Dispatch from the Front Lines: The course of history, and a puff of wind

Well. That should settle things down. Also, our petulant PM, our unimpressive would-be PM, and the betrayal of McGill.

Hello, Line readers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.

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And now, on with the dispatch.

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We at The Line were just about to finish up our weekly dispatch when we received the news: Former U.S. president Donald Trump had received minor injuries in what law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have deemed an assassination attempt. As Sunday dawned, we, like so many of you, checked our news feeds, and found that Trump is alive, recovering from his minor injuries, and that an attendee at his rally has died from what appears to have been a round intended for the former president. Two other attendees have been critically injured. The would-be assassin was swiftly killed by Secret Service snipers.

We expect many of your news and social media feeds will be filled with the usual, correct condemnations of political violence. We feel no need to belabour this point and, besides, sentiment ain't the punch we serve here at The Line. We serve our takes hot, fast, and occasionally over-long. 

On that note, there's nothing particularly surprising about a U.S. president facing an assassination attempt. America is a violent place, at least by the standards of most Western nations. Further, its history is pockmarked by a litany of attempts on presidents and politicians' lives — while many were reminded Saturday of the 1981 shooting of then-president Ronald Reagan, your Line editors, fans of history, thought instead of the shooting of candidate Theodore Roosevelt (also, then, a former president) in 1912. Roosevelt, shot in the chest at a campaign event in Milwaukee, insisted on finishing his speech before receiving medical attention. In any event, the fact that we have different examples to contemplate speaks to the point.

That history alone makes what happened in Pennsylvania on Saturday less than surprising. We must also remember the context of this moment in history. The Line has written and spoken more than once about our concerns about the incredibly angry and polarized state of U.S. society, and especially its politics. Trump is both a symptom and a cause, and represents a unique challenge and, perhaps, threat to American democracy as we know it. Further, the rhetoric surrounding the risks of a second Trump president has been burning so intensely that we are, we regret to confess, only really surprised that it took this long for someone to take a shot at the man. 

Especially after the last two weeks. After Joe Biden faltered on the debate stage and then failed to keep major leaders' names straight in public, and as many Democrats have descended into something we could describe as semi-controlled panic, Trump's prospects for a second term rose. No one seems to dispute this.

The prospect of someone deciding to take the rhetoric to its most extreme albeit logical conclusion — if Trump is a threat to life as we know it, the threat must be ended — cannot come as a surprise. At this time, we don't know much about the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, beyond his name, the fact that he was a registered Republican but, also, a one-time donor to a progressive political action committee. We await more information, and hope there aren't many more like him waiting to try again, or retaliate against a Democratic politician.

For now, we at The Line are pondering what's next. July 13, 2024 is going to be one of those days that future historians look back upon with a certain wistfulness. If the wind was a little harder, a bullet lands a few inches in another direction, and Donald Trump is dead. In this timeline, though, the shooter missed, and now America is going to witness first hand the problems with relying on violence to secure political outcomes. Namely, it very often backfires. 

Because we've taken the other fork in the road. We now exist in the other timeline of history — the one in which Donald Trump is now the far-and-away favourite to win a second term. 

We could be wrong about this. No one can predict the future, and there are lots of scenarios still unplayed out. Does Biden step down in favour of Kamala Harris? Does the shooting turn out to be a hoax perpetrated by Trump or his supporters? Does Trump suffer a heart attack between now and November? Does someone else get shot? Any of these possibilities is still available, and any one could further change the outcome. 

However, at this moment in time, it was hard for us to look at the picture of Trump standing up once the bullets had struck, demanding to be seen by the crowd even as his Secret Service detail tries to get him off the stage, pumping his fist in the air, all framed by an American flag, and think anything but "Well, that's the ballgame." 

