Category: Canada Page 3 of 6

Happy Canada Day

On July 1, 2019

Canada remains a good country to live in. There are a few countries– mostly northern European-that have better statistics, but not too many.

Outsiders tend to overestimate how good, however, and Americans, in particular, tend to idealize Canada a bit too much.

The key thing to understand about Canadian politics is that they are right-wing trending, the same as the US. This shouldn’t be a surprise; the country is swamped with American money, ideas, and political operatives.

The difference is mostly that Canada started this rightward swing in a far better position than the US: We were more left-wing, with more support for a safety net, universal healthcare, etc.

So we have farther to go to be as bad as the US.

But we’re hustling.

And, like most countries, there are people for whom Canada is not good. Mostly this would be the indigenous peoples.

Still, overall, there are few countries I’d rather live in. Among other things, Canada still has tons of wilderness, and though I don’t get to spend much time in it any more (something I hope to remedy), I did when younger, and I value it a lot.

So, Happy Canada Day, and may we stop running down this neoliberal path before it destroys us.

What the Huawei Row Portends for the Future of America, China, and Canada

By Ian Welsh

On January 14, 2019

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Huawei is a giant Chinese telecom company. It produces fifth-generation telecom equipment (5G), cell phones, and much more. Its 5G equipment is probably the most advanced in the world.

The US has accused it of espionage: Stealing commercial secrets. In the US, it is illegal for Huawei telecom equipment to be used for infrastructure, and the US is trying to convince other countries, especially European ones, to not use their equipment either. The rationale is that such equipment makes Chinese spying easier.

A while back, the US government asked the Canadian government to extradite a Chinese Huawei executive to the US. Her name is Meng Wanzhou, and she is the daughter of Huawei’s CEO.

Importantly, she was charged with fraud related to violating US-Iran sanctions, not espionage against American companies.

In response, China has mostly swung at Canada, arresting a number of Canadians and retrying a Canadian drug smuggler, increasing his penalty to death.

One of the US’s goals has been to separate the US and China: For example, the NAFTA rewrite, the USMCA, forbids any member from forming a trade deal with a “non-market economy” if either other member disagrees. (The US defines China as a “non-market economy.”)

It may or may not have been deliberate, but this request has made Canadian/Chinese relations much worse.

Note that the person being charged is pretty close to Chinese royalty. This is like if Steve Job’s daughter was a senior Apple executive and arrested. Imagine the furor.

But I want to highlight something else: This is about breaking Iran sanctions. (Which China did, though I have no insight into Meng’s involvement.)

The Iran sanctions were certainly legal under US law. They were not, however, in any way, shape or form, just. As with all economic sanctions they disproportionately hurt people not in the ruling class. They hit various medicines and caused a lot of suffering and death. The evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapon program was always dicey, and in any case, that America has the right to deny nuclear weapons to other countries is unclear.

So Meng is being prosecuted for a political crime. She is being prosecuted because her country decided not to obey US laws with respect to another country. US laws which are unjust on their face.

To me, at least, this is illegitimate. China’s counter-strikes are also illegitimate: Canadians should not be used as cats-paws in this, and China’s actual issue is with the United States, not Canada. That said, from a realpolitik point-of-view, I entirely understand China making the point that acting on behalf of the US in its near-cold war with China will have negative consequences.

This row has continued to accelerate. There is a fair bit of danger, in the medium-run, that the world is going to split into two economic blocs, and enter something close to a cold war again.

The US wants China to do what the US wants, which is for them to remain a regional power, not a great power, to not take control of its near abroad (as the US did in the 19th and early 20th century, in much more violent fashion than China has so far), and China, a rising Great Power (and potential superpower) will not be stifled in this way. No rising great power, certainly not the US, ever was or will be.

This road, though we are early on it, leads to war. There are things China does that are illegitimate, but its power will have to be accommodated, just as the US’s was. (Take a look at the map of the Canadian province of British Columbia, notice the Alaska panhandle: It is complete bullshit, and it was obtained because Theodore Roosevelt was willing to go to war to get it, and the British, preoccupied elsewhere, weren’t willing to fight him for it.)

