On Trump's good choices, and bad choices. On terrible scenes in Toronto. On failing to clear the low bar of "Don't make people angry about Nov. 11 ceremonies"
This may be too obvious, but on the question of why stuff isn't getting built, it would be great to hear from Dan Gardner, formerly of the Ottawa Citizen. For anyone who doesn't know, Dan co-wrote a book, "How Big Things Get Done", with a guy named Bent Flyvbjerg who is pretty much the world's biggest expert on megaprojects.
The book isn't particularly about Canada, and it's focused on big projects (like the Eglinton LRT but not like building housing). But I bet Dan would have an interesting and useful point of view.
Yes, they are showing Schindler’s List in rural Manitoba. My daughter will be watching it in Grade Twelve History next semester. Last year they watched All Quiet on The Western Front. They did a grade eight project on the Holocaust and WW2.
Jen's rant on "once you come to Canada, these armies become your national ancestors" remind me that progressives apply this framing to another matter: how Canada handled indigenous people. Even children that wasn't born in Canada and whose ancestors never interacted with a Canadian first Nations have to somehow carry the sins of what Canadians from generations ago (or using Hobb's linggo "some white men who did something related to governing"). But when it's about something Canadians should be proud about, then it's "something white men did related to military".
I think both are correct. To become Canadian through either birth or migration is to take on all of the glory and shame of Canadians past, the same way as if you buy shares in a company, you're taking on a share of all of its debts and credits.
I have the privilege of typing this right now from a beautiful river valley that was taken from its previous inhabitants through coercive treaty. I'm not giving the river valley back! But nor do I get to distance myself from the terms and context of the signing of that treaty. It's all part of my heritage.
What Hobbs did/said is not an abertation. There are many teachers and union officials proudly agreeing with him on twitter, under their real names. They also proudly and righteously defended kids being taken to the Hamas rally, and all the other crazy shit that happens regularly.
Places like OISE are far-left madrassas training teachers to dismantle the white male cis-hetero-capitalist patriarchy, and Hobbs is what that looks like in practice. You once said it yourself, Matt: most teachers are great, but "5-10% have the fanatic's gleam in their eye", and that's all you need to cause a severe problem.
The reason I'm a broken record ranting about the "culture war" is because *everything* is downstream from culture, and the dominant ideology of our schools is now one that seeks to defame our history, subvert our traditions, and turn our kids into lil' revolutionaries, whether its lgbtqrst, "anti-racism", or "de-colonization". I personally have witnessed and continue to witness *insane* things happening at my own kids school that I'm reluctant to talk about publicly... I'm trying to get my affairs in order to move out of the city in what will likely be a futile effort to escape this bs, because while some schools are worse, it's everywhere.
What's your definition of 'many'? There are approx 160K teachers in Ontario & over 400K teachers in Canada. I wonder what proportion of them are agreeing with Hobbs?
IMO this is yet another situation where applying critical thinking skills on 'both sides' is important. Even if a few thousand agree with him that represents less than 2% of teachers in Ontario & considerably fewer in Canada.
I'm in no way defending Hobbs - I'm appalled at his opinion, but it's also important not to assume that his thinking represents the majority.
No, it isn't a majority - as I said, it's around 5-10% of teachers, but they browbeat the others into towing the line, and whats worse, the unions and schoolboards are run by the most fanatical of all. This isn't some evil conspiracy, these people really do believe that they're doing good, they're just really mistaken. They're proud of what they're doing, they proclaim it openly, but they use language in a way that makes their ideas seem like basic human decency - fairness, equity, inclusion, anti-racism... but what they understand those to mean is radically different from how the words are commonly understood.
One big one is "critical" : whenever you see someone in education saying "critical", they do *not* mean critical thinking, they mean Critical Theory, i.e. wokeness. They'll say "teaching students to think critically", and that means inculcating them into wokeness. Here is an excellent explainer of the difference between critical thinking and Critical Theory:
Critical thinking means restraint from blindly trusting someone’s or your own opinions and ruthlessly checking them against facts. It also means restraint from oversimplifying your interpretation of the situation, from premature jumping to obvious conclusions.
Critical Theory is completely different. It refers to an approach to language that aims at political change and denies any objective reality that would dilute its message. In this way it’s much more like propaganda. Engaging with both sides of an argument (as in critical thinking) is antithetical to Critical Theory."
> They'll say "teaching students to think critically", and that means inculcating them into wokeness.
Yeah, that's just not true.
"Teaching students to think critically" means to apply critical thinking. I know a LOT of teachers, (same reason as Matt) and 100% of them mean it that way because that's what those words mean in that context.
They're also aware of SOGI and wokeness and some of them are very much on board with those things.... and they're still in that 100% of the teachers I know who are aware that "think critically" means "critical thinking" not "be woke". When they encourage students to buy into the woke dogma, they use other words like "equity".
