Through the age of traditional broadcast media, we put significant emphasis on Canadian content, ‘CanCon’ for short. Today, just about the hardest place in the world to see Canadian content is in Canada. I have referenced it many times over the years in different fora, but my favourite example of this is a Cineflix production known as Mayday, a TV show that has been running for 26 seasons offering clinical analysis of plane crashes, airing in multiple languages in nearly every country in the world.

But if you are in Canada, the only way you can legally watch the full run of this Canadian-made show is with a Crave account, Bell Canada’s streaming service. The first 20 seasons of the show were available on DVD (until the distributor went out of business) in several other countries, but were region-encoded and no version was available here in the country in which it was produced. You could buy the DVD sets on line from Australia or the United Kingdom, but you would also need to buy a region-free DVD player as they were encoded against the North American market.

It is, of course, Bell’s right to maintain a domestic monopoly on the content it purchases or produces while maximising availability in other markets, but it speaks to the real problems Canada has across its content creation and media industries: namely, media ownership and vertical integration.

Michael Geist

From Making Web Giants Pay to Making Taxpayers Pay: Government Announces Plan to Kill the CRTC’s Online Streaming Ruling

The government today killed the centrepiece of its broadcasting policy, announcing it plans to issue a new policy direction to override the CRTC’s Online Streaming Act decision on Internet streaming service contributions less than two weeks after the…

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10 days ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Michael Geist

While the $600 million the government is committing to directly funding Canadian content is welcome, it is hard to imagine that this money won’t be absorbed by Canada’s media and telecommunications oligopoly.

There are a number of regulatory and legal solutions we should be considering alongside direct funding that might actually begin to solve our internet and foreign-dominated content woes. None will be popular with the telecommunications lobbyists well-paid to prevent such outcomes from coming to be.

The first is breaking the vertical integration of Canada’s media giants. Production and distribution of content should be separate. Our internet service providers should not also be our newscasters, content creators, and cell phone providers. The government must examine the big three telecommunications providers from an anti-trust perspective to increase genuine competition at all levels of the information and entertainment supply chain.

If we lack the public imagination and political will to nationalise our fixed and mobile Internet service providers as the public infrastructure that they are, they must at least be regulated to neutrally provide equitable service to Canadians on both sides of the connection, the creators and the consumers.

The second is to state that any Canadian production that receives any public funds must be made reasonably available to all Canadians. Funding our domestic cultural production needs is at the centre of the purpose of government, but public funding of private profits needs to come to an end across the economy. If we are funding a public good, it is because it is a public good. It needs to be administered and regulated with that as a central premise.

The third is through regulation. Social media giants and what the CRTC calls Internet broadcasters like Netflix and Youtube have to be given legal parameters around how they work, how they filter, and what they label.

If we go to the grocery store, we have country of origin labelling laws that affect every product we buy. The internet has no such requirement, but there is no reason that it could not be done. Internet content providers including social media companies could easily be required to place clear country of origin labelling on all content, and be forced to provide country-of-origin filters.

It would not be unreasonable to open Netflix and be able to specifically select Canadian content, for example. It would be even better if there were a Canadian streaming service that syndicated rather than limited our own cultural production. Both the National Film Board and the CBC already offer their own streaming services, but are among the most siloed of those available to Canadians.

Facebook being required to list country-of-origin based on the owner of the content, as well as the physical location from where it was uploaded where applicable, could be quite informative on that score. X’s voluntary disclosure of country-of-origin for its user accounts has been enlightening, although also demonstrated the technical challenges of identifying physical traffic sources in the age of tor nodes and VPNs.

It would not be effective to do any of this on our own, as the Online News Act has allowed social media giants to essentially ignore Canada, however Canada and Europe are in a cooperative mood at the moment. Synchronising our Internet content policies would serve to make them far more effective for all of us. Europe has been effective in using its sheer market weight to force changes like USB-C charger compatibility for iPhones, for example, something that Canada could never achieve on its own.

David Graham

Net Neutrality and the War On News

As the federal government and tech giant Meta (Facebook) continue their entrenched battle over access to, and payment for, Canadian news, we might consider what is really at stake…

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3 years ago · 4 likes · David Graham

On the news and information side, we should also be considering legal changes to make the knowing production or distribution of objectively false or misleading information to be an offence. For both news and general content, Internet broadcasters and social media providers must also be required to offer unfiltered content streams not curated by reaction-based algorithms.

Attacking both misinformation and the emotional feedback loop that makes it profitable is critical to reclaiming the Internet as a valuable and productive feature of our society, rather than the means of its own destruction. Foreign-funded misinformation will out-score quality domestic content in every algorithm.

Producing, identifying, and labelling Canadian content is only half the battle, of course. $600 million of publicly funded content that nobody wants to watch would not materially advance the cause of our domestic culture. Nor is Canadian content that Canadians have to jump through additional hoops to watch in Canada in any meaningful way beneficial.

Mandating clear country of origin labelling and filtering would provide the data needed to direct public funds toward the type of domestic content that Canadians actually want, if we have the patience to make this a multi-year project. Ensuring publicly-funded Canadian content is available to Canadians will also ensure that this data is of some empirical value.