As for Meng, she is clearly a political prisoner and pawn, as are all the Canadians that China has arrested in retaliation.

While it’s unlikely to happen, because Americans think they have the right to apply their law to anyone, anywhere and to kill anyone they want in most countries in the world, without even a trial, sensible politics would be to de-escalate this.

Locking up Meng, which is most likely (US prosecutors generally get their victims) will be a running sore. America is banking on Chinese fear outweighing Chinese anger. Maybe it will, for a time, but the Chinese strategic tradition also includes a hell of a lot of smiling at enemies until you can stomp them flat.

The US ought to think very carefully on that, and whether or not it really wants to go down this road, especially over such an unjust charge.

As for Canada, it is an American subject state, and, as the USMCA proved, when America gets serious, Canada does what it is told. I have explained this to Canadians for a couple decades now, including the need for an actual deterrent (it needn’t be nuclear), but Canadians think the US is Canada’s friend, not overlord.

This mistake, too, will continue to be punished.

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Should Canada Concede to Trump in NAFTA Renegotiations?

By Ian Welsh

On August 28, 2018

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So, Trump has been renegotiating NAFTA. Not necessarily a bad thing. He’s cut a deal with Mexico, says he’ll sign it without Canada.

Canada has three main sticking points.

It wants to keep the Chapter 19 dispute resolution system so that the US can’t unilaterally impose dumping and anti-subsidy penalties. This is a big deal, because the US is prone to do this stuff due to domestic pressure from industries, and with no check, it will do them more often. Not that Chapter 19 is that great; when the US loses Chapter 19 rulings it tends to just ignore them and impose duties anyway, as it did in the 2000s on lumber. Still, even a delay is good, and that delay has likely stopped a lot of tariffs over the years.

The second issue is IP.

Other hurdles include intellectual property rights, such as the U.S.-Mexico ten-year data exclusivity for biologic drug makers and extensions of copyright protections to 75 years from 50, all higher thresholds than Canada has previously supported.

Yeah, that’s just fucking awful. No thank you. 50 years is already way too much and who wants even higher drug prices in Canada. (US pharma, yeah.)

Finally there is the Canadian milk production system, which is horribly protective and freezes American milk out of Canada. But, well, our standards are higher for milk production, and as such, no, I don’t want change.

If Trump doesn’t get this, he promised auto tariffs, which will hit Southern Ontario hard.

I’m going to say that Canada shouldn’t give in on these issues. It’s not clear that Trump has the votes in the Senate to pass his bilateral Mexico-US deal, and even if NAFTA is lost, well, whatever. Being subject to American tariffs at the whim of any sitting President is not acceptable, nor are higher drug prices and shitty milk.

Canada gave up our world-leading aviation industry in the 50s, in essence, for the right to be part of the US automobile industry. It was a shitty deal then, because it made us dependent, and we are seeing that dependency now.

We’ll see how this plays out. I don’t know if Freeland and Trudeau have the guts to walk away and there certainly would be a cost. But Trump is not certain to be forever, and anything we give up now we are unlikely to get back in the near future.

There was a possible NAFTA renegotiation which would have been a win for all three countries, dealing with issues such as the right of private investors to sue governments for doing perfectly reasonable things like banning anti-cancer additives in oil, but that’s not the renegotiation Trump has chosen to do.

As such, I hope Trudeau holds the line.

Also, there are ways for Canada to retaliate. They are counter-intuitive, but real. I would start by slapping a huge export-tax on all wood products, and watch the US housing industry fall to its knees and the US economy tremble. That would involve some pain at home, but frankly, we can tax a little higher and subsidize those who lose, it’s not a big deal.

Trump’s the sort of person who only respects hardball. Play it, or crawl on your belly.

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Canada’s Trump Now Premier of Canada’s Largest Province

By Ian Welsh

On June 8, 2018

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So, Doug Ford, brother of the Toronto’s crack-Mayor Rob Ford, is now Premier of Ontario.