Again, I'm not talking about the majority of teachers, who are not zealots. I'm talking about the ones like Hobbs, and the ones who took kids to the Hamas rally where they chanted "from Turtle Island to Palestine" and boldly stood by their actions, along with board and union officials who supported them, many at the rally themselves. I'm talking about the woman from the board who gave a seminar I attended explaining that from kindergarten on, the goal was to "dismantle cis-heteronormativity" which includes teaching that the male/female binary was a fraudulent creation of colonialism designed to oppress everyone. These are the folx who think they should be able to shepherd your kid through a social transition behind your back.
The people setting the curriculum and the ethos of the TDSB are devotees of the Paolo Friere school of eductation, where the role of school is not what you and I think, but to "conscientize" students into Critical Consciousness in an effort to transform society into a social(ist) justice utopia.
These are the people coming up with idiotic programs like "Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy" - ask your friends about that.This stuff sounds stupid, and it is, but it really does matter that the zealots are running the schoolboards!!! Imagine if christian fundamentalists were doing this, and secretly teaching kids about young-earth creationism while math and literacy rates were plummeting... would you dismiss this as "not all teachers"?
It is possible that I'm just an anomaly... But 100% of the teachers I'm talking about don't mean "critical theory" when they say "think critically".
I don't know if you'd call them "gleam in their eye activists", but I'm talking bout teachers who when talking about the trans issue endorse withholding information from parents about what's going on with their kid and being deliberately deceptive, which people generally call "lying".
Now maybe you'd say that 100% of the teachers endorsing woke ideology are not part of that activist strain of teachers because you're making a distinction between two kinds. But if that's the case, I don't agree. What I'm describing IS activism. Telling kids to start their days sharing their pronouns, insisting that the quasi-spiritual belief in a "gendered person" that overrides sex, insisting on a definition of racism that is itself racist... I think those are all examples of activism and not teaching even if they happen to know what "critical thinking" means even as they fail to apply it.
You are correct. And Matt is correct; it is the 10 % with the fanatic gleam in their eyes - my words added here - that are controlling the educational system. Canada's degeneration started about 4 decades ago when the schooling system has ever so subtly started to be subverted into ideological conformity by leftists infiltrating the teachers' unions. This was helped by the first Trudeau's (harsh curse be upon both of them) introduction of multiculturalism; an academic idea that has now in several Western countries proved that it does not work in practice. Fact of life is that there are cultures in existence which are actively hostile to any other cultures and seek to become dominant. What I see today in Canada is that this country is being ripped apart by both home-grown and imported predators.
I really hope that the line editors check out a youtube episode on Canadian Military procurement by Perun, an Australian defence economics expert (linked below). As a person who has been wondering for years about "Why don't we build things good?" I left the episode more angry at our bureaucracies than I've been in years. I'm so fed up with Canadian mediocrity.
I'd love to see your team dig into the Canadian productivity gap and "why we no build things good?". It's an existential question that's hard to parse from the ground level, but critical to the functioning and dis-functioning of our nation. Why can Sweden and Norway build things but not us?
On the Paul Wells podcast from November 6 (https://paulwells.substack.com/p/hoodwinked-by-big-paderno), there were some interesting comments by Vass Bednar and Denise Hearn about the relationship between Canadian monopolies and Canadian productivity. Briefly, the argument was that monopolies make it hard for innovators to break into the market, and those innovators could be innovating in the direction of more productive use of labour. Meanwhile, the lack of competition reduces the incentive for existing players to become more efficient.
Jen and Matt keep mentioning the supply management system. I'm a small farmer who's almost gone broke a few times trying to make money in competition with the big corps. There is some serious regulatory capture there, especially with the milk and egg mafias. Meat packing centralization has been really problematic for small scale producers as well. It all seems to stem from Health Canada not wanting to regulate smaller scale, more distributed solutions. That's a feature, not a bug.
I can’t speak to other projects but the Ottawa LRT project is a good example. When preliminary bids came in the Quebec criminally convicted and politically influential engineering firm SNC Lavalin was eliminated for failing to need technical requirements. But they mysteriously - secret Ottawa Council vote - reappeared as a contender on the next phase and eventually won the competition with all the delays and screwups that followed. Of course the feds were subsidizing the project to the tune of $250 million and of course that money had to go to the “right” people. I don’t believe Sweden and Norway have a bunch of Quebeckers to cater to
Scandinavians do not have the Oddaua degenerative disease. See related comment above (or below). This is absolutely a critical question, also re. the approaching potential dis-nationing of our nation. At some point the provinces will push Oddaua aside to ensure their own economic survival and build things regardless of Oddaua's yelpin'.
I spent enough time in Oddaua to take a good note of the snootiness of the civil service and political mandarin class.
@Matt Gurney: I wondered if you'd stumbled across Perun. He and his power points are truly gems. I gotta admit to waiting with equal parts dread and relish for the "Canadian Procurement" episode.
Seen it, am a regular on Perun's podcasts. My answer to you: Ottawa needs to depopulated and turned into an army training area: one week for artillery target practice, one week for infantry urban warfare, one week for combined arms assaults.
That city is one main reason for Canada's degenerative constipation.
I aim at the city as the symbol of government. You are correct, so I would be aiming at any other city which housed such a dysfunctional mongrel of a government.