There is a caveat to all of this, though. Any such regulation has to be approached with caution. Canada’s lawful access regime currently winding its way through the House as Bill C-22 and through a soon-to-be introduced bill on age limits for certain Internet activities offers a warning. Any data the government collects has to be limited in scope, existing to control funding flows, not toward infringing the rights and privacy of the public.

Money alone is not the solution to our digital culture woes, especially if it exists as just another gift to the media oligopoly. Asserting the role of the government through anti-trust action and thoughtful regulation in concert with other countries, though, might at least start us on the right track.

It was also born of a desire to document the stories from the four fleeting years I spent holding federal office, and the two facets are very much related.

In politics, there are two main types of people: those who want to do, and those who want to be. Like the worst people in any office hierarchy often rising to the top, politics favours the be category, because they are the ones that put themselves in front of the cameras and the crowds and court adoring fans, who build the profile and reputation needed to stay in the public imagination, who say the things that get the headlines. The be-ers do enough actual work to have a reason to find another camera and receive another accolade, rather than for any intrinsic value or sense of accomplishment.

The do-ers only do the public relations necessary to allow them to do the actual work they want to do. They don’t seek public attention, they show up early, go home late, and don’t rest until they achieve their objectives.

Writing here has been a way to draw attention to the work that needs to be done, and to reference realities that we do not want to acknowledge. In eschewing the public profile of office beyond what was necessary to build name brand recognition within my local community, I did not do the public relations work necessary to continue the grunt work I enjoyed, avoiding rather than chasing cameras, having no larger profile, no capture of the wider imagination.

I wanted to solve specific problems, to have some modicum of positive impact on my community and the world from this one opportunity to be at the table. I saw caucus and committee meetings as the places I could do those things, but the electors don’t see those. As Catherine McKenna or Steven Guilbeault might tell you, having a seat at the table may get you heard, but it doesn’t necessarily get you listened to.

Busy with a young family and the daily grind of real-world work in a gruelling but interesting 24-hour-on-call environment where I now find myself in the post-political world, this substack has become my primary outlet for participation. I write primarily for myself, to say what I feel needs to be said, and just hope that someone somewhere who needs to hear it does.

I have always detested marketing, growing up believing that if a product needs to be advertised it is because it cannot stand on its own merits, in a household where Adbusters was core reading material from its first issue.

In my writing, which I try to maintain the discipline to do twice a week, the results, the readership, the sharing, speak directly to how politics works and how politicians rise — or don’t. The most-read and most-shared articles I have written here are also the most partisan. Colourfully sharing my especially dim view of Pierre Poilievre gets read and spread like nothing else.

Discussions of policy ideas, paths to solve the problems I see, how to address unpopular issues or take unpopular positions? Decidedly less interesting.

The least-read piece I have published here so far in 2026 was an honest and pragmatic assessment and nuances of fair pay for those holding elected office.

David Graham

What Is Fair Pay For Politicians?

The two most common reactions I received to the remuneration of Members of Parliament during my brief time in the role was: ‘that is way too much money’, and ‘that is not nearly enough money’. There is no goldilocks zone for politician pay, but the salary is only a part of the question…

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20 days ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

The most popular piece was warning that Canada is not safe from American attack.

David Graham

The American Threat

Conventional wisdom is that the United States would not attack Canada. Several people have said it to me since my recent essay warning us to materially prepare for the possibility of asymmetric war with our former ally…

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3 months ago · 76 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Both are important, but sharing ideas and visions and goals should be what drives us.

We have so many problems to solve. Canada and the United States share much in common, and not all of it is positive. We are living the third generation curse of national generational wealth — the third generation being the ones that had no part in building it and are most prone to squandering it.

We have spent my entire lifetime ripping out or squandering our national infrastructure and resources. We have missed untold opportunities to look centuries ahead and plan for the well-being of our grandchildren’s grandchildren instead of our own individual stock portfolios. We lack ambition across the entire anglosphere, trading the future for the present.

Meanwhile, countries we culturally deride and see as some sort of rival like China are modernising faster than we can even begin to comprehend, building out infrastructure and decarbonising while we fight over control of the world’s dirtiest oil.

There are conversations to be had, there are visions to pursue, there are ideas to share, and this little corner of the Internet will continue to be my little folding chair at the edge of the very large table of public discourse.

It is the public platform necessary for me to pursue the work I want to do, to the benefit of the grandchildren of my eventual grandchildren.

It was the Bloc’s own social media post disavowing the racist slogan of the protest that first crossed my news feed. Then the deeply separatist St Jean Baptiste society’s post condemning, without irony, all forms of intolerance and racism. The leaders of the Parti Québécois, the premier, and every Quebec nationalist ever to sow the divisions underlying the slogan jumped on the bandwagon over the weekend. Their own urgency to dissociate from a slogan that did not mention them helped it spread far more widely than it otherwise would have.

In 2015, I ran in the rural Quebec riding in which I had grown up, believing that the orange wave of 2011 had proven that the province was finally ready to move on from this type of nonsense and discuss real issues. That, though fluently bilingual, I was and would always be, and be seen as, an anglophone, but that it would finally no longer matter. I was born in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts and even as I had lived in other places, I had always been proud to be a Quebecker, with my own heritage documented in the province going back to 1647.

