This is an excellent piece. On the night JT was first elected I was thrilled to hear that that was going to be the last FTP election. He didn't just promise it he said it like it they had worked it through and we're going to get it done so going back on it was worse than breaking the usual political promises. That's when I realized the rhetoric doesn't fit the reality. Squaring the circle of taking serious action on climate change and buying a pipeline is another head-scratcher. I guess he thought it would buy him some love in Alberta but that didn't work at all.
My understanding is that buying the pipeline was something the federal government was basically forced into to save face (and jobs) when Kinder-Morgan gave up the project after investing billions, because of the ever-changing and more draconian regulatory requirements of…the federal government. Not a good environment to do business in, this country.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The PM really wants to be loved as a good socialist. However, he is the head of a big tent party that only leans a little left and who's primary policy is do what is necessary to stay in power. Being a good left wing socialist requires taking stands and making decision which will be unpopular with other wings of the party, and risk them loosing support.
Oh, man, rant time. (I'm sorry. Buttons have been pushed.)
First, I do dislike the media (not the people, this is just news media) obsession with good news not being news. CERB was an astonishing miracle, I've never seen the like. I watched bureaucracies take years to do days of computer programming ... my whole career. I wrote my own, while awaiting IT to call the first meeting. The ObamaCare website was *typical* for a big bureaucracy. Then somehow the Feds put out CERB in a matter of days, people marvel that 90% are on and off the site in literal minutes, Thanks Guys!!! ...but then that story is over, never mentioned again, what have you done for us lately?
The media somehow never discuss the simple, numerical, obvious fact that Canada has yet to reach 800 dead/million, as Germany hits 1300, France 1850, UK 2150, America 2470.
SIXTY THOUSAND CANADIANS ARE ALIVE THAT WOULD BE DEAD IF THEY WERE AMERICAN.
Canada has done two or three times as well on the final anvil of testing: "Can your society combat the challenges presented by life on Earth, and make your people safe from them?" If Canada had two or three times the economic growth rate of western Europe and the USA, it would considered absolute proof of whatever economic choices we'd made at the time, were genius.
I haven't seen a single news story on the topic of "Why has Canada's pandemic been so much better than its comparable peers?" It's just not "a thing". It's merely a fact, not a story.
But we on the Left can never give whomever is in power a break, the conditions of our causes are that "power never concedes anything without a demand" - and it generally takes decades. I spent 40 years afraid that my comfortable professional life would be ruined if cannabis were smelled at the wrong moment by the wrong person. The simple fact that the stuff was almost non-toxic, the Prohibition of it madness, was well-known in scientific circles for most of that time, but we just had to keep patiently pushing and awaiting the Old Guard simply dying off. During that time, "mindshare" can be sought with little gestures that don't cause real change - except in minds.
And, yes, I'm not the biggest fan of Mr. Image, but there was genuine substance in his straight-up legalization call, when he was a political lightweight, and it leapfrogged past the NDP weak-tea "decrim" call of many years, hit them from the left. At the time, Stephen Harper still thought it was the Reagan era, and actually broke out the your-brain-a-frying-egg crap one last time, to find that Trudeau had 'read the room' much more astutely, leaving Harper looking old, out-of-touch, even delusional.
It's easier to placate the Right than the Left, if you ask this leftie. The Left takes your 80% complete clean-water on FN, and demands when the harder 20% will be done. We aren't satisfied by *talking* about minimum wages and wealth taxes, we want to see results.
The Right, on the other hand, does not demand the end to minimum wage and lower taxes on upper incomes, because that particular *part* of the Right, that wants tangible Righty results, is just that 1% of the population. Or less. Their demands are made quietly, in back rooms, and journalists are never invited.
The 99%, the rank-and-file, of the Right, never filled a street to demand those major changes. "Less Financial Regulation", said no sign ever. The rank-and-file of the Right, are terrifyingly, willing to vote for you if you promise them performative symbolic crap like War Rooms against the Foreign Green Conspiracy, or anti-tax stickers for their gas pumps. I say "terrifyingly" because we now know from the USA that there's no bottom to how much you can get right-wing votes by deploying conspiracy theories out of "The Paranoid Style of American Politics", 1964 - and promising to fight them.