It wasn’t particularly close: 41% to 34%, although polls had shown it neck and neck. At a guess, youngsters didn’t show up at the polls, which always a risk. Without a Corbynite rock star politician who they actually believe in, they tend to vote less than they intend. Horwath, the NDP leader, is no Corbyn, but a relatively left-centrist pol with little charisma.

Doug Ford is accused of having stole from his brother’s wife, of driving his business into the ground, and was a drug dealer when younger. He didn’t bother to put out a costed platform, about a third of his candidates are under criminal investigation, and etc, etc…

He’s a stupid buffoon, and his policies, such as they were, don’t even make as much sense as Trump’s did (because he has no Bannon). However, what we can know for sure is that they will involve a lot of privatization and budget cuts, fire sales to cronies and so on.

Given the percentages, caveats about proportional voting and first past the post aside, it’s hard to say this isn’t what the most committed plurality of Ontarians want. I notice that Liberals don’t appear to have strategically voted all that much, as they always want NDPers to do (and as about a third of NDPers generally do do in close elections.)

Oh well, gonna be a sucky 4 years in Ontario, but that’s what a plurality of us voted for. And, yeah, Canadians, willing to vote for really shitty people, just like Americans. (Trudeau, by the way, has run a terrible policy regime in many ways. He just knows how to look good doing it.)

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One Deep Reason Why the US Does Not Have a Sane Way to Pay for Health Care for All

By Mandos

On June 30, 2017

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(PLEASE CHECK THE BYLINE ABOVE. YES, IT’S MANDOS AGAIN.)

Single-payer is proposed by many as the most ideal way to reform the payment/insurance process for health care in the US, for reasons with which I mostly agree, based on personal experience. The Canadian experience is drawn up, again mostly appropriately, as part of the evidence-base for this view. But if one is going to use Canada as an example, it is important to understand, in some detail, how single-payer was accomplished and what lessons this has for the US.

Canada has single-payer health care, but it did not come out of nowhere. It came from a left-wing government in the province of Saskatchewan, and it came after quite a dramatic fight, including a strike by medical doctors, who were its fiercest opponents.

The history of opposition to Saskatchewan was documented in a very detailed and high-quality MA thesis from 1963 by Ahmed Mohiddin Mohamed at the University of Saskatchewan, which, as far as I can tell, is the authoritative original history on opposition via media to the Saskatchewan single payer plan. Mr. Mohamed (I am unable to locate his present-day particulars or even if he is still alive) managed to get his hands on a treasure-trove of documents from various “players” not that long after the original events.

That opposition involved a great deal of media and propaganda, including astroturf organizations called “Keep Our Doctors” (KOD) committees. It is important to note that even if a lobby group is “astroturf” in the sense of being supported by vested interests, it is not the case that the people who run it, work for it, support it, etc., don’t have genuine beliefs in line with activities of the group. The KOD committees actually and genuinely originated with mothers, particularly rural mothers, who had the vaunted “personal relationship” with their local doctors and the ideological belief that their doctors would be justified in leaving Saskatchewan and abandoning their patients if they were forced into a monopsony. The song should be familiar to Americans — professional liberty and all that. Their local doctors convinced them that the Saskatchewan government would be responsible for denying them access to health care.

Of course, not only were they egged on by their own doctors, eventually medical organizations and ideological businessmen got into the game via their wives and organized province-wide KOD committees, radio propaganda, etc. The public focus and concern of all the protest and propaganda were very simple, as above: Professionals should have the right to choose their working conditions, and the pricing power that single-payer insurance gave government effectively made the government the dictator of doctors’ working conditions, and the ordinary Saskatchewan patient would suffer from this in various ways.