David Graham

Language Politics: False Division

After the Bonjour-Hi debacle of 2017, the National Assembly’s war on linguistic minorities only got worse. It hasn’t ended; two weeks ago, the government of Quebec launched a $2.5 million ad campaign to promote “Bonjour” as the only greeting in the province…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · David Graham

I won my seat in that election by a thin margin. A week earlier, I would probably have lost to the collapsing NDP. A week later, I would probably have lost to the rising Bloc. But I was sworn in on November 10th, 2015 and received an overwhelmingly positive reception across a riding that had spent a generation being among the safest Bloc seats in the province. We got to work showing that the federal government could, in fact, do something.

Through my first years in office, the Bloc was a dead issue. It had all but collapsed. The small caucus of 10 people itself cleaved into two caucuses. Quebec society had moved on, and we were fixing badly overdue problems like rural telecommunications infrastructure that were leaving the regions behind. There were still overtones of the nationalist debates, of course, especially around secularism in the public service as the provincial government fanned the flames over visible religious symbols in the public service. It hadn’t gone fully away. But locally, I could do the job I was elected to do — bring the concerns of my community to Ottawa, and get them addressed.

Then the Quebec National Assembly, nervous across party lines about a federal government actually achieving for Quebec, had their ridiculous ‘Bonjour-Hi’ motion. The province was bending over itself to explain how being greeted with a bilingual question, leaving the door open to the customer’s choice of language of service, would destroy Quebec society and set French back generations.

Late one evening in that period, without premeditation, I flippantly said ‘bonjour-hi, madame la présidente’ at the start of a speech in the House of Commons on campaign finance reform, and found myself in a media quagmire of my own making, with a new-found target on my back.

The Bloc’s newly elected leader, Yves-François Blanchet, meanwhile, was bringing the Bloc movement back from the brink. The Conservative propaganda machine had done a number on Justin Trudeau’s reputation, turning the once-popular prime minister into a political albatross. Immigrants crossing into Canada at Roxham Road were fanning the flames of nationalist sentiment.

Identity politics were fully back on the front burner. As I went door-to-door and through the hundreds of community events that clogged my calendar, I was asked increasingly negative questions. A common one, often phrased bluntly, was: ‘what are you doing about all these immigrants?’ to which I would answer ‘like my wife?’ Such a response often left them tongue-tied. Argument won — vote lost.

As the 2019 election drew nearer, I felt a frost come over my riding. People who had expressed genuine appreciation for the work my team and I had managed to do were suddenly cold to me. Previously strong supporters were yelling at me on their doorstep about Trudeau and immigrants. Folks from towns too small for their own neighbours to find on the map expressed fear of Islamic terrorism, which they saw as the obvious outcome of letting those immigrants into the country.

The mood I remembered from my childhood, where anyone who was not seen as a pure Québécois-de-souche was not a real Quebecker, was coming back with a vengeance. The Bloc was rising, even if my own party’s Montreal organisers, insulated from rural realities and attitudes, refused to see it coming.

When the 2019 election finally arrived, the Bloc Québécois slogan was ‘Le Québec, c’est nous’ overlayed with photos of happy white francophones. For those of us who were not pure enough, it was a clear message. ‘Quebec is us’ was an exclusive, not an inclusive, slogan. It was a message of division, that Quebec belongs to a certain kind of Quebeckers, the kind seen on those posters. It was a message I took personally as support for the Bloc skyrocketed across my riding. People who had promised me their support bailed toward this divided vision as my Asian wife, whose five spoken languages do not include French, clearly got the message. I went on to lose by nearly 9,000 votes.

When the overtly white supremacist protesters, wearing ICE-style masks, paraded in a town with the decidedly non-white name of ‘Shawinigan’ with a banner reading “I remember a white Quebec,” it was not by accident, and it did not appear in a vacuum. If the province’s nationalists are genuinely as upset about it as they say, then this is their time for some serious introspection.

Otherwise, they are just upset that the quiet part got said out loud.

His kids are now reported to be in school in Buenos Aires. Perhaps there, they will grow up learning about what their father has been a part of doing.

After the Second World War, thousands of Nazis fled Germany. While they went to numerous countries, Adolf Eichmann’s Mossad extraction to Israel, trial, and execution for his key involvement in the Holocaust resulted in Argentina becoming synonymous with these escaping war criminals.

Thiel’s choice of Argentina, then, is deeply symbolic. Nazis escaping after the war were refugees from their own destruction. They had systematically destroyed their own country, their neighbours, and put in place industrial concentration and death camps to legitimise their own sense of moral and ethnic supremacy.

Argentina, today, is run by Javier Milei, a Trump ally. It was only a few months ago, while the American dictatorship was cutting domestic social programs and claiming bankruptcy that they offered Milei a $20 billion bailout to stabilise his crashing economy, conditional on him winning his own re-election. It is no surprise, then, that the country’s government is willing to offer itself as a safe haven for the current generation of escaping Nazis.

Peter Thiel, it should be remembered, wrote in 2009:

Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

It is not a position he has left as open to philosophical debate. He has spent his time since systematically undermining the very fabric of democracy, presumably in the interests of his own freedom.

The company he chairs, Palantir, is at the centre of the American government’s Big Data drive which, in case you were wondering, is not aimed at analysing trends to fix social programs for the betterment of society.