Even when proven dead-wrong, even when centre-right journalism like TheLine busts the War Room, Jason Kenney is ***NOT*** called on that bullshit by the right-wing activists, like Trudeau is on his own - Team Conservative just wants that War Room thing to be true.
It's not "bullshit" to take a long time to do something that needs "mindshare", that needs the old to die off, mostly, but also needs younger minds to be gently pressured to not adopt the sins of their fathers. My parents were hotly indignant, when I raised in the early 1980s, the notion that it had been wrong to imprison Japanese Canadians in their youth. They lectured me for a few minutes about how nobody could be sure they were safe to let loose. I'm certain they would have given the same defense of Residential Schools (if any of us had been aware of them).
The Nisei never got more than apologies, "empty gestures", and it was a long journey through even more minor acknowledgements. The First Nations are getting $40B, at last, but there were a lot of empty gestures for decades, while mindshare was gained. The $40B would have been utterly impossible when my parents were alive. And voting.
Gay people had to wait a long time, too, though, again, knowledgeable people, doctors, understood it was no mental illness or perversion. I got "Alberta Report" at work through the 90s, and every week had a whole page devoted to how sick gay people were, how unsafe around children, insane to let them adopt or be teachers. One "performative bullshit" gesture after another was made, one minor victory at a time, it was all necessary baby-steps that helped Gen-
X and Millenials NOT grow up hearing only the homophobia that we Boomers grew up on.
The interesting question, not for me, really, but for journalists who follow all the drama of the rich and powerful, is the extent to which the "bullshit" is understood as such by the bullshitter. We "Call Trudeau on His Bullshit", because we of course want results, not gestures. But is it just a call-and-response? FDR told his supporters that he wanted to do vast Real Results like the New Deal, but told them they had to go out, demonstrate, scare the squares, "Make me do it". Paul Krugman repeats that story incessantly, that Democrats can't give them health care and better wages without angry, demanding people on the streets, scaring the Right of their own party.
You have to stay in power to do anything, so you compromise and provide half-a-loaf; everybody on both sides gets that. The only challenge, is to separate the FDR, who wants to do what you want done, but needs support - from the Bill Clintons of the "left" who want to deregulate finance, get rich, and fly private, while buying off support with a few Culture War gestures of their own.
Trudeau's genuine political courage on the cannabis file suggests he has some honesty in him, and the $40B for FN the other day (again, I didn't notice a single thank-you quote from anybody), suggest there's a real core there. But, of course, the Party will try to beat that out of him.
Point taken, I was of course using "safe" in that limited sense.
None other makes sense in the discussion, as truly "safe" means you'd have to prohibit most of the cleaning-products aisle at, ahem, Safeway.
Also, the NEJM could give a crap if I was a sleepless wreck during certain points of my career, and turning to alcohol instead to cope. There were terrible *medical* costs to Prohibition for 70 years, as we're finding out now that legal cannabis states experience a drop in opioid abuse.
No, you picked the single issue that makes me *personally* angry (not being gay, Indigenous, or poor). 63-16 = 46 years of being angry at living in fear for 40 of them, because of right-wing bullshit invented in the 1930s... demonstrably, scientifically-provably untrue the entire time. The science experiments to prove it were forbidden by law. Climatology never suffered such a prohibition.
May I most-politely encourage you to acquaint yourself with modern medical literature on the subject. Your idea was a "zombie idea" before most of Paul Krugman's were even invented.
I can sort of imagine Trudeau going into some Twilight Zone episode where he is presented with two buttons about his legacy. Press "A" and everything he had hoped to accomplish from a center left perspective will get enacted in the coming years in a meaningful lasting policy kind of way. But, the catch is EVERYONE left and right will hate him as the worst PM ever. Press "B" and nothing gets done, but people on the left will fawn over him as some great combo Pearson/Layton/Tommy Douglas like character. Looking at the buttons, he thinks to himself, well, A is the obvious, ?!?! WAIT, How the hell did "B" get pressed ?!?!?!"