There is one important feature, however, of the anti-single-payer campaign: All the Saskatchewan government’s antagonists went out of their way to agree that people who could not afford access to medical care themselves, should still receive it. Their counterproposal was instead that there be voluntary regulated insurance, and the government would instead use its funds to pay the premiums of those who could not afford it. Doctors would charge patients directly — remember, we’re talking about a health care system that involved direct cash payments — and patients would submit the bills to the insurance agency, if they didn’t just want to pay the cost themselves. The medical associations agreed then only to charge poor patients what the insurer would pay out, so that poor patients would not have to swallow the costs.

The problems with this are obvious, of course. The Tommy Douglas government didn’t buy it, and proceeded to institute single-payer and break that doctors’ strike. The rest is Canadian history. But what is remarkable, and what I would like to emphasize, is that at no time did anyone make the public argument that the indigent should simply go without care.

In point of fact, the Canadian health care system still has ideological opponents in Canada, both among doctors and rich patients who think their wealth should allow them to skip the queues that do indeed sometimes result from the monopsony more easily than they do now (by going to the US). The difference is that it is still not possible in Canada to admit in public that you don’t think that those who can’t afford it shouldn’t have access to quality care. Almost all domestic Canadian attacks on single payer acknowledge the need for universal coverage, even if their proposed solutions won’t work as well as single payer.

That is a deep and fundamental difference with the United States of America and its health care debate. Admitting to a belief that someone should suffer medically for lack of funds does not put you beyond the pale of politics. I lived in the US during the Obamacare debate and had many acquaintances who expressed envy of the Canadian system under which I had lived my life previously; but I also had acquaintances who were willing to at least entertain the right-libertarian argument that property is an essential characteristic of being, and that to dilute my property for someone else‘s life — is a theft of my life. And they could make that argument in polite company and not be shunned.

To me, that is the most fundamental barrier preventing humane health insurance reform in the US. I find it difficult to believe that the US will achieve a single-payer health insurance system until nearly all opponents of single-payer, down to the college libertarian level, still feel obliged to make a halfway sincere-sounding argument that their preferred reform idea will pay for universal access to affordable care. From what I see in the health care debate in the US, that day is not here yet, although the discomfort that the Republicans have in trying to find a way to delete Obamacare suggests that some progess has been made; people are uncomfortable with taking away what has been given, and what has been given is at least some insurance for some of the uninsurable. But if arguing to leave some uninsured is socially acceptable, then that will usually be the path of least resistance.

Arctic Permafrost Defrosting and the Age of War and Revolution

By Ian Welsh

On March 10, 2017

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Globe on Fire For well over a decade, I have written that we are past the point of no return on climate change. My reasoning was that hothouse gasses already in the atmosphere, or which were for sure going to enter the atmosphere given our lack of action, were enough to trigger massive carbon and methane releases.

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon…

We’ve seen that methane, which accounts for only 14 percent of emissions worldwide, traps up to 100 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a five-year period. This means that even though carbon dioxide molecules outnumber methane 5 to 1, this comparatively smaller amount of methane is still 19 times greater a problem for climate change over a five year period, and four times greater over a 100 year period.

It is even more potent in the short run. Meanwhile, the arctic circle was about 30 degrees warmer this year than normal, and permafrost is un-perma-ing.

Huge slabs of Arctic permafrost in northwest Canada are slumping and disintegrating, sending large amounts of carbon-rich mud and silt into streams and rivers. A new study that analyzed nearly a half-million square miles in northwest Canada found that this permafrost decay is affecting 52,000 square miles of that vast stretch of earth—an expanse the size of Alabama…

…Similar large-scale landscape changes are evident across the Arctic including in Alaska, Siberia, and Scandinavia

There is no way we are avoiding near-worst case scenarios for climate change without aggressive geo-engineering (completly unproven, and requires political willpower). We will see temperature increases in some parts of the world which are currently highly populated. These increases will make those places uninhabitable outside of air conditioning. Changes in rainfall patterns will large current agricultural powerhouses to fail; an effect which will be compounded by the fact that we have vastly drained and polluted our groundwater in prime agricultural areas.