The simultaneous existence of a privately-run database of all details of all people, and an on-going effort to detain and deport “illegal immigrants” by the millions is not coincidental. The United States, even under ostensibly progressive Democrat leaders, already had among the highest incarceration rates in the world. In raw numbers, the United States imprisons more of its own citizens than any other country in the world.

Controlling a people, though, requires more than for-profit prisons and grossly inflated prison populations. It requires full-on concentration camps, and the United States is still building those, in case the lack of recent headlines on the topic caused anyone to forget. Industrial imprisonment requires industrial data, and so it is no surprise to find Palantir’s name turn up here.

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

Alligator Alcatraz Was Only the Prototype

One camp empties this week. Three more are taking its place…

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14 days ago · 100 likes · 26 comments · W. A. Lawrence

When one of the wealthiest and most connected people in the country, whose efforts have gone into installing an openly corrupt government, says that he does not believe democracy and freedom are compatible, you’d best believe he intends to put his money where his mouth is.

Freedom, as it exists for the masses in the United States, is ephemeral. American freedom today is over which brand of car to share ownership with which bank to commute too far to which soul-crushing job while feeding your family from a narrow selection of fast food and grocery chains. The owners of the auto manufacturers, parts suppliers, and fuel companies are the same people, and they own the food supply chain. Freedom in the United States exists principally in the minds of the peasants serving their feudal lords, who are themselves the only ones to have actual freedom.

That true freedom is the ability to enjoy life, to have control over your own time, your own location, your own health, your own priorities. It is the kind of freedom that comes with having enough money that daily stresses are essentially optional, offloadable to others. All are freedoms systematically denied to a working class convinced they are the freest people in the world.

From Thiel’s point of view, freedom and democracy being incompatible is probably correct. True democracy empowers the people, and an empowered people will recognise the oligarchs for what they are, that the assertion of genuine democratic powers is the only way for the masses to enjoy genuine freedom. The extreme prison populations, and the concentration camp system being built to further expand it without the benefit of due process, is essential to keeping freedom exclusive to its current owners.

If, after following in Eichmann’s footsteps in being a key architect of the American concentration camp system, Thiel feels a need to move to Argentina to protect his own freedom, it may be that the Big Data he is working on has warned him that he has pushed too far.

The democracy he fears, that his allies have tried to suppress and destroy, may be regaining enough strength to defeat his brand of freedom. He has access to data that the rest of us do not. He may have seen through his own palantir what the future holds for him and his fellow oligarchs, and he is making sure he, like Adolf Eichmann, has an escape plan.

The sudden need for the person at the very centre of the most extensive data and analysis on every person in the United States ever gathered to hedge, to get his own family a safe haven out of the country, is the most positive sign yet that the collapse of the fascist American administration may finally be on the horizon.

In both cases, such an act does not serve the interests of the people. The primary beneficiaries are political adversaries.

In the ten years since the Brexit vote, there have been widespread allegations and evidence of foreign interference in the Brexit referendum and across British politics more generally, generally attributed to Russia.

From a timing point of view, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started two years earlier in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea. The west reacted with angry words and financial sanctions which hurt the Russian economy while the country claimed that its invasion was legal, justifying it with a sham referendum after the fact that was rejected by the United Nations general assembly.

In the aftermath of that invasion and its international reaction, western powers started seeing widespread social media-driven disinformation campaigns guiding public opinion away from hardliners against Russian expansionism as we started becoming aware of Russian bot-farms.

By 2016, a stale western establishment vulnerable to plausible disinformation about why the middle class is disappearing started getting defeated by an electorate who had reached the wrong conclusions.

That summer saw the Brexit referendum pass when the Conservative Prime Minister ran the referendum to end the question. That fall, Trump beat Hillary Clinton to take the White House with all the grace of the Crimean invasion. Both of those events had significant Russian assistance, and both relieved pressure on Russia.

Nigel Farage, a leading figure in the Brexit movement, was quoted in 2014 as saying that Vladimir Putin was the world leader he admired the most. Farage, who today is running for Prime Minister of England and has a good chance of winning, is embroiled in controversy for accepting a cash gift of five million pounds from a crypto magnate who, he claims, wants nothing in return. Crypto is a favourite of those looking to mask the origins of money, convenient for those whose political interests diverge from those of their country.

Donald Trump, another heavy investor in crypto, for his part spent his first term trying to get the G7 to readmit Russia, which had been expelled as a result of the Crimean invasion, something he has continued to do in his second term. With Trump’s Russian connections and influence well-established, it is time to connect the dots back to today.

David Graham

New Enemies — Foreign and Domestic

In recent days, the Musk-Trump administration and their allies have made a further series of terrifying moves and decisions. So fast and furious is their shutdown of the current world order and their national democratic institutions that it’s hard to keep up, and the collusion of the oligarchic media owners is making it increasingly hard to share the in…

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a year ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

It needs to be plainly stated that Russia and the United States are now allies, and America’s historical alliances are of no further value, existing only to the extent that geography forces them. As with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent invasion of the rest of Ukraine, the United States under its new autocracy has openly called for the inclusion of Canada into their union, and is actively politically undermining Alberta to prepare it for a sham referendum.