I think the guy just cant help himself too often. He knows what to do, but he just cant help himself. and surrounded by sycophants, his worst instincts rule :(
Agree. I'm sure he would hate the comparison, but personality and background wise he has a lot in common with Donald Trump. Born into privilege, he would be nowhere in life without his far more competent father. He had no meaningful work experience to prepare himself for the role (even George W. Bush was the governor of a state before he became president). And it's obvious he is far more interested in being well regarded than he is in actually making any kind of policy change.
On that last front, he is the polar opposite of Pierre Trudeau, who made himself quite unpopular in some quarters in service of his policy goals, to the point that separatists once hurled debris at him at a public appearance (not to mention what Albertans think of him).
There is still a vocal left in Canada that wants these kind of things despite the evidence pointing to the fact that they will not work or are not good for Canadians. That is a major problem here too, no one seems willing to stand up to people on the left and say what you are asking for is simply out of the question. So we play this pretend game of back and forth.
If you'd like a liberal defense of the sport, read any Hunter Thompson. Though Matt says the same more succinctly.
But the fun read is the book by ultraliberal gay sex columnist Dan Savage, who went to a gun range out of curiosity, and was thrilled to discover that he was a one-in-a-thousand Natural Deadeye talent. Quickly got bored with the targets, and started picking off periods in the copyright notice at bottom.
I have all his books and two biographies, thanks. HST could have done himself in with any number of drugs, obviously, the lack of a gun would not have saved his life.
And it was a shotgun: even Canadians can own those, out in places like Woody Creek, CO, where hunting is a thing.
I'm conflicted by the premise. By the most important metric, finances, the Trudeau government has taken the country far to the left. The big question is what measurable, favorable outcomes has runaway spending delivered? Maybe that is the true measure of "progressive", spending money without delivering results.
Trudeau is a centrist? Really? Here's a PM who, like his father before him, is determined to destroy English and French Canada and relegate their respective peoples to the status of a minority - a sine qua non for creating a multicultural Canada. Given that no Canadian government has ever had a mandate for such a policy, this act of creative destruction represents a revolution orchestrated by elites.
Matt, I'm curious about your thoughts on how the disconnect between announcement and performance of the political elite connects to the wider disconnect you wrote about between Canadians outdated expectations and the drift of normal in the post-WWII world. (Maybe something for a future dispatch?) Justin is at the sharp, pointy end of this, insofar as he had the fortune/misfortune of being elected and becoming the face and embodiment of this disconnect.
If pols appeal to the public's expectations in order to get elected, given the drift of reality and normality, are events not likely to comprise those expectations and those political announcements? In other words, the distorted image pols present, is just the distorted image our distorted mirror of reality produces as a product of continuing to want what was in fact an ephemeral historical moment of prosperity, security and comfort in the post-WWII world.
Hi Robert. It's a good question. I don't honestly know if I have a specific, thoughtful answer to the precise question you asked. It's something I'll ponder, because as I said, it's good. As I said in that column you linked to, it's hard to tell the chicken from the egg here — my gut feeling is more than our dysfunctional politics is downstream from our clueless society, but I don't know how I'd prove that, right? And I'd be open to arguments that the opposite is true.
FYI: I'm just prepping our weekly Line editor video and there is some stuff in there between Jen and I that addresses what you're asking about in a different way. We're talking in the video about the media and the public, and Jen is harsher on the media than I am. It's not that I'm blind to our faults. I just don't always think there is an audience among the public for what the public says it wants. I bring that up because I think the same is probably true of our politics. We get what we deserve, maybe, is the best way to sum it up.
