward is from June 2015, with 77 requests.
The high-point seen here is also from June 2015, with 464 items.
This is interesting – not only have the amount of requests gone up from Jan 2016 onward, but requests from the executive branch of government greatly outweigh those from the judicial branch, too. As you can see, however, there are a number of instances where this was true during the Harper years, as well.

Requests by Reason

Trudeau years.
Snapshot from the Harper years, for comparison.

Requests for User Information

Note that Google did not start tracking the reasons given for the requests until July 2014. The bar furthest to the right is for Jan – June 2018; just doesn’t show up on the screenshot.

Thoughts

  • It’s interesting that “Fraud” has topped the list of reasons from July 2016 to June 2018, with “Defamation” usually coming in at a distant second during the Trudeau years in power; especially since “Fraud” is entirely absent from the stats until the reporting period immediately preceding this (Jan – June 2016). Unfortunately, Google does not provide exact details for every single request, so I am not sure what either category refers to in practice — for instance, “defamation” of whom, by whom?
  • I had personally been expecting to see “Privacy and Security” in either first or second place, consistently throughout both periods. At least, one would hope that requests for content removal would be issued for very important reasons, such as, well, privacy and security… that, or “National Security,” which only comes up once.
  • Note as well that “Other” featured heavily as a reason during the Harper years, and disappears during the Trudeau years. What would fall under “Other,” I wonder?
  • Why did the number of requests for user information nearly double between July – Dec 2017 and Jan – June 2018? I also wish we could see what falls under “other legal requests,” as this is the largest percentage for the most recent reporting period. Furthermore, “Emergency disclosure” requests noticeably increased during the Trudeau years — is this perhaps counter-terrorism related (i.e. tracking ISIS recruits or “far-right radicals”) or something else?
Unknown's avatar A. E. 5:52 pm on March 18, 2019
Tags: , ,   

Article: At Trudeau’s behest, Gould instructed Google News to limit Canadian access to foreign press

“Gould placed a call to a senior government relations executive at Google, during which she complained about ‘hate speech’ and ‘toxic rhetoric’, referring multiple times to specific criticisms of the Trudeau government that she found objectionable. She then threatened sweeping regulations that would require unprecedented disclosures of advertising sponsors.”

All Canadians need to see this. Our democracy is dying in real-time.

At Trudeau’s behest, Gould instructed Google News to limit Canadian access to foreign press