Comprehensive voter information about every Alberta voter was recently leaked to the province’s separatists. The group that got the data has been linked to American Ambassador Pete Hoekstra.

Premier Danielle Smith is taking the half-pregnant David Cameron Brexit approach to the prospect of a referendum on the province’s independence, hoping to hold it to wash her hands of the issue while also working with those who want it to succeed.

None of this is a coincidence and it is not going to end well for Alberta, regardless of the outcome should the October 19th, 2026 referendum go forward, in spite of court rulings against it.

Russia wants a fractured west. The United States wants Canada’s resources and land. Their interests intersect somewhere between Fort McMurray and Calgary, and they have found the people they need to pursue them.

The school of thought that says politicians should make minimum wage because that would force them to raise the minimum wage is a logical fallacy. Politicians should raise the minimum wage to a genuinely liveable wage because politicians should be people who have the best interests of the public, not of themselves, at heart.

Paying politicians minimum wage will not bring such people into elected office in any meaningful way, and would likely further reduce the already dangerously low percentage of politicians who run for the right reasons. Rather, it would ensure that only those who do not need an income will credibly offer themselves in election. As the billionaires filling the White House today should remind us, those people are not driven by the principled pursuit of our collective best interests.

The state of New Hampshire famously pays each of its 400 state representatives $100 per year. Louisiana pays its state reps $16,800, which is still more than their country’s minimum wage. Texas pays its state reps $7,200 a year — about half of minimum wage. New Mexico does not pay its state reps at all. Only California, Pennsylvania, New York, and DC pay six figures. The National Conference of State Legislatures lists both salary and demographic information for every state.

In Canada, there is no central website that lists each province’s legislative remuneration, but the range is quite a bit narrower, with all ten provinces treating it as a full time job with salaries ranging between about $85,000 in PEI and about $157,000 in Ontario.

Federally, MPs currently earn $217,000 CAD per year while American congressmen make $147,000 USD — about $202,000 CAD. MPs’ pay is indexed around an industrial average to detach MPs from their own pay raises, while the Americans have had their salaries frozen for the past 17 years.

But none of that really matters, because in nearly every case, elected politicians are not banned from having outside income or financial interests. Some even argue in favour of such secondary income so they can feed their families, without any sense of irony of the impact of their policies on the average citizen’s ability to feed their own families.

In the United States, the current controversy is around the ability — and extent to which — American legislators trade on the stock market, profiting off of information they learn from their positions in office. There are few members of either the American Senate or the American House whose net worth increases while in office are proportionate to their pay. Nor are they consistent with growth in the general public’s investment portfolios, for those voters wealthy enough to have one. A 2014 study showed that among the top 20 congressmen, the average increase in net worth was a staggering 422% per year — and Democrats are nearly as lucky as Republicans in this regard, in case you were about to jump to any conclusions.

In Canada, MPs are bound to the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons, which itself is a part of the Standing Orders, the rules by which the House governs itself. The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner has the power of investigation, but the enforcement action is limited to a report back to the House of their findings, leaving it to the legislators themselves to deal with a colleague found to have fallen out of bounds.

Should MPs as a whole one day decide, as their American counterparts already have, that if everyone profits through conflict of interest then nobody can be held accountable, there is no current mechanism to stop it as even public shame is proving to be of no effect south of the border.

Regardless of the stated intent by Republican Speaker Mike Johnson to crack down on conflict of interest, for which he is doing a miserable job, and of the existence of ethics committees and commissioners and policies in some form in nearly all elected bodies, the very ability of lawmakers to have outside income is inherently corruptible.

A significant number of Members of Parliament are landlords. The vast majority own assorted stocks. Only a very small group of them must place their assets in blind trusts, but one can reasonably assume even they are aware of what went into those trusts when they entered office. Whether outcomes consciously benefit them or not, it will more than likely impact their perspectives when debating policies or casting votes.

An elected body where members of all parties own revenue property will not naturally solve the housing crisis. An elected body where members of all parties invest in the casino that we call the stock market will not seek to break monopolies or end the planned obsolescence that generates unnecessary sales and waste throughout the economy at the expense of share value. They will not spend their time seeking ways to make sure that employees are the primary protected creditors of a failing business rather than the investors, lenders, and shareholders.

David Graham

Private Money In Politics Is The Root Of Our Rot

Nearly all the problems we are facing today share a common root cause: the role of money — and those who have too much of it — in politics…

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5 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Elected representatives need to be paid sufficiently well that their focus is on the task at hand, not on their own well-being. They must not spend their time wondering how they will make a living should they lose office, which will also tend to corrupt their decision-making. Why would they publicly make policy that might negatively impact a potential future employer?

To truly do their jobs, to build elected bodies that will make sure that minimum wages rise, that cost of living increases are brought under control, that greedy corporatists are held to account, they also must be free of outside financial consideration, of outside interests. They must see potential for making a post-electoral living that is not based on the sale of their rolodexes and networks to interests whose focus is on influencing the governments they left.

A legislator who is paid $7,200 per year but who makes $4 million in stock trades is probably overpaid. The $7,200 is inconsequential to them and becomes an insult to citizens rather than remuneration for a job well done. One who makes $85,000 and who eschews all other financial opportunity probably is not paid enough for the hours and level of responsibility. The raw dollar salary is not the full story.