I"m not sure you are telling us anything we don't already know except the fact you own three handguns. ( "because you like shooting them") I'm pretty sure a hockey stick a tennis ball and a net would give more satisfaction than you can get at a firing range and be a better example to our children of a healthy activity. Two thirds Canadians would be perfectly happy with an outright handgun ban and the number would be higher if we weren't so apathetic. It's an eventuality in this country so I'm surprised that no leader has tried to define himself by proposing a ban. Trudeau hasn't because he has no originality nor leadership and seems to only be interested in re- election.
I have hockey sticks and tennis balls and a net, and golf clubs, and firearms, and they all bring me their own joys. As for the majority of Canadians, you're 100% right. This is just another example of something the majority is wrong about. There are others. Oh well.
N.B. i'm a Calgarian, but do you really feel that removing handguns from the streets of Toronto would be unless. Removing them from your collection, yes, but now we are talking about the sacrifice for the greater good.
Useless, yes. The guns will be replaced. Toronto doesn't have a gun control problem, it has a gang problem. Trying to fix gang violence with the system used to regulate firearms ownership for the broader public is a basic category error.
Precisely Matt. This reminds me of the Liberal's long gun registry. I said it was the same as the Barney Fife type cop that comes upon an armed robbery of a bank. The first thing he does is write out a ticket for their getaway car that's parked illegally in front of the bank.
In a sense the handgun issue is similar to abortion. For those that don't like it it seems simple to just ban it completely and be done with it. The reality is much more complicated than that. Canada has had very strict handgun laws since the 1930s. I think our society was lax in sentencing when the arrival of crack on the street brought a gun epidemic but we don't actually need new laws. Taking away the guns of responsible owners doesn't achieve anything. The number of stolen legal guns on the street is a speck compared to Illegal Imports.
I don't think people who are using guns in crime in Toronto and Calgary are getting them through the legal channels. They are getting guns that have been smuggled from the U.S. I would be shocked if more than about 25 percent of handguns used in crimes in Canada came from Canada. And I would be even more shocked if any of those guns were used by their legal purchaser.
Also, from my understanding it's already illegal to possess a handgun on your person in almost every circumstance in Canada. So if someone is walking around with a gun in their waistband, they're already violating the law.
Your understanding is correct. So is your guess about the origin of guns used in crime — overwhelmingly smuggled in. There are SOME that are domestically sourced, of course, and banners jump on that as a justification — if it saves one life, etc! But that's just a failure of fundamental economics. There is a demand for guns in Toronto. They sell at 3x their legal sale price on the black market. Pinch off the (tiny minority) portion of the supply that comes from domestic firearms, which is what a ban would theoretically do, and the smuggling market just instantly makes up the difference.
Not sure what the point is here. The tone seems critical of Trudeau for not being a genuine progressive (as the lefties complain) yet a good chunk of the article focusses on firearms and handguns, where his refusal to much with our already effective laws for the sake of Safety Theatre is the right thing to do. Some of the other examples (beach vacation on the day of reconciliation) showcase Trudeau's obliviousness more than his positioning on a left / right scale. So, the conclusion is that Trudeau's really a centrist, and that's a good thing? Or that governing in the real world is harder than making grand pronouncements from the sidelines?
This is an excellent piece. On the night JT was first elected I was thrilled to hear that that was going to be the last FTP election. He didn't just promise it he said it like it they had worked it through and we're going to get it done so going back on it was worse than breaking the usual political promises. That's when I realized the rhetoric doesn't fit the reality. Squaring the circle of taking serious action on climate change and buying a pipeline is another head-scratcher. I guess he thought it would buy him some love in Alberta but that didn't work at all.
My understanding is that buying the pipeline was something the federal government was basically forced into to save face (and jobs) when Kinder-Morgan gave up the project after investing billions, because of the ever-changing and more draconian regulatory requirements of…the federal government. Not a good environment to do business in, this country.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The PM really wants to be loved as a good socialist. However, he is the head of a big tent party that only leans a little left and who's primary policy is do what is necessary to stay in power. Being a good left wing socialist requires taking stands and making decision which will be unpopular with other wings of the party, and risk them loosing support.