The Line is no fan of Trump, but we are also political observers, and Trump's handling of the assassination attempt, as political showmanship, was absolutely perfect. Trump displayed an incredible presence of mind in the midst of mortal peril. While the echoes of the gunshots were still ringing, he understood that he needed to forgo some small degree of further protection in order to show his supporters — and the world — that he was fine. No one has to like the guy, or ignore the real risks he poses both to American and Canada, but we do have to respect how he handled that moment, if nothing else. It demonstrated calm nerves and competency under literal fire. 

The response shored up Trump's strengths in a way that highlighted Joe Biden's comparative frailty. The shooting will absolutely supercharge Trump's supporters, his base, his cult. There's no coming back from it. 

We don't know what more to say here, folks. For the record, we at The Line rule out nothing at this early juncture. But if the momentum of history holds on its current track, there's a very good chance that the next American election is over weeks before anyone bothers to cast a ballot. 

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And now back to what we were planning to write before all hell broke loose. We had thought that Line editor Matt Gurney’s column on Friday would suffice for our commentary on Canadian military spending and national defence. How naive we were. Since Gurney published his latest on Friday morning, there has been an outpouring of nonsense from both Liberals and Conservatives, which we must address.

In the main, we would like everyone to grow up. That shouldn't be too much to ask.

Let's start with Defence Minister Bill Blair, and more accurately, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. As those who read Gurney’s Friday column know, the Liberals have at long last announced a plan, in theory, for Canada to hit the NATO two-per=cent-of-GDP defence target. Gurney covered the details extensively, so we won’t recap them here. Suffice it to say, the plan is awfully vague and requires a whopping eight years to achieve. That’s more of a notion than a plan, if we’re being honest. Given this government's reluctance to spend on defence and its well-established record of deliverology flops, we don’t take the two-per-cent-by-2032 pledge seriously. We doubt our allies are taking it seriously either.

What we want to underline here is how petulant the government is about the goal it has acknowledged it will reach, albeit on a lackadaisical schedule. Gurney mentioned in his column and on the podcast that even as he announced the 2032 target, the prime minister lamented it. "We continually step up and punch above our weight, something that isn't always reflected in the crass mathematical calculation that certain people turn to very quickly,” the PM said in Washington.

We remind our readers that, by “crass mathematical calculation,” the PM is referring to the thing he told our allies that he would do. Like, gosh, we know the guy has always been more talk than action — he’s pretty notorious for it, as two billion unplanted trees and our first-past-the-post electoral system could tell you — but yikes. That’s just ugly stuff from the PM. It seems our leader does not like being held to account when he fails to deliver on what he has promised.

In an interview with CBC, Blair struck a similar, if somewhat less petulant, tone. "It's one thing for a relatively small nation to increase their defence budget to two per cent," Blair said. "In some of those cases, you know, a few hundred million dollars would bring them there. … For Canada, it's a far more substantial investment. And from Canada, that investment actually requires the acquisition of capabilities that most of those other, smaller NATO members do not require."

Yeah, okay, but, again, no one is asking us to do anything we haven't pledged to do. The two-per-cent NATO target is not new. This government, really meaning Justin Trudeau himself, has repeatedly reiterated that Canada supports the target and remains committed to reaching it. We just haven’t done anything to make it happen and seem offended when anyone points this out.

Frankly, we don’t know how Blair or Trudeau (especially Trudeau) find the nerve to complain about being expected to do what they promised. It's a terrible look on them and on this country.

Blair, to his credit, at least acknowledged some politically obvious points. He admitted that rolling out the announcement only at the end of the summit probably meant Canada took more political flak from allies than necessary. We give him partial credit for that admission. However, we call on the defence minister to realize that the allies we hope to appease with this promise are the same ones learning from press clippings collected by their Ottawa embassy staffs that, having announced our intention to hit the target, Canada’s leaders are now complaining about it.

We’re sure you’ve all had a friend who always wanted to be included but always complained about the price of food and drink, the cover charge at the club, or the concert ticket costs. This friend is usually almost the one most deeply offended if they aren’t included in the event that they loudly bemoan the price of attending.