Later on, we will see vast rises in the ocean level. Virtually every city sitting on a seashore today will be gone in a hundred years, some of them a lot sooner.

This stuff is baked into the cake. It is essentially unavoidable. It has been effectively and politically unavoidable for quite some time now.

Do not expect the political, economic, and social arrangements you favor to survive this. The waves of refugees will be magnitudes larger than those currently shaking the Middle East and Europe. There will be water wars; people will not sit still while they are dying, they will fight. Some of those wars will involve, at the least, the use of tactical nukes.

Capitalism, Democracy, the Chinese Communist Party, etc…any system and group of people who can reasonably be blamed for this, will likely be on the block. When hundreds of millions to billions start dying, they will not go gently into that long dark night. No, they and those they leave behind will look for people, ideologies, and organizations to blame, and they will plenty of them, because everyone and everything who had any power has failed to prevent an entirely forseen and largely preventable disaster.

Our failure will not be considered acceptable to those who pay the bill, and our “capitalism” and “democracy” and “corporations” and “free trade” and everything else you can think of will be on the block, liable for destruction.

This is coming on faster than many expected. Added to ecosphere collapse, the current cyclical capitalist sclerosis, and vast arsenals, it is going to be immensely damaging.

If you aren’t old, or sick, you’re going to suffer some of this. If you’re young, you’re going to suffer a lot of this, assuming you aren’t an early casualty.

So it is. So it shall be. We were warned, we chose not to act, because corporations needed profits or something.

So be it.

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Terrible Human Political Judgment

By Ian Welsh

On September 9, 2016

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Trudeau Pandas One of those amusing scientific studies runs as follows: Someone in a supermarket knocks over a large display of canned goods. They either:

Show no remorse, but put all the cans back in place.
Act very embarrassed and do nothing.

People like and trust the people who act embarrassed and do nothing. They don’t like people who put the cans back but show no remorse.

I was reminded of this study by this news piece:

In his first event at the G20 leaders’ summit, Justin Trudeau urged his peers Saturday to drive away the anti-globalization and protectionist attitudes that have been fuelling “divisive, fearful rhetoric” in different parts of the world.

This is why Trudeau will join the TTP and TTIP if he can. Trudeau is a neoliberal. He believes that “trade” deals which are primarily about reducing wages, increasing intellectual property, and removing corporations from government oversight are good things. He likes Canada losing sovereignty; he thinks it’s a good thing.

Justin Trudeau has abs. He is, well, beautiful. He has a great smile. He’s a neoliberal authoritarian who helped pass Bill-C51, a terrible bill which, among other things, makes large classes of speech criminal and allows national security to illegalize environmental protests–should the government desire it.

It’s not that Trudeau isn’t better than Canada’s previous PM Harper, it’s that that is a very low bar. Yes, he believes in multiculturalism, and in taking in refugees, and I’m glad he does, but that doesn’t offset the other ways in which he is terrible.

Trudeau’s just a prettier, slightly kinder face on standard neoliberal policies.

But, he’s pretty. And he says warm things about refugees. And he marches with gays. And he has amazing abs, and shows them off.

He parses as a really nice guy. The NDP leader, Mulcair, is fat, bearded, and can come across as intimidating. He’s more of a centrist than I like, but when Bill C51 was suggested, he immediately opposed it–even when the polls were in its favor. When there was a row about Niqabs in Quebec durign the election, Mulcair immediately supported the right to wear them. He spoke out against the effects of oil dependence on Canada’s economy when the price of oil was still high.

I won’t say Trudeau isn’t a man of principle, but I will say that his principles are neoliberal principles combined with cosmopolitanism.

But Mulcair, the fat man with the beard, has principles which include liberty and which he holds to even when they are unpopular.

More Canadians, of course, voted for Trudeau. The break point in the election, despite all the whining from lefties, was not Trudeau’s declared willingness to run deficits vs. Mulcair’s saying he wouldn’t. No, it was Niqabs. Quebec is a secular province, similar to France, in that secularism is its ideology, its religion.