The Friday before Remembrance Day, the HR department at work (specifically the DEI coordinator) sent out a somewhat tone-deaf email noting the day, with the 2nd paragraph talking about how other cultures experience the commemoration differently.
Both of my daughters are in cadets, so I was helping shepherd them to different Remembrance Day ceremonies on November 11 (Daughter #1 with Sea Cadets in New Westminster, daughter #2 with Air Cadets in Burnaby.). One thing you notice immediately is that those cadet corps are HEAVILY multicultural: kids of East Asian, South Asian, and African descent, with kids of European heritage a distinct minority in the Air Cadets. Those kids were at the ceremonies; so were their parents. They embrace the importance of the commemoration, and they were out there in the cold and rain when most other Canadians were probably enjoying a lazy morning on a November statutory holiday.
So what culture experiences Remembrance Day differently? Left wing culture. They’ve lost the plot on this by projecting various intersectional and anti-Western pathologies that are truly ignorant of what the day means.
A few years ago in Toronto I was at an event with a heavy uniformed CAF presence. Ended up hanging out with some guys from the unit my great-grandfather served in in France from 1915-18. Not a one of them looked like me (or him). But they were proud Canadian warriors. He’d have recognized that in them, I bet, if nothing else. Just a terrific group of kids.
And they are kids. I’m old enough now to see that. The things we ask them to do. Sigh.
Small disagreement with Jen here... The white poppies are NOT appropriate and those wearing them are disrespectful and rude.
This isn't because I can't respect pacifism. I can and I do. I'm the descendent of conscientious objectors... pacifists who refused to fight because of their moral objection to killing.
At the same time, wearing a white poppy on Remembrance Day is like a woman showing up as a guest at a wedding while wearing a white dress with a long train and purple lighting bolts down the side because she wants to "as long as we both shall love" commitment by unmarried people as well as attend the wedding. In academic circles, this is what's known as "a dick move".
Remembrance Day isn't about someone's protest, whether that protest is for pacifism or Hamas. It's just not. Remembrance Day is about remembering those members of the military who died in the line of duty and paying our respects to that sacrifice.
Exactly. The poppies we all wear for Remembrance week are made especially for and sold by The Royal Canadian Legion. Monies gathered from the sale of these red poppies go into a specially designated Poppy Fund and are only used to support veterans in need. They signify the horrors of war and try to help repair the ones that had to "go and do" the fighting. Go and do being the operative words. Very, very few come home from war without being somewhat broken. Let us please take a day, a few days or a week to remember these somewhat broken brothers and sisters and what they had to do for US. If you want to start a day to honour pacifism, then go right ahead and proclaim your day and then proclaim that we can show our support by buying and wearing a white poppy. Just don't do it on or around November 11th. At the going down of the sun And in the morning, We will remember them, we will remember them.
It was interesting to hear you two discuss the curriculum regarding holocaust education and the world wars in the general. I'm not sure when the curriculum took such a large shift from discussing the horrors, but in 2006 I was in grade 10. In our history class, we learned about the holocaust, but also about the Japanese atrocities in Nanking. We were shown a picture book called "The Rape of Nanking". It was a book with photographs showing some of the atrocities the Japanese committed against the civilian population and prisoners of war. I needn't go into detail, but needless to say it was quite graphic. Shocking as it was, I can't say that I didn't get any value out of it. I think that it can be hard to truly grasp (insofar as one can) the horrors of war without those visceral depictions.
After my father died, a long time ago now (I’m retired, just to give perspective), I came across a couple of scraps of paper in his study while I was going though his effects. They were some handwritten notes about Remembrance Day from when he was asked to speak at the school’s assembly where he was a teacher. They were very poignant, especially the part where he talked about his friend who was killed beside him. He explained that for him that was what remembering meant. I really believe that we must emphasize that “remembering” is not just some generic activity, like remembering to buy milk, but has a particular context. Unfortunately, that context is unpleasant. But really, we are less likely to be able to avoid conflict in the future if we don’t understand that context.
The discussion on Noah Smith's column made me think of a column by Josh Barro (another US substracker) after the election entitled "Trump Didn't Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose" that also does a great job explaining the Democrats problems with effective governing and symbolism over substance. Outside of a few differences on the specific issues(screwing up on illegal immigration versus legal immigration, etc.) pretty much the exact same article could be written about the Trudeau Liberals.
At this point I don't care about left-wing or right-wing politics, I just want basic competence. I'm not optimistic.
Great podcast. I agree with the analysis of the Trump admin picks mostly. Gaetz is a highly disappointing choice who hopefully gets spiked in senate confirmation. I don’t agree with your assessment however of Tulsi Gabbard. Having listened to hours of her speak, she is highly reasonable, well informed and views the world in a very similar way to a large amount of combat veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her perspectives on war and geopolitics also align with a majority of Americans. The accusations of her being a “Russian asset” are completely fabricated and unfounded and began with Hilary Clinton in 2019. Now listening to Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who was exposed colluding with the Clinton campaign against Bernie Sanders in 2016 as head of the DNC), parrot these same unfounded claims now again is absolutely dumbfounding. What credibility either of these people have at this point is well beyond me. Tulsi Gabbard served her country honorably in war, and then as a member of congress. That is far more than most members of the failed Washington elite governing class can say.