Yet the left keeps voting for him
Because he sells well. They aren't stupid.
Nah....Trudeau provides enough free money to buy the Left out of its principles
Oh, man, rant time. (I'm sorry. Buttons have been pushed.)
First, I do dislike the media (not the people, this is just news media) obsession with good news not being news. CERB was an astonishing miracle, I've never seen the like. I watched bureaucracies take years to do days of computer programming ... my whole career. I wrote my own, while awaiting IT to call the first meeting. The ObamaCare website was *typical* for a big bureaucracy. Then somehow the Feds put out CERB in a matter of days, people marvel that 90% are on and off the site in literal minutes, Thanks Guys!!! ...but then that story is over, never mentioned again, what have you done for us lately?
The media somehow never discuss the simple, numerical, obvious fact that Canada has yet to reach 800 dead/million, as Germany hits 1300, France 1850, UK 2150, America 2470.
SIXTY THOUSAND CANADIANS ARE ALIVE THAT WOULD BE DEAD IF THEY WERE AMERICAN.
Canada has done two or three times as well on the final anvil of testing: "Can your society combat the challenges presented by life on Earth, and make your people safe from them?" If Canada had two or three times the economic growth rate of western Europe and the USA, it would considered absolute proof of whatever economic choices we'd made at the time, were genius.
I haven't seen a single news story on the topic of "Why has Canada's pandemic been so much better than its comparable peers?" It's just not "a thing". It's merely a fact, not a story.
But we on the Left can never give whomever is in power a break, the conditions of our causes are that "power never concedes anything without a demand" - and it generally takes decades. I spent 40 years afraid that my comfortable professional life would be ruined if cannabis were smelled at the wrong moment by the wrong person. The simple fact that the stuff was almost non-toxic, the Prohibition of it madness, was well-known in scientific circles for most of that time, but we just had to keep patiently pushing and awaiting the Old Guard simply dying off. During that time, "mindshare" can be sought with little gestures that don't cause real change - except in minds.
And, yes, I'm not the biggest fan of Mr. Image, but there was genuine substance in his straight-up legalization call, when he was a political lightweight, and it leapfrogged past the NDP weak-tea "decrim" call of many years, hit them from the left. At the time, Stephen Harper still thought it was the Reagan era, and actually broke out the your-brain-a-frying-egg crap one last time, to find that Trudeau had 'read the room' much more astutely, leaving Harper looking old, out-of-touch, even delusional.
It's easier to placate the Right than the Left, if you ask this leftie. The Left takes your 80% complete clean-water on FN, and demands when the harder 20% will be done. We aren't satisfied by *talking* about minimum wages and wealth taxes, we want to see results.
The Right, on the other hand, does not demand the end to minimum wage and lower taxes on upper incomes, because that particular *part* of the Right, that wants tangible Righty results, is just that 1% of the population. Or less. Their demands are made quietly, in back rooms, and journalists are never invited.
The 99%, the rank-and-file, of the Right, never filled a street to demand those major changes. "Less Financial Regulation", said no sign ever. The rank-and-file of the Right, are terrifyingly, willing to vote for you if you promise them performative symbolic crap like War Rooms against the Foreign Green Conspiracy, or anti-tax stickers for their gas pumps. I say "terrifyingly" because we now know from the USA that there's no bottom to how much you can get right-wing votes by deploying conspiracy theories out of "The Paranoid Style of American Politics", 1964 - and promising to fight them.
Even when proven dead-wrong, even when centre-right journalism like TheLine busts the War Room, Jason Kenney is ***NOT*** called on that bullshit by the right-wing activists, like Trudeau is on his own - Team Conservative just wants that War Room thing to be true.
It's not "bullshit" to take a long time to do something that needs "mindshare", that needs the old to die off, mostly, but also needs younger minds to be gently pressured to not adopt the sins of their fathers. My parents were hotly indignant, when I raised in the early 1980s, the notion that it had been wrong to imprison Japanese Canadians in their youth. They lectured me for a few minutes about how nobody could be sure they were safe to let loose. I'm certain they would have given the same defense of Residential Schools (if any of us had been aware of them).