Standing up for the right to wear Niqabs caused the NDP’s vote in Quebec to collapse. When it collapsed, national polls dropped the NDP below the Liberals and since soft-stupid left wingers were in “anyone but the Conservatives” mode they ran to the Liberal party.

And yeah, Trudeau is better than Harper, but he isn’t actually good on really important economic and liberty issues. Except when it comes to cosmopolitan issues like refugees and not being a dick about things like the census, his policies are not noticeably different from Harper’s. He does 80 percent of what Harper would have done, 80 percent of the harm, but without the added 20 percent of the gratuitous cruelty and stupidity.

Canadian left-wingers got suckered again. They could have had a flawed man who was genuinely anti-authoritarian, and whose economic policies, while flawed, would have included, oh, tax raises.

Instead they got Mr. Neoliberal Pretty Abs.

I’m not entirely upset by this. I think Mulcair triangulated too much on economic policy, or possibly genuinely believed in stuff like “no deficits.” Him running “center” and losing might not be the worst thing if people realize that as why he lost.

But it wasn’t his weaknesses that pushed Canadians over the edge, it was his integrity. And the love of Trudeau, even during the election, was based mostly on his status as son of a beloved past-leader and his prettiness and charisma.

Trudeau’s record was of supporting most of the worst things perpetrated by the Conservative party–the things people wanted to replace. Mulcair had a record of opposing those things.

This is similar to American leftists running to “the woman” as if Thatcher wasn’t a woman, or to “the black” as if Obama hadn’t been on his knees all election worshiping at the shrine of Reagan. Or, locally, of Liberals voting for a lesbian in Ontario, because, hey, lesbian, and waking up to find out that, on economic policy, she’s more right-wing than the last Conservative premier was. The left-wing white male candidates, like the guy who ran a food bank, well, fuck, they were straight. They couldn’t be as left-wing as a lesbian.

This inability to think, to judge actions over acting and rhetoric, and group identity markets is killing us. I mean that quite seriously. Policies are engaged in whose objective effect is to increase poverty and fuel the rise of the authoritarian right.

Our inability to overcome programming meant for living in bands of 60 people or so is killing us in a hundred ways, of which this is just one. Trudeau may be the guy you’d want to have at your house-warming party, like George W Bush was the guy you’d want a drink with, but both are bad leaders in ways that matter and that will harm many of the people who voted for them.

Democracy is swiftly moving from “the worst type of government other than all the others which have been tried” (Churchill) to “the government under which we made most of the decisions which destroyed half the world.”

Do not think those who pay the price for our failures will say, “Gee, the primary government form of the most important nations had nothing to do with it.” If you love Democracy, figuring out how to work it so it results in better decisions is mandatory, and that means figuring out how to elect better leaders.

Pretty or not.

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Toronto Ex-Mayor Rob Ford Dead

By Ian Welsh

On March 22, 2016

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I live in Toronto.

Rob Ford was a bad mayor.

He also was caught on tape smoking crack. The Toronto police had him under surveillance and were well aware that he was doing illegal drugs.

They did not charge him.

Somehow, however, the man who filmed the incident wound up in prison.

He was also violent, nearly tackling a female legislator.

There was something sad about Ford. Something broken.

But he was a public figure. He wasn’t even charged for crimes that would have put ordinary people (and certainly poor blacks) in prison. He was a bad mayor, and overall, he was a bad man.

The fact that he is dead does not mean we should forget these things.

I would add that “Ford Nation” presaged the Trump phenomenon. Trump is smarter, better organized, and not a drug addict, but he is appealing to much of the same demographic. Ford’s followers felt he wasn’t “an ordinary politician” and that he “told the truth.” He did not parse as part of the problem.

Unfortunately he was incompetent, mean, and a drug user. Those facts had a bearing on how he ran the city.

If there is an afterlife, I wish him nothing but the best there. I ask that no person, no matter how evil, be condemned to some insane “eternal hell.”

That fact does not alter his record, which is that he did a great deal of harm.

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