Note the distinction between accusing someone of being a Russian "asset" as Gabbard is accused of being, and being a Russian "agent", something of which almost no one is accused of being. To be a Russian agent, you would need to be a conscious traitor to your country, which Gabbard is not. But to be a Russian "asset", all that needs to be true is that the Russian elite and Vladimir Putin in particular perceive you to be friendly to their general cause.
Gabbard has expressed some views that are definitely favourable to the Russian war narrative in the invasion of Ukraine. Has she expressed any policy views that would be contrary to the advancement of the Putin imperial cult's agenda? If not, then that is concerning.
Thanks for the reply Stefan. While I appreciate your distinction, I don’t believe it’s one anywhere close to a majority of voters would make. Case in point, the statements made here by Matt and Jen in this podcast which are pejorative. In popular culture there is very little perceived distinction between someone being called an asset or an agent, an asset being perceived as the more modern term used. You may be semantically correct here, but Hollywood has rendered that definition wrong in the minds of the vast majority. Hilary Clinton knew exactly what she was doing when she made the statements and insinuations she did, and as mentioned, this podcast’s assessment is evidence of that.
She also thinks Bashar Al-Assad is a swell guy, despite him being one of the worst war criminals of the past half century. To hear her tell it, all of his war crimes are actually the US's fault. She has a laundry list of similarly awful opinions on just about every major issue. Whether she genuinely believes any of it is hard to say.
I will say the Americans not visiting Canada first is not really new. Neither Carter nor Reagan went to Canada first, and Carter had never visited Canada during his term. The truth is that we were never really relevant to the Americans at all.
Also, remote work is killing cities right now. There's way less point to live in them. I would expect rust belt cities everywhere.
I'm spent my career in the "getting it done" business, and my business is involved in the upper echelons of a niche in big "getting it done" projects. The short answer in why we can't get things done in Canada is that experience and past successful results just aren't valued culturally. The juice is just not worth the squeeze culturally for Canadians.
We have whole generations of talent coming out of university who never got hired in areas such as big corporate project management or even manufacturing, and that talent was never cultivated. This has been going on for 25+ years. Those folks are doing something else now. I know plenty of folks with civil engineering degrees from Canadian schools who are teaching high school or even lawyers now. When they were 22 they couldn't find a job in their field and now 15 years later it's too late. That's the group who would have been training the next generation in competent project management I'm not even going to bring up the huge brain drain in tech talent, even interprovincially. The Ontario engineering grad moving to Alberta or California for a job, a lot more money and never coming back is a cliche at this point. It's pathetic.
So why is Canada not culturally attuned to successfully large project completion? There is an insightful article in The Atlantic with the hypothesis that society creating a technocratic elite out of ivory tower academic stars basically made what they are good at, the theoretical and the communication of ideas more rewarded by society than "getting it done." Humans are driven by motivators. The elite used to be hereditary to a certain extent and that meant noblesse oblige and looking over the shoulder to make sure the elite delivered what the people needed was a prime concern. Now that just isn't necessary. Senior public servants do not have the explicit motivators to risk their reputations or career for successful completion. You don't jeopardize your pension for not going out of your way.
Again, it comes down to ultimately Canadians being ingrained in the "don't rock the boat" and "it will be alright" ethic. Being too ambitious or even disrupting people's weekends is not considered polite here.
We are in essence "too laid back and nice" along with too deferential to have nice things. Works great to keep multilingual and multicultural country together, but sucks if you want to build great things on time and on budget.
Minor addition to your insightful and correct comment: .......... eventually, the "too laid back and nice" will not be sufficient to keep multilingual and multicultural country together.
Tell me about it,. I'm in Canada because my last country was a multilingual and multicultural country that fell apart. I worry that Canada could fall apart as well in similar (but less dramatic) fashion.
Remembrance Day crap wasn’t because the teachers spend their time with kids. First off , this guy was a principal so that doesn’t hold. It’s the school boards hard left DIE shit and how they have lost sight of curriculum responsibility and governments who have prioritized votes over their responsibilities to ALL their constituents.
My son is the fourth generation of my family to serve in the Canadian Armed Forces (note that when the Liberals talk about them Armed is left out). I cannot get over being angry that I have seen no sign the principal in Ontario has not been fired nor has the one in Nova Scotia. These idiots do not belong in the same Canada that I grew up in and now enjoy my retirement in
This may be too obvious, but on the question of why stuff isn't getting built, it would be great to hear from Dan Gardner, formerly of the Ottawa Citizen. For anyone who doesn't know, Dan co-wrote a book, "How Big Things Get Done", with a guy named Bent Flyvbjerg who is pretty much the world's biggest expert on megaprojects.
The book isn't particularly about Canada, and it's focused on big projects (like the Eglinton LRT but not like building housing). But I bet Dan would have an interesting and useful point of view.