The Nisei never got more than apologies, "empty gestures", and it was a long journey through even more minor acknowledgements. The First Nations are getting $40B, at last, but there were a lot of empty gestures for decades, while mindshare was gained. The $40B would have been utterly impossible when my parents were alive. And voting.
Gay people had to wait a long time, too, though, again, knowledgeable people, doctors, understood it was no mental illness or perversion. I got "Alberta Report" at work through the 90s, and every week had a whole page devoted to how sick gay people were, how unsafe around children, insane to let them adopt or be teachers. One "performative bullshit" gesture after another was made, one minor victory at a time, it was all necessary baby-steps that helped Gen-
X and Millenials NOT grow up hearing only the homophobia that we Boomers grew up on.
The interesting question, not for me, really, but for journalists who follow all the drama of the rich and powerful, is the extent to which the "bullshit" is understood as such by the bullshitter. We "Call Trudeau on His Bullshit", because we of course want results, not gestures. But is it just a call-and-response? FDR told his supporters that he wanted to do vast Real Results like the New Deal, but told them they had to go out, demonstrate, scare the squares, "Make me do it". Paul Krugman repeats that story incessantly, that Democrats can't give them health care and better wages without angry, demanding people on the streets, scaring the Right of their own party.
You have to stay in power to do anything, so you compromise and provide half-a-loaf; everybody on both sides gets that. The only challenge, is to separate the FDR, who wants to do what you want done, but needs support - from the Bill Clintons of the "left" who want to deregulate finance, get rich, and fly private, while buying off support with a few Culture War gestures of their own.
Trudeau's genuine political courage on the cannabis file suggests he has some honesty in him, and the $40B for FN the other day (again, I didn't notice a single thank-you quote from anybody), suggest there's a real core there. But, of course, the Party will try to beat that out of him.
No, cannabis is not safe.
I welcome your thoughts in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Otherwise, save it.
How about the New England Journal of Medicine?
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMra1402309
Sure, it shouldn't be prohibited. But it's not exactly "safe," nor is alcohol, nor is tobacco.
Point taken, I was of course using "safe" in that limited sense.
None other makes sense in the discussion, as truly "safe" means you'd have to prohibit most of the cleaning-products aisle at, ahem, Safeway.
Also, the NEJM could give a crap if I was a sleepless wreck during certain points of my career, and turning to alcohol instead to cope. There were terrible *medical* costs to Prohibition for 70 years, as we're finding out now that legal cannabis states experience a drop in opioid abuse.
wow.... I'm glad that I didn't waste my time disagreeing with the rest of your comments. I was taught to be polite. Have a Happy New Year.
No, you picked the single issue that makes me *personally* angry (not being gay, Indigenous, or poor). 63-16 = 46 years of being angry at living in fear for 40 of them, because of right-wing bullshit invented in the 1930s... demonstrably, scientifically-provably untrue the entire time. The science experiments to prove it were forbidden by law. Climatology never suffered such a prohibition.
May I most-politely encourage you to acquaint yourself with modern medical literature on the subject. Your idea was a "zombie idea" before most of Paul Krugman's were even invented.
What can I say but ..... well done Matt. Smacked that nail right on the head.
I can sort of imagine Trudeau going into some Twilight Zone episode where he is presented with two buttons about his legacy. Press "A" and everything he had hoped to accomplish from a center left perspective will get enacted in the coming years in a meaningful lasting policy kind of way. But, the catch is EVERYONE left and right will hate him as the worst PM ever. Press "B" and nothing gets done, but people on the left will fawn over him as some great combo Pearson/Layton/Tommy Douglas like character. Looking at the buttons, he thinks to himself, well, A is the obvious, ?!?! WAIT, How the hell did "B" get pressed ?!?!?!"