Sometimes you might love that friend, but no one really likes that friend. In NATO, Canada is that friend.

So, our message to Mr. Trudeau. Stop complaining about being expected to do what you said you’d do. Stop offering our acknowledged and uncontested contributions to NATO as an excuse. It's good that Canada has continued to make contributions to NATO. As one of the alliance's more prosperous countries, it is only just and right that we contribute meaningfully. But the fact remains, however inconvenient Messrs. Trudeau and Blair may find it, that we made a specific pledge and have repeatedly failed to reach it, and have made obvious our lack of interest in ever doing so.

Onto the Conservatives. Sigh.

After the prime minister made his grudging, bitter pledge, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was asked if he, if elected prime minister, would honour it. Poilievre refused to commit. He told the reporter that since he would inherit a "dumpster fire" of a budget from the Liberals, he doubts we can hit the target since we are, he said, broke.

We agree that the Liberals have overspent and not exercised appropriate fiscal restraint. But we aren’t broke. Our fiscal position, though undeniably deteriorated since the pandemic, remains relatively robust compared to many of our NATO allies who are, miracle of miracles, hitting their targets for defence spending. So frankly, Mr. Poilievre, you need a much better talking point. One that reeks less of manure, if you will.

And, on a more basic level, if Mr. Poilievre wants to be the next prime minister of Canada, sooner or later — and we would prefer sooner — he’s going to need to start telling us what he would actually do. Some of the things he will need to do, and that Canadians will need him to do, will require painful decisions.

It’s clear to us that the Conservatives plan to spend every moment until the next election pretending that everything wrong with this country can be traced directly back to Justin Trudeau. In this Conservative fantasy, the election of Conservatives will, by itself, be sufficient to fix what ails us.

And, in some ways, sure. We have no doubt that a change of government would provide some benefits in Ottawa. There probably are some problems in the federal bureaucracy that would benefit from a simple change in leadership. That’s true of any long-serving government and its successor. Kicking the bums out has a general salutary effect for a reason.

But let’s not kid ourselves, or allow ourselves to be fooled by the Conservative leader. Not every problem this country has will be fixed as if by partisan magic the minute Justin Trudeau relinquishes the keys to Rideau Cottage. Some of what Poilievre will have to do will involve painful and awkward trade-offs that won’t present him with any quick and easy political wins. He’ll have to piss some people off, which doesn’t seem to bother him, but this time, he’ll have to piss off some people who would otherwise normally agree with him.

What will hitting two per cent by 2032 — or maybe even faster — actually mean? It could mean many things. It could mean higher taxes, or at least not cutting (axing, in the vernacular) certain taxes. It could mean cutting other, probably more popular, federal expenditures to free up room to better fund the military. Or it could mean missing the target or outright renouncing it.

These are the kinds of decisions a prime minister has to make. And that is the job Poilievre is notably running for.

Right now, the Liberals have offered us a vague, far too slow, and frankly not particularly credible “plan” for reaching the NATO target. This ought to be a very low bar for Poilievre to clear, and then some. And he is either unwilling or incapable of doing that.

Mr. Poilievre, that is not good enough. Canadians deserve better than what this government has been giving them, on many fronts, including and perhaps especially national defence. Offering better should be easy. The fact that you seem set on making it hard for yourself should give voters pause, and it certainly gives us pause.

If Poilievre finds a way to be less impressive on national security than Justin Trudeau, that’s a choice. Indeed, it seems to be the choice he’s landed on. We encourage him to make a different one. A better funded, more capable national defence is something the Conservatives can commit to doing today, on a more aggressive schedule than the Liberals have pledged. How about you guys “bring that home” for us, eh?

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The longest running pro-Palestinian university encampment in Canada was taken down this week. Early Wednesday morning, a private security firm hired by McGill came in with excavators and dump trucks and started tearing down the camp that was first set up at the end of April, and which had steadily grown in size and complexity over the last few months. 