Yes, they are showing Schindler’s List in rural Manitoba. My daughter will be watching it in Grade Twelve History next semester. Last year they watched All Quiet on The Western Front. They did a grade eight project on the Holocaust and WW2.
Jen's rant on "once you come to Canada, these armies become your national ancestors" remind me that progressives apply this framing to another matter: how Canada handled indigenous people. Even children that wasn't born in Canada and whose ancestors never interacted with a Canadian first Nations have to somehow carry the sins of what Canadians from generations ago (or using Hobb's linggo "some white men who did something related to governing"). But when it's about something Canadians should be proud about, then it's "something white men did related to military".
I think both are correct. To become Canadian through either birth or migration is to take on all of the glory and shame of Canadians past, the same way as if you buy shares in a company, you're taking on a share of all of its debts and credits.
I have the privilege of typing this right now from a beautiful river valley that was taken from its previous inhabitants through coercive treaty. I'm not giving the river valley back! But nor do I get to distance myself from the terms and context of the signing of that treaty. It's all part of my heritage.
What Hobbs did/said is not an abertation. There are many teachers and union officials proudly agreeing with him on twitter, under their real names. They also proudly and righteously defended kids being taken to the Hamas rally, and all the other crazy shit that happens regularly.
Places like OISE are far-left madrassas training teachers to dismantle the white male cis-hetero-capitalist patriarchy, and Hobbs is what that looks like in practice. You once said it yourself, Matt: most teachers are great, but "5-10% have the fanatic's gleam in their eye", and that's all you need to cause a severe problem.
The reason I'm a broken record ranting about the "culture war" is because *everything* is downstream from culture, and the dominant ideology of our schools is now one that seeks to defame our history, subvert our traditions, and turn our kids into lil' revolutionaries, whether its lgbtqrst, "anti-racism", or "de-colonization". I personally have witnessed and continue to witness *insane* things happening at my own kids school that I'm reluctant to talk about publicly... I'm trying to get my affairs in order to move out of the city in what will likely be a futile effort to escape this bs, because while some schools are worse, it's everywhere.
What's your definition of 'many'? There are approx 160K teachers in Ontario & over 400K teachers in Canada. I wonder what proportion of them are agreeing with Hobbs?
IMO this is yet another situation where applying critical thinking skills on 'both sides' is important. Even if a few thousand agree with him that represents less than 2% of teachers in Ontario & considerably fewer in Canada.
I'm in no way defending Hobbs - I'm appalled at his opinion, but it's also important not to assume that his thinking represents the majority.
No, it isn't a majority - as I said, it's around 5-10% of teachers, but they browbeat the others into towing the line, and whats worse, the unions and schoolboards are run by the most fanatical of all. This isn't some evil conspiracy, these people really do believe that they're doing good, they're just really mistaken. They're proud of what they're doing, they proclaim it openly, but they use language in a way that makes their ideas seem like basic human decency - fairness, equity, inclusion, anti-racism... but what they understand those to mean is radically different from how the words are commonly understood.
One big one is "critical" : whenever you see someone in education saying "critical", they do *not* mean critical thinking, they mean Critical Theory, i.e. wokeness. They'll say "teaching students to think critically", and that means inculcating them into wokeness. Here is an excellent explainer of the difference between critical thinking and Critical Theory:
https://notesfromthenorthcountry.com/2021/11/critical-thinking-versus-critical-theory/
"
Critical thinking means restraint from blindly trusting someone’s or your own opinions and ruthlessly checking them against facts. It also means restraint from oversimplifying your interpretation of the situation, from premature jumping to obvious conclusions.
Critical Theory is completely different. It refers to an approach to language that aims at political change and denies any objective reality that would dilute its message. In this way it’s much more like propaganda. Engaging with both sides of an argument (as in critical thinking) is antithetical to Critical Theory."
> They'll say "teaching students to think critically", and that means inculcating them into wokeness.
Yeah, that's just not true.
"Teaching students to think critically" means to apply critical thinking. I know a LOT of teachers, (same reason as Matt) and 100% of them mean it that way because that's what those words mean in that context.
They're also aware of SOGI and wokeness and some of them are very much on board with those things.... and they're still in that 100% of the teachers I know who are aware that "think critically" means "critical thinking" not "be woke". When they encourage students to buy into the woke dogma, they use other words like "equity".
Again, I'm not talking about the majority of teachers, who are not zealots. I'm talking about the ones like Hobbs, and the ones who took kids to the Hamas rally where they chanted "from Turtle Island to Palestine" and boldly stood by their actions, along with board and union officials who supported them, many at the rally themselves. I'm talking about the woman from the board who gave a seminar I attended explaining that from kindergarten on, the goal was to "dismantle cis-heteronormativity" which includes teaching that the male/female binary was a fraudulent creation of colonialism designed to oppress everyone. These are the folx who think they should be able to shepherd your kid through a social transition behind your back.
The people setting the curriculum and the ethos of the TDSB are devotees of the Paolo Friere school of eductation, where the role of school is not what you and I think, but to "conscientize" students into Critical Consciousness in an effort to transform society into a social(ist) justice utopia.