I think the guy just cant help himself too often. He knows what to do, but he just cant help himself. and surrounded by sycophants, his worst instincts rule :(
Agree. I'm sure he would hate the comparison, but personality and background wise he has a lot in common with Donald Trump. Born into privilege, he would be nowhere in life without his far more competent father. He had no meaningful work experience to prepare himself for the role (even George W. Bush was the governor of a state before he became president). And it's obvious he is far more interested in being well regarded than he is in actually making any kind of policy change.
On that last front, he is the polar opposite of Pierre Trudeau, who made himself quite unpopular in some quarters in service of his policy goals, to the point that separatists once hurled debris at him at a public appearance (not to mention what Albertans think of him).
You are right on re Trump comparison. I've said for years now that they are two very different sides of the same coin.
There is still a vocal left in Canada that wants these kind of things despite the evidence pointing to the fact that they will not work or are not good for Canadians. That is a major problem here too, no one seems willing to stand up to people on the left and say what you are asking for is simply out of the question. So we play this pretend game of back and forth.
Because Canadians avoiding confrontation is literally a core trait of the culture, at least in English Canada.
Which “kind of things” do you mean? He speaks about a lot of issues in the article.
I’m pleased to see the robust yet mostly civil comments/discussion section developing at The Line!
May I inquire: why do you have three handguns? What are they for?
I like shooting them.
Ah. Ok. Thanks for answering.
If you'd like a liberal defense of the sport, read any Hunter Thompson. Though Matt says the same more succinctly.
But the fun read is the book by ultraliberal gay sex columnist Dan Savage, who went to a gun range out of curiosity, and was thrilled to discover that he was a one-in-a-thousand Natural Deadeye talent. Quickly got bored with the targets, and started picking off periods in the copyright notice at bottom.
Are you aware that HST shot himself to death? Kinda speaks for the value of gun control regardless of polemics on the value of owning guns.
Suicide is legal in this country. The method used is irrelevant.
I have all his books and two biographies, thanks. HST could have done himself in with any number of drugs, obviously, the lack of a gun would not have saved his life.
And it was a shotgun: even Canadians can own those, out in places like Woody Creek, CO, where hunting is a thing.
Well at least he didn't take anyone with him.
LOL that's amazing. :) I'll check it out.
I'm conflicted by the premise. By the most important metric, finances, the Trudeau government has taken the country far to the left. The big question is what measurable, favorable outcomes has runaway spending delivered? Maybe that is the true measure of "progressive", spending money without delivering results.
Looking forward to this week's dispatches!
Trudeau is a centrist? Really? Here's a PM who, like his father before him, is determined to destroy English and French Canada and relegate their respective peoples to the status of a minority - a sine qua non for creating a multicultural Canada. Given that no Canadian government has ever had a mandate for such a policy, this act of creative destruction represents a revolution orchestrated by elites.
'Or maybe it’s even more basic than that: perhaps he wishes he was something he’s not willing to actually be'. I think this is a perfect description.
Matt, I'm curious about your thoughts on how the disconnect between announcement and performance of the political elite connects to the wider disconnect you wrote about between Canadians outdated expectations and the drift of normal in the post-WWII world. (Maybe something for a future dispatch?) Justin is at the sharp, pointy end of this, insofar as he had the fortune/misfortune of being elected and becoming the face and embodiment of this disconnect.
If pols appeal to the public's expectations in order to get elected, given the drift of reality and normality, are events not likely to comprise those expectations and those political announcements? In other words, the distorted image pols present, is just the distorted image our distorted mirror of reality produces as a product of continuing to want what was in fact an ephemeral historical moment of prosperity, security and comfort in the post-WWII world.
https://theline.substack.com/p/matt-gurney-your-expectations-are
Hi Robert. It's a good question. I don't honestly know if I have a specific, thoughtful answer to the precise question you asked. It's something I'll ponder, because as I said, it's good. As I said in that column you linked to, it's hard to tell the chicken from the egg here — my gut feeling is more than our dysfunctional politics is downstream from our clueless society, but I don't know how I'd prove that, right? And I'd be open to arguments that the opposite is true.