The right pay for politicians can be measured on the question: what is the amount needed that will allow them to have their primary professional focus be on doing their job to the best of their abilities, without outside interest or consideration? It is not so much a specific number as it is a philosophy.

This is not unique to the role of an elected representative. Every employer should be ending the current race to the bottom and asking the same question about how they pay their employees. Politicians are hardly the only ones looking for side hustles to pay their mounting bills. In the case of public office holders, we are the employers — and must lead by example.

Since the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) Callais decision just three weeks ago, the former Confederate states have been in overdrive, using the decision as cover to eliminate any remaining representation for the country’s black population. It is an obvious and total power grab and a constant reminder that the Americans never fully resolved the question that caused their civil war more than 160 years ago.

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

The Redistricting Race To The Bottom

Southern states continue to push redistricting as far and as fast as they can, seemingly for no purpose other than the incessant desire to please an audience of one. First, the table setting: Here’s where things stand tonight…

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a month ago · 1735 likes · 161 comments · Joyce Vance

Trump is what the president of the United States would look like if the Confederate States had comprehensively won that war. He is, in essence, the first Confederate president of the entire union. Everything he does is about enriching himself and his fellow slave-owners, suppressing minorities and those he considers beneath him, and consolidating his own power and wealth.

With the American population turning on him, but his fellow pedophiles, billionaires, and white supremacists wanting to hold on to power, the situation is vastly more dangerous than we allow ourselves to believe.

The MAGA Republicans are openly stealing Congress. Their Supreme Court is enabling them in every way they can, while some of the nation’s top jurists are facing serious allegations of corruption in their own right. And yet, in spite of the plain evidence of all three branches of their government being rotten to the core, there is enough of a subset of the population that still supports them to enable it all.

Just enough.

The Trump administration wants to keep that fervently loyal crowd on board with the promise to these poor uneducated racist folk propping up this fetid government that they, too, can become rich if they are sufficiently loyal to the mad king.

And thus comes his latest project, the details of which started leaking on Friday.

The Treasury department has a slush fund called the Judgment Fund, intended to settle “actual or imminent litigation against the government.”

As you may have heard, Trump has been pursuing a lawsuit against the United States Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion, accusing the government of unauthorised release of his tax information during his first mandate. Of course, he controls the department that has to respond to that suit, and he has no qualms about conflicts of interest. The settlement he is offering is to drop the lawsuit, and use this Judgement Fund instead to pay $1.7 billion out to anyone deemed to have been oppressed by the Biden administration — such as participants the January 6th coup.

They are even calling it a “weaponisation fund.”

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

Paid to Riot

Once political violence becomes financially profitable, democracy enters liquidation…

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a month ago · 286 likes · 16 comments · W. A. Lawrence

January 6th had approximately 1,500 identified participants. $1.7 billion is over $1.1 million per person of government money being prepared to pay directly to those who attempted to seize the federal government.

There is an election this fall that the MAGA Republicans cannot win fairly, and might not even win unfairly. Holding on to power may require violence, if graft and cheating are not sufficient. And the message from the Confederate administration is clear: if you participate on our side, we will protect you and we will reward you. We will even make you rich. So get ready, we’re going to need you.

None of this is by accident. The election this fall will not be normal. Do not expect the United States to restore itself to anything resembling a functional democracy through action limited to electronic ballot boxes that do not even keep proper records. They are preparing to hold on to power by force, and are preparing the brownshirt army to help, in plain sight for all to see.

The American war in Iran may appear to be a bumbling fiasco run by an incompetent administration full of yes-men after the purging of anyone with anything resembling experience or conscience from any position where this could have been prevented. Militarily, the United States has already lost this war, mercifully far more quickly than their defeat in Vietnam, and yet there is no particularly obvious reason to have waged it in the first place.

Unless, of course, the relatively low casualty defeat was the point.

The price of gas has gone through the roof. This will inevitably raise the price of everything else as increasing transportation costs trickle through supply chains. The cost of gas has not gone up with the price of gas, meaning major oil companies are increasing their already obscene profits from their largely domestic supplies. From this perspective, trickle-down economics is a real thing.

Airlines are adding fuel surcharges to deal with rising fuel prices, but are explicitly unwilling to commit to revoking those surcharges should prices come back down. Delta CEO Ed Bastian was quoted as saying as much during an earnings call in April:

Fuel recapture is going to be important no matter what we do, and the degree to which we can retain any of the pricing strength that we talked about from industry rationalization, that will certainly help us boost our margins this year and clearly into next year as well.

In other words, dropping fuel prices with consumers already used to paying the higher rates from the surge will improve their bottom line. It is hard to imagine that grocery chains will be any more charitable.

In order to assuage concerns about high fuel prices, the Canadian government temporarily cut the $.10/litre excise tax on gas. The price drop was immediate at the pumps, and within days was completely erased with further price increases, with the collective taking an ever-smaller cut. The price of gas here in Moncton is now around $1.93 per litre, up about $.60 since the Iran war began — with less of it going to the government, and therefore our future, than before.

