Category: Canada Page 4 of 7

Happy Canada Day

On July 1, 2020

I like Canada, but it has its flaws. In particular, it’s been a shitty country to indigenous people.

Plenty of spreading disease in the early years, and the deliberate destruction of their ways of life and cultures through residential schools.

Back in high school, I learned about the Metis rebellion, but it was never clear WHY it happened, and I didn’t learn the reason until I was in my 40s. Until the Victorian era, the Metis were the trading caste among the first nations; they controlled much of the economy and were the people who tied together various hostile tribes.

When the Brits/Canada pushed West, they didn’t respect that, and threatened the existing power structures and economic arrangements. So the Metis rebelled. Bit of a damp squib, mostly because the leader, Louis Riel, was unwilling to fight properly. He was advised to cut the rail lines, which would have made it a real fight.

Everything after that has been a downhill slide for the indigenous peoples, who are treated terribly and discriminated against. The worst racism in Canada is definitely against the natives, not against blacks (which is not to say there is no discrimination against them).

Canada has a mixed record for a lot of others, good for many. For a lot of people, it’s been a very good place to live, better than most in the world.

It’s heading in the wrong direction, however, and has been for decades. That’s accelerated recently in two of the most important states, Ontario and Alberta, which are both slashing and burning public services and ownership. Both want to get rid of universal healthcare and so on. They won’t quite manage it this time around, but when the centrist liberals get in power they won’t roll it back, so I figure we’ve got ten to twenty years. If politics don’t radically change by then, Canada will turn into USA North.

One thing I particularly love about Canada is that we have lots and lots of wilderness, one of the few countries where that’s still true.

Overall, I’m pretty glad I was born here.

Hope you’re having a good day, feel free to use the comments as an open thread.

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Alberta’s Alienation from Canada

By Ian Welsh

On November 5, 2019

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So, for those of you who don’t know, Alberta is sort of Canada’s Texas: It has a lot of oil and a lot of farms.

Alberta is also the heart of the Canada’s Conservative Party. Virtually all of their seats go to the Conservatives every federal election.

Many Albertans feel isolated and disrespected by Ottawa (our capital) and the East. Back in the 70s, Pierre Trudeau (our current Prime Minister’s father) made them sell oil to Canadians for less than market price and even nationalized a little bit of the market.

Since they also have a lot of money, they make what are called “transfer payments” to the other provinces.

So, they feel like they put in more than they get back.

There’s a lot of truth to this, of course. This isn’t the same “Red State” BS like in the US, where they get more from the Feds than they put in and whine about it.

That said, Alberta has been sitting on black gold and fucked it up.

Fucked it up.

They decided that low taxes were more important than investment. They hardly taxed the oil companies pumping the oil, even the foreign ones, and even during boom times when there was no question those companies would pay.

So, they didn’t get as much money as they should.

They also misspent what money they had, and didn’t think about creating a post-oil future economy.

In Canada, we do have poor provinces. The poorest are the Maritime provinces–the ones up against the Atlantic.

Here’s a funny story: Those provinces used to be rich, a long time ago.

See, England needed lots of masts. You need good trees for masts, and the English cut down all their own, and other Europeans had either done the same or wouldn’t chop down enough of them.

Good masts were incredibly valuable. In addition, the Maritimes had the richest fisheries in the world. There are eyewitness accounts from the early days that you could literally dip a bucket into the Ocean and come up with fish.

So the Maritimes were prosperous.

Then the world moved to Steam engines.

Then the Maritimes, quite deliberately and before the advent of climate change, fished the Grand Banks cods to collapse.

Now, they are poor as hell, and always getting those transfer payments.

So, this is Alberta’s future.

The funny thing is that Alberta is also a big agricultural province, but, of course, since oil makes more money, they’ve gone ahead and polluted like hell, destroying vast swathes of land.

To summarize: Alberta did not invest enough in industries to take over when oil (a non-renewable resource) became less valuable. They did do what they could to fuck up their sustainable resource industry: farming.

Most of this is not the rest of Canada’s fault. Yeah, they would have had more money if Ottawa had given them a complete free hand, but they had plenty of money and wasted it on low taxes and tax cuts and didn’t bother to be good environmental stewards.

These decisions were made in Alberta, by Albertans, not in Ottawa.

Resource economies are always, at best, cyclical. They are always in danger of being destroyed by substitution (as is happening with hydrocarbons). A smart jurisdiction uses their resource-based wealth to buy a future not reliant on those resources.