FYI: I'm just prepping our weekly Line editor video and there is some stuff in there between Jen and I that addresses what you're asking about in a different way. We're talking in the video about the media and the public, and Jen is harsher on the media than I am. It's not that I'm blind to our faults. I just don't always think there is an audience among the public for what the public says it wants. I bring that up because I think the same is probably true of our politics. We get what we deserve, maybe, is the best way to sum it up.
I"m not sure you are telling us anything we don't already know except the fact you own three handguns. ( "because you like shooting them") I'm pretty sure a hockey stick a tennis ball and a net would give more satisfaction than you can get at a firing range and be a better example to our children of a healthy activity. Two thirds Canadians would be perfectly happy with an outright handgun ban and the number would be higher if we weren't so apathetic. It's an eventuality in this country so I'm surprised that no leader has tried to define himself by proposing a ban. Trudeau hasn't because he has no originality nor leadership and seems to only be interested in re- election.
I have hockey sticks and tennis balls and a net, and golf clubs, and firearms, and they all bring me their own joys. As for the majority of Canadians, you're 100% right. This is just another example of something the majority is wrong about. There are others. Oh well.
Some times a small sacrifice is made for the good of the whole.
Yeah, sometimes. And sometimes the larger group demands something useless from the smaller group just cuz they can.
N.B. i'm a Calgarian, but do you really feel that removing handguns from the streets of Toronto would be unless. Removing them from your collection, yes, but now we are talking about the sacrifice for the greater good.
Useless, yes. The guns will be replaced. Toronto doesn't have a gun control problem, it has a gang problem. Trying to fix gang violence with the system used to regulate firearms ownership for the broader public is a basic category error.
Precisely Matt. This reminds me of the Liberal's long gun registry. I said it was the same as the Barney Fife type cop that comes upon an armed robbery of a bank. The first thing he does is write out a ticket for their getaway car that's parked illegally in front of the bank.
In a sense the handgun issue is similar to abortion. For those that don't like it it seems simple to just ban it completely and be done with it. The reality is much more complicated than that. Canada has had very strict handgun laws since the 1930s. I think our society was lax in sentencing when the arrival of crack on the street brought a gun epidemic but we don't actually need new laws. Taking away the guns of responsible owners doesn't achieve anything. The number of stolen legal guns on the street is a speck compared to Illegal Imports.
I don't think people who are using guns in crime in Toronto and Calgary are getting them through the legal channels. They are getting guns that have been smuggled from the U.S. I would be shocked if more than about 25 percent of handguns used in crimes in Canada came from Canada. And I would be even more shocked if any of those guns were used by their legal purchaser.
Also, from my understanding it's already illegal to possess a handgun on your person in almost every circumstance in Canada. So if someone is walking around with a gun in their waistband, they're already violating the law.
Your understanding is correct. So is your guess about the origin of guns used in crime — overwhelmingly smuggled in. There are SOME that are domestically sourced, of course, and banners jump on that as a justification — if it saves one life, etc! But that's just a failure of fundamental economics. There is a demand for guns in Toronto. They sell at 3x their legal sale price on the black market. Pinch off the (tiny minority) portion of the supply that comes from domestic firearms, which is what a ban would theoretically do, and the smuggling market just instantly makes up the difference.
Not sure what the point is here. The tone seems critical of Trudeau for not being a genuine progressive (as the lefties complain) yet a good chunk of the article focusses on firearms and handguns, where his refusal to much with our already effective laws for the sake of Safety Theatre is the right thing to do. Some of the other examples (beach vacation on the day of reconciliation) showcase Trudeau's obliviousness more than his positioning on a left / right scale. So, the conclusion is that Trudeau's really a centrist, and that's a good thing? Or that governing in the real world is harder than making grand pronouncements from the sidelines?
> Legalizing pot doesn't qualify.
Beg to differ. (At tedious length, sorry.) Above.
I suspect you didn't spend decades afraid.