These are the people coming up with idiotic programs like "Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy" - ask your friends about that.This stuff sounds stupid, and it is, but it really does matter that the zealots are running the schoolboards!!! Imagine if christian fundamentalists were doing this, and secretly teaching kids about young-earth creationism while math and literacy rates were plummeting... would you dismiss this as "not all teachers"?
https://www.tdsb.on.ca/About-Us/Equity-Anti-Racism-and-Anti-Oppression/Building-Critical-Consciousness
It is possible that I'm just an anomaly... But 100% of the teachers I'm talking about don't mean "critical theory" when they say "think critically".
I don't know if you'd call them "gleam in their eye activists", but I'm talking bout teachers who when talking about the trans issue endorse withholding information from parents about what's going on with their kid and being deliberately deceptive, which people generally call "lying".
Now maybe you'd say that 100% of the teachers endorsing woke ideology are not part of that activist strain of teachers because you're making a distinction between two kinds. But if that's the case, I don't agree. What I'm describing IS activism. Telling kids to start their days sharing their pronouns, insisting that the quasi-spiritual belief in a "gendered person" that overrides sex, insisting on a definition of racism that is itself racist... I think those are all examples of activism and not teaching even if they happen to know what "critical thinking" means even as they fail to apply it.
You are correct. And Matt is correct; it is the 10 % with the fanatic gleam in their eyes - my words added here - that are controlling the educational system. Canada's degeneration started about 4 decades ago when the schooling system has ever so subtly started to be subverted into ideological conformity by leftists infiltrating the teachers' unions. This was helped by the first Trudeau's (harsh curse be upon both of them) introduction of multiculturalism; an academic idea that has now in several Western countries proved that it does not work in practice. Fact of life is that there are cultures in existence which are actively hostile to any other cultures and seek to become dominant. What I see today in Canada is that this country is being ripped apart by both home-grown and imported predators.
I really hope that the line editors check out a youtube episode on Canadian Military procurement by Perun, an Australian defence economics expert (linked below). As a person who has been wondering for years about "Why don't we build things good?" I left the episode more angry at our bureaucracies than I've been in years. I'm so fed up with Canadian mediocrity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27wWRszlZWU
I’ve seen it. It was a hard watch.
I'd love to see your team dig into the Canadian productivity gap and "why we no build things good?". It's an existential question that's hard to parse from the ground level, but critical to the functioning and dis-functioning of our nation. Why can Sweden and Norway build things but not us?
On the Paul Wells podcast from November 6 (https://paulwells.substack.com/p/hoodwinked-by-big-paderno), there were some interesting comments by Vass Bednar and Denise Hearn about the relationship between Canadian monopolies and Canadian productivity. Briefly, the argument was that monopolies make it hard for innovators to break into the market, and those innovators could be innovating in the direction of more productive use of labour. Meanwhile, the lack of competition reduces the incentive for existing players to become more efficient.
Jen and Matt keep mentioning the supply management system. I'm a small farmer who's almost gone broke a few times trying to make money in competition with the big corps. There is some serious regulatory capture there, especially with the milk and egg mafias. Meat packing centralization has been really problematic for small scale producers as well. It all seems to stem from Health Canada not wanting to regulate smaller scale, more distributed solutions. That's a feature, not a bug.
I can’t speak to other projects but the Ottawa LRT project is a good example. When preliminary bids came in the Quebec criminally convicted and politically influential engineering firm SNC Lavalin was eliminated for failing to need technical requirements. But they mysteriously - secret Ottawa Council vote - reappeared as a contender on the next phase and eventually won the competition with all the delays and screwups that followed. Of course the feds were subsidizing the project to the tune of $250 million and of course that money had to go to the “right” people. I don’t believe Sweden and Norway have a bunch of Quebeckers to cater to
Scandinavians do not have the Oddaua degenerative disease. See related comment above (or below). This is absolutely a critical question, also re. the approaching potential dis-nationing of our nation. At some point the provinces will push Oddaua aside to ensure their own economic survival and build things regardless of Oddaua's yelpin'.
I spent enough time in Oddaua to take a good note of the snootiness of the civil service and political mandarin class.
A bunch of politically connected Quebeckers that need to be catered to in any project involving federal funding.
@Matt Gurney: I wondered if you'd stumbled across Perun. He and his power points are truly gems. I gotta admit to waiting with equal parts dread and relish for the "Canadian Procurement" episode.
Seen it, am a regular on Perun's podcasts. My answer to you: Ottawa needs to depopulated and turned into an army training area: one week for artillery target practice, one week for infantry urban warfare, one week for combined arms assaults.
That city is one main reason for Canada's degenerative constipation.
It's not the city it's the government. It'd be the same no matter where the capital is.
I aim at the city as the symbol of government. You are correct, so I would be aiming at any other city which housed such a dysfunctional mongrel of a government.
The Friday before Remembrance Day, the HR department at work (specifically the DEI coordinator) sent out a somewhat tone-deaf email noting the day, with the 2nd paragraph talking about how other cultures experience the commemoration differently.