There are lessons here for a lot of countries and regions. Canada as a whole has fucked up its economic balance over the last 20 years (a different article). Russia is way too reliant on resources. Various US states are going to take it on the chin when hydrocarbon prices collapse, and they too have been short-sighted, greedy, and stupid: They’ve been doing things like polluting their groundwater with fracking.

In the future, water is going to be far more valuable than oil. So is good agricultural land.

These places have gone out of their way to destroy both.

The problem with Ottawa isn’t so much that they interfered in Alberta, but that they interfered in Alberta in the wrong ways.

As for Albertan voters who always vote Conservative: You’re fools. Because they know you will always vote for them, they do nothing for you. When the Conservatives were in power for almost a decade, they sucked up to Ontario and Quebec, because they knew they needed their votes.

You? You got nothing, exactly because they know they don’t need to give you anything.

There are those in the US who might think on this lesson as well.

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Trudeau Decides to Run a Minority, Conservative Government

By Ian Welsh

On October 24, 2019

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Justin Trudeau

So, Trudeau has announced he won’t form a coalition with any other party (really, not with the NDP, Canada’s left wing party), or a confidence and supply agreement (in which a party agrees to support them on confidence votes but not other votes), but instead to run a minority government.

His first order of business will be a tax cut.

I said in the last post that I thought Trudeau would be more comfortable working with the Conservatives than the NDP, given he’s a staunch neoliberal, and this indicates he’s de-facto going to do that: The Conservatives never saw a tax cut they didn’t like, after all.

Minority governments don’t tend to last, so there’ll probably be another election in about two years. Trudeau would rather take a shot at a majority, with the possibility of a loss, than run a coalition government.

More importantly, I’m reasonably sure that he’s just not willing to do the things the NDP would require in return for a coalition. They, after all, want to raise taxes on the rich and corporations, for example.

We’ll see how it plays out. My sense is that an NDP coalition, through which he did some genuinely left-wing populist things, would have been a better call for him from a practical perspective (and I think not just because I prefer the NDP). He could then take credit for the stuff he was forced to do and win a majority–as his father did when he joined a coalition with the NDP.

But unlike his father, Justin is genuinely conservative–he’s a neoliberal. He’s going to make decisions based on what he actually believes in, which is… good?

I suspect he’s risking a loss. If he’s going to play conservative, people may decide they might as well get the real thing. But I’m bad at electoral predictions, so I’ll just sit back and see.

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Liberal Party Wins a Minority in Canada

By Ian Welsh

On October 22, 2019

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Justin Trudeau

So, as the polls predicted, the Liberals win the most seats, but just short of a majority. The Conservatives actually got slightly more of the popular vote at 33 to 34 percent, but as their support is geographically clustered, they received less seats.

The NDP lost seats, taking them down to 24. The Bloc went from almost none to probably 32 of Quebec’s 78 ridings, making them the third largest party. This shouldn’t be taken as meaning separatism is roaring back, the Bloc downplayed separatism, but did benefit from supporting the “no religious symbols law” in Quebec (which includes hijabs and so on). The Quebecois, like the French, are still big believers in secularism and not fans of multiculturalism.

The most likely result here is a Liberal/NDP coalition government, though Trudeau could try to govern as a minority. He won’t want to ally with the Bloc as they are still officially separatists, and the rest of Canada wouldn’t like that.

My read of Trudeau’s personality is that he’s woke in the most performative sense; he doesn’t actually believe in anything left-wing, really, and he won’t like allying with the NDP. I read Trudeau right when he became leader, noting that there was no chance in hell of any electoral reform under him unless it was ranked ballots, and I stated that he was an empty shirt. His betrayal of his promises to Canada’s indigenous people and his buying a pipeline indicate I was correct.

Trudeau would be more comfortable working with the Conservatives, in my view, but that’s impossible for a variety of reasons.

So, we’ll see what he does. I’d expect him to suck it up and do a coalition, then like his father, after having been forced to do some left-wing things by the NDP, to use those as proof that he’s left-wing and not an empty shirt, and call another election. (His father, though many things, was not empty, mind you.)

However, we’ll see. Trudeau’s primary characteristic is near narcissism. He’s always been beautiful, rich, and loved. He has near divine confidence that whatever he does is right, and he’s a neoliberal at heart.

As for the longer future, nothing about this election is good. The NDP continue to slide. The Conservatives are getting stronger, and the Liberals are just neoliberals. There is no sign that Canadian politics is getting healthier, other than a minor surge by the NDP towards the end. The choice remains one between “bad” or “terrible.”

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Happy Canada Day

By Ian Welsh

On July 1, 2019

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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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