As far as we here at The Line are concerned: It’s about fucking time.

The persistence of the camp, in the face of repeated efforts by McGill administrators to negotiate in good faith with the protesters, followed by failed attempts at getting help from the police and the courts, has been an absolute disgrace. It did untold damage to the global reputation of Canada’s most renowned university, indulged a faction of a campus that has long-standing problems with anti-semitism, and revealed an ugly truth about Quebec politics, namely, that anglophone institutions cannot expect the most basic protection of the law in an increasingly hostile province. Along the way, virtually no one involved has acquitted themselves well. 

Let’s start with an obvious point: If the camp had been set up anywhere in Quebec except for the front campus of McGill, it would have been torn down in days. Try to imagine a similar situation unfolding at, say, the Université de Montréal. You can’t. Because there is no way it would have been allowed to happen in the first place — the cops would have gone in within days. If you think that is an exaggeration, consider that when a parallel camp was established at Square Victoria, in downtown Montreal across the street from the head offices of the provincial pension fund manager — Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec — the SVPM moved in and tore it down in less than a week, apparently on the orders of the mayor, Valerie Plante. After which,  Plante had the absolute gall to criticize McGill for not coming to a peaceful resolution with its own occupiers, and generally failing to control its “private property.”

Plante conveniently ignored the fact that she had done zero negotiations herself, and that McGIll had tried, repeatedly, to negotiate a deal with the occupiers, including caving to a number of their demands. Plante also ignored the fact that McGill had tried to get the police to enforce its property rights, and that they had refused. Then McGill tried to get the courts to issue an injunction to remove the protesters, and the courts also refused. 

By all appearances, everyone in Quebec not affiliated with McGill seemed to enjoy the occupation, which looked certain to stretch into the fall semester, but two things seem to have finally forced McGill into action. 

The first was an injunction issued by the Ontario Superior Court in early July against a similar occupation at the University of Toronto, which ordered the police to remove anyone who refused to abandon the encampment. In his ruling, Justice Markus Koehnen made a few obvious points, the first being that the question of the legitimacy of the camps has nothing to do with free speech. His second point, which is so simple you could put it in a grade 4 reader, was this: “If it is not the owner who gets to determine what happens on the property it will become a brutal free-for-all. If protesters can just take Front Campus, nothing prevents a stronger group from coming along and forcibly taking it over from the current protest group for another cause or a counter protest.”

QED. 

The second major shift seems to have happened after fire department officials attempted to access the McGill camp to assess the safety of the scene. The officials were denied access. In response, an exasperated McGill hired a private security firm to infiltrate the camp and assess the situation. What they found was not a happy little protest village, but a rat-infested open air latrine, occupied by homeless people, drug users, and shady outside “activists.” This was no longer a “student protest,” and it probably never was. As McGill president Deep Saini noted in an email to the university community, “One organizer of the encampment came to Montreal from outside the country shortly before tents were set up” — we wonder if this is maybe something the RCMP might wish to look into. 

This has not been a great year for Saini. Since he replaced Suzanne Fortier just about one year ago, he has had to deal with an aggressive attack by the province on the university’s enrollment and its finances. This was followed by a disruptive (and unresolved) strike by the law faculty and subsequent efforts at unionization by the faculties of Arts and Education. And, since October 7, he has been in charge of a highly divided campus where Jewish students in particular have been made to feel increasingly unwelcome and unsafe. 

It took Saini probably a lot longer than it should have to take matters in his own hands, but if he is guilty of anything, it is in believing in the good faith of the occupiers, his city’s mayor and police services, and the province’s court system. At least now he, and the McGill community as a whole, have a clear sense of where they stand. 

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Okay, everyone. Hold onto your butts. Enjoy what’s left of your weekend.

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The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  lineeditor@protonmail.com