Both of my daughters are in cadets, so I was helping shepherd them to different Remembrance Day ceremonies on November 11 (Daughter #1 with Sea Cadets in New Westminster, daughter #2 with Air Cadets in Burnaby.). One thing you notice immediately is that those cadet corps are HEAVILY multicultural: kids of East Asian, South Asian, and African descent, with kids of European heritage a distinct minority in the Air Cadets. Those kids were at the ceremonies; so were their parents. They embrace the importance of the commemoration, and they were out there in the cold and rain when most other Canadians were probably enjoying a lazy morning on a November statutory holiday.
So what culture experiences Remembrance Day differently? Left wing culture. They’ve lost the plot on this by projecting various intersectional and anti-Western pathologies that are truly ignorant of what the day means.
A few years ago in Toronto I was at an event with a heavy uniformed CAF presence. Ended up hanging out with some guys from the unit my great-grandfather served in in France from 1915-18. Not a one of them looked like me (or him). But they were proud Canadian warriors. He’d have recognized that in them, I bet, if nothing else. Just a terrific group of kids.
And they are kids. I’m old enough now to see that. The things we ask them to do. Sigh.
A five-star comment.
This might well have been your best podcast yet.
On minor correction, Matt: At Remembrance Day ceremonies we play ‘The Last Post’ not ‘Taps’ (which is the American equivalent).
Small disagreement with Jen here... The white poppies are NOT appropriate and those wearing them are disrespectful and rude.
This isn't because I can't respect pacifism. I can and I do. I'm the descendent of conscientious objectors... pacifists who refused to fight because of their moral objection to killing.
At the same time, wearing a white poppy on Remembrance Day is like a woman showing up as a guest at a wedding while wearing a white dress with a long train and purple lighting bolts down the side because she wants to "as long as we both shall love" commitment by unmarried people as well as attend the wedding. In academic circles, this is what's known as "a dick move".
Remembrance Day isn't about someone's protest, whether that protest is for pacifism or Hamas. It's just not. Remembrance Day is about remembering those members of the military who died in the line of duty and paying our respects to that sacrifice.
I tend to agree that the white poppies are pretty cringe for this reason. But I'd infinitely prefer a white poppy to a Hamas protest song. JG
Exactly. The poppies we all wear for Remembrance week are made especially for and sold by The Royal Canadian Legion. Monies gathered from the sale of these red poppies go into a specially designated Poppy Fund and are only used to support veterans in need. They signify the horrors of war and try to help repair the ones that had to "go and do" the fighting. Go and do being the operative words. Very, very few come home from war without being somewhat broken. Let us please take a day, a few days or a week to remember these somewhat broken brothers and sisters and what they had to do for US. If you want to start a day to honour pacifism, then go right ahead and proclaim your day and then proclaim that we can show our support by buying and wearing a white poppy. Just don't do it on or around November 11th. At the going down of the sun And in the morning, We will remember them, we will remember them.
It was interesting to hear you two discuss the curriculum regarding holocaust education and the world wars in the general. I'm not sure when the curriculum took such a large shift from discussing the horrors, but in 2006 I was in grade 10. In our history class, we learned about the holocaust, but also about the Japanese atrocities in Nanking. We were shown a picture book called "The Rape of Nanking". It was a book with photographs showing some of the atrocities the Japanese committed against the civilian population and prisoners of war. I needn't go into detail, but needless to say it was quite graphic. Shocking as it was, I can't say that I didn't get any value out of it. I think that it can be hard to truly grasp (insofar as one can) the horrors of war without those visceral depictions.
When I was a kid in Quebec our teacher said Premier Duplessis said the holocaust was an English lie. And we weee told the Jews had killed Jesus.
Romans killed Jesus, for them a political inconvenience.
After my father died, a long time ago now (I’m retired, just to give perspective), I came across a couple of scraps of paper in his study while I was going though his effects. They were some handwritten notes about Remembrance Day from when he was asked to speak at the school’s assembly where he was a teacher. They were very poignant, especially the part where he talked about his friend who was killed beside him. He explained that for him that was what remembering meant. I really believe that we must emphasize that “remembering” is not just some generic activity, like remembering to buy milk, but has a particular context. Unfortunately, that context is unpleasant. But really, we are less likely to be able to avoid conflict in the future if we don’t understand that context.
The discussion on Noah Smith's column made me think of a column by Josh Barro (another US substracker) after the election entitled "Trump Didn't Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose" that also does a great job explaining the Democrats problems with effective governing and symbolism over substance. Outside of a few differences on the specific issues(screwing up on illegal immigration versus legal immigration, etc.) pretty much the exact same article could be written about the Trudeau Liberals.
At this point I don't care about left-wing or right-wing politics, I just want basic competence. I'm not optimistic.