The Trump administration, and their Canadian patsies in the Conservative party, have been doing everything they can to kill all forms of renewable energy projects and programs. With this oil price play taking place through the war in Iran, it should be obvious why. Creating a captive market for oil forces the consumers to spend all their money on fossil fuels because the alternatives have been systematically and deliberately destroyed. We are quite literally being forced to sell our future in the interests of short-term profits.

This is not the only way that American policy is fleecing consumers to the benefit of the oligarchs.

Who can forget Donald Trump’s tariffs imposed on most of the world by declaring myriad “emergencies” like Canada being responsible for entirely too much fentanyl smuggling, when the real numbers show that Canada’s contribution to this problem is statistically insignificant, with less than 1% of fentanyl entering the United States from its border. It was simply an excuse — an obvious one — to impose tariffs willy-nilly.

An American court earlier this year declared that this was not legal and ordered a reimbursement of some of those tariffs. This week, some $35.5 billion USD in collected tariff revenue became eligible for reimbursement — to the businesses that passed them on to the consumers rather than to the consumers who paid them.

Yet again, the tariffs had nothing to do with drug or trade policy, and everything to do with robbing the American public to put in the hands of our oligarchy.

We see it over and over again. Mega-corporations like Starbucks, Amazon, and Wal-Mart, to name but a few, have gone to great lengths to fight any prospect of unions organising in their businesses, shutting down facilities rather than allowing anything that might allow their employees to be paid reasonable wages. Their extremely wealthy owners see this as necessary to preserve their wealth, status, and influence.

And that is the point. Every major policy decision coming out of the United States, most of which have consequential impacts on Canada and numerous other countries, are focused a single overarching objective: enriching the rich at the expense of the masses. Social programs are cut for the people while social programs are expanded for the corporations and the oligarchs. Students are drowned in unforgivable debt to make them beholden to this structure before they ever enter the workforce.

There is no amount of money, no amount of power, no amount of influence that these billionaires will ever find sufficient. The very existence of billionaires should offend the sensibility of every other person. There is no rational reason to have that level of wealth, and no ethical way to gain it. Yet few who ever achieve the status of billionaire ever consider how to give back to a society that allowed them to get to that point.

And for those who do, being that wealthy is so self-perpetuating that it is genuinely hard to give it all away. The upward economic syphons are so powerful that being a billionaire is a virtually unstoppable force, once the threshold is crossed.

Consider the case of MacKenzie Scott, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife. In their 2019 divorce, she walked away with an estimated net worth of $38.9 billion. By the end of last year, to her credit, she had made an estimated $26.3 billion in donations to various causes and charities — and, in spite of giving away what would appear to be over two-thirds of her wealth, her net worth is now estimated at $42.7 billion.

If the oligarchs have managed to fix the system this thoroughly to ensure that their limitless wealth continues to grow at rates the rest of us cannot even begin to comprehend, the long-term viability of western democracy and civilisation itself is in obvious and existential danger. There is no such thing as sustainable growth, much less infinite growth, as our resources are ultimately finite. One can ultimately either sustain or grow. At some point, the obscenely rich will reach their physical limits; there will be no working class, no masses to provide still more wealth to them, no assets left that they have not already taken.

This is, in large part, the purpose of the current AI revolution. If a completely broke working class can no longer generate wealth for the oligarchs, perhaps a synthetic work force can replace them. As many have said, the problem AI is being used to solve is not so much knowledge, capacity, or ability — it is wages. It is a huge waste of the phenomenal potential of that technology, which could and should instead be used for the betterment of all.

The two most dangerous types of people are those with everything to lose and those with nothing to lose. At some point, when everyone left falls into one of those two categories, these two discrete groups will come to a head and there is no predicting the outcome of that conflict.

We can be reasonably sure, though, that the price of gas will no longer be of significant consequence when it is over.

Among her past roles were Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the UN Secretary General’s special representative for international migration. This is hardly a comprehensive list.

As our head of state, she is everything that Donald Trump is not. She stands against everything he is. And as neighbouring heads of state, the contrast is a signal to the rest of the world of what we believe and where we stand as a country.

Rare is it for me to disagree with Matt Gurney, who has taken the public but very narrow view that Arbour’s appointment is a missed opportunity to placate Alberta’s foreign-funded separatists by having a Governor General from the province.

The Line

Matt Gurney: Not choosing an Albertan to be GG is an alarmingly obvious missed opportunity

By: Matt Gurney…

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a month ago · 110 likes · 188 comments · Matt Gurney

Who would have been the right choice from Alberta, of equal value and impact to one of the most respected names in international justice? Former Edmonton Liberal MP Anne McLellan? Former NDP premier Rachel Notley? Former Minister and national advisor on LGTBQ2+ issues Randy Boissonnault? All would be qualified public figures from the province, but none would placate the joint Russian-American operation to break up Canada through amplifying Albertan feelings of ‘alienation’.

Perhaps the appointment of Danielle Smith would have been better — it would solve two problems at once, removing her from her destructive leadership of the province while offering an olive branch to the movement she leads with vague and unconvincing efforts at plausible deniability. We might soon find out, through her, though, that disallowance is still a technical power belonging to the Governor General, and she could just as easily refuse to assent to federal legislation.