Great podcast. I agree with the analysis of the Trump admin picks mostly. Gaetz is a highly disappointing choice who hopefully gets spiked in senate confirmation. I don’t agree with your assessment however of Tulsi Gabbard. Having listened to hours of her speak, she is highly reasonable, well informed and views the world in a very similar way to a large amount of combat veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her perspectives on war and geopolitics also align with a majority of Americans. The accusations of her being a “Russian asset” are completely fabricated and unfounded and began with Hilary Clinton in 2019. Now listening to Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who was exposed colluding with the Clinton campaign against Bernie Sanders in 2016 as head of the DNC), parrot these same unfounded claims now again is absolutely dumbfounding. What credibility either of these people have at this point is well beyond me. Tulsi Gabbard served her country honorably in war, and then as a member of congress. That is far more than most members of the failed Washington elite governing class can say.
Note the distinction between accusing someone of being a Russian "asset" as Gabbard is accused of being, and being a Russian "agent", something of which almost no one is accused of being. To be a Russian agent, you would need to be a conscious traitor to your country, which Gabbard is not. But to be a Russian "asset", all that needs to be true is that the Russian elite and Vladimir Putin in particular perceive you to be friendly to their general cause.
Gabbard has expressed some views that are definitely favourable to the Russian war narrative in the invasion of Ukraine. Has she expressed any policy views that would be contrary to the advancement of the Putin imperial cult's agenda? If not, then that is concerning.
Thanks for the reply Stefan. While I appreciate your distinction, I don’t believe it’s one anywhere close to a majority of voters would make. Case in point, the statements made here by Matt and Jen in this podcast which are pejorative. In popular culture there is very little perceived distinction between someone being called an asset or an agent, an asset being perceived as the more modern term used. You may be semantically correct here, but Hollywood has rendered that definition wrong in the minds of the vast majority. Hilary Clinton knew exactly what she was doing when she made the statements and insinuations she did, and as mentioned, this podcast’s assessment is evidence of that.
She also thinks Bashar Al-Assad is a swell guy, despite him being one of the worst war criminals of the past half century. To hear her tell it, all of his war crimes are actually the US's fault. She has a laundry list of similarly awful opinions on just about every major issue. Whether she genuinely believes any of it is hard to say.
I will say the Americans not visiting Canada first is not really new. Neither Carter nor Reagan went to Canada first, and Carter had never visited Canada during his term. The truth is that we were never really relevant to the Americans at all.
Also, remote work is killing cities right now. There's way less point to live in them. I would expect rust belt cities everywhere.
I'm spent my career in the "getting it done" business, and my business is involved in the upper echelons of a niche in big "getting it done" projects. The short answer in why we can't get things done in Canada is that experience and past successful results just aren't valued culturally. The juice is just not worth the squeeze culturally for Canadians.
We have whole generations of talent coming out of university who never got hired in areas such as big corporate project management or even manufacturing, and that talent was never cultivated. This has been going on for 25+ years. Those folks are doing something else now. I know plenty of folks with civil engineering degrees from Canadian schools who are teaching high school or even lawyers now. When they were 22 they couldn't find a job in their field and now 15 years later it's too late. That's the group who would have been training the next generation in competent project management I'm not even going to bring up the huge brain drain in tech talent, even interprovincially. The Ontario engineering grad moving to Alberta or California for a job, a lot more money and never coming back is a cliche at this point. It's pathetic.
So why is Canada not culturally attuned to successfully large project completion? There is an insightful article in The Atlantic with the hypothesis that society creating a technocratic elite out of ivory tower academic stars basically made what they are good at, the theoretical and the communication of ideas more rewarded by society than "getting it done." Humans are driven by motivators. The elite used to be hereditary to a certain extent and that meant noblesse oblige and looking over the shoulder to make sure the elite delivered what the people needed was a prime concern. Now that just isn't necessary. Senior public servants do not have the explicit motivators to risk their reputations or career for successful completion. You don't jeopardize your pension for not going out of your way.
Again, it comes down to ultimately Canadians being ingrained in the "don't rock the boat" and "it will be alright" ethic. Being too ambitious or even disrupting people's weekends is not considered polite here.
We are in essence "too laid back and nice" along with too deferential to have nice things. Works great to keep multilingual and multicultural country together, but sucks if you want to build great things on time and on budget.
Minor addition to your insightful and correct comment: .......... eventually, the "too laid back and nice" will not be sufficient to keep multilingual and multicultural country together.
Tell me about it,. I'm in Canada because my last country was a multilingual and multicultural country that fell apart. I worry that Canada could fall apart as well in similar (but less dramatic) fashion.
Remembrance Day crap wasn’t because the teachers spend their time with kids. First off , this guy was a principal so that doesn’t hold. It’s the school boards hard left DIE shit and how they have lost sight of curriculum responsibility and governments who have prioritized votes over their responsibilities to ALL their constituents.
My son is the fourth generation of my family to serve in the Canadian Armed Forces (note that when the Liberals talk about them Armed is left out). I cannot get over being angry that I have seen no sign the principal in Ontario has not been fired nor has the one in Nova Scotia. These idiots do not belong in the same Canada that I grew up in and now enjoy my retirement in
I absolutely agree with you and thank you for your service and yours and your families sacrifice.