Perhaps, then, the best approach to picking our head of state who holds technically real, if only theoretical, power, is to choose someone who has genuinely served the country, the world, and the rule of law. Where she is from within Canada is irrelevant. For this role, what matters is that she is from Canada and represents the best of what Canada has to offer.

Arbour is known internationally for indicting sitting heads of state for war crimes, and for the prosecution of sexual violence as a crime against humanity. She rose to international prominence for the indictment of sitting Serbian president Slobodan Milošević on those charges.

Arbour is known for her tenure as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, where, as CBC noted this week, she took a decidedly progressive position on issues such as marijuana, noting in a 2003 dissenting opinion:

A law that has the potential to imprison a person whose conduct causes little or no reasoned risk of harm to others offends the principles of fundamental justice.

After her tenure on the Supreme Court, one of few justices to retire from the role voluntarily before their mandatory retirement, she went off to the United Nations as the High Commissioner for Human Rights and then as the Secretary General’s special representative on mass migration.

Every aspect of her career is a poke in the eye of Donald Trump, and an obvious contrast to who Pierre Poilievre might have appointed in his idolatry of Trump.

First, opposite the world’s leading misogynist, Canada has appointed a profoundly accomplished woman to the role of head of state — our third in a row.

But her accomplishments systematically counter everything the American dictator is attempting to do.

She defends democracy. She defends human rights. She defends minority rights. She upholds the law. She prosecutes war crimes. She prosecutes sexual crimes as crimes against humanity. She defends the rights of migrants. She will now hold and demonstrate those values in the name of an actual, rather than aspiring, King.

Each and every one of these points is in direct abject contrast to Donald Trump, and is a statement to the world of where we stand relative to our neighbour.

Her appointment as the King’s representative in Canada is a statement of how Canadians see ourselves, how we want to present ourselves on the world stage, and who we want to be. It matters a whole lot more than which province she is from.

If we want to know where we’d be on the world stage in the alternate universe of the 2025 election having gone the way it looked like it would, we can clearly see it here.

The invitation to attend the EPC Summit in Yerevan, Armenia is a reminder of Carney’s immense respect on the world stage, earned over an impressive career of repeatedly being in the right place at the right time to solve problems created by the right wing. But it is also a warning that Canada’s place in the world does not automatically follow his eventual departure. Carney has a history of coming in, cleaning up a mess — and moving on to the next problem.

He was central to Canada’s role in mitigating the 2008 crash for our own citizens. He softened the crash-landing of Britain’s masochistic experiment in detaching itself from European unity. He stopped Poilievre in his magalomaniacal tracks and is rapidly reshaping Canada’s alliances and economy to be resistant to a collapsing American empire.

He will no doubt be courted elsewhere as soon as he gives the vaguest indication of being ready. Perhaps somewhere like the United Nations, where current Secretary General António Guterres is approaching the end of his second five-year term, as the international rules-based order faces its biggest test in generations — another right-wing catastrophe that will require someone serious to fix.

It is hard to clearly state whether Canada was invited to Yerevan, or if Mark Carney was invited, and where the line between the two is drawn. But we can answer the question with a greater degree of certainty by simply asking: under what other circumstances would Canada have been there?

It is hard to know for sure, but it would be hard to imagine Pierre Poilievre being at the European Political Community Summit talking about rebuilding the world order out of Europe. Rather, in spite of a stunning, comprehensive, and continuing rebuke by the people of Canada, he continues to double down not only on disinformation and personality attacks against those who defeated him, but in expressly aligning with our economic and political adversaries.

Annie Koshy

🔴Pierre Poilievre, Mike Pompeo, Pete Hoekstra and Danielle Smith Walk Into a Conference. This Is Not a Punchline.🔴

From May 6 to 9, the Westin Hotel in Ottawa will host the Canada Strong and Free Network’s annual conference, billed as the largest conservative networking event in Canada. The feature speakers are Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Official Opposition, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, former United States Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, an…

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a month ago · 56 likes · 22 comments · Annie Koshy

Poilievre has been attacking the Prime Minister for being “poorly educated in economics” in spite of his Harvard and Oxford degrees in economics, and his success running two central banks, an investment bank, and a country. One wonders what his standard would be for a well-educated economist. The point, though, is to attack credibility, to poison the well of public debate, and to cast doubt on the very idea of expertise. It is in line with his attacks on vaccines and science and climate change.

On that point, there was a third conference that mattered this week, one that not nearly enough people are talking about. Colombia hosted the “First Conference on Transitioning away from Fossil Fuels” attended by, according to Carbon Brief, 57 countries: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, the EU, the Federated States of Micronesia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Kenya, Luxembourg, Malawi, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, México, Mongolia, the Netherlands, Nepal, Nigeria, Norway, New Zealand, Palau, Panama, the Philippines, Portugal, Saint Lucia, Senegal, Singapore, Slovenia, the Solomon Islands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Turkey, Tuvalu, Uganda, the UK, Uruguay, Vanuatu, the Vatican, and Vietnam.

While, like so many environmental conferences before it, the result was mostly an agreement to keep talking with little in the way of concrete action, we should not take Canada’s presence for granted. We are a major producer of fossil fuels and, as we know, there is far too little interest in this country in progressing from that position. China has effectively used its vast coal resources to convert to an economy increasingly built on renewable energy. Canada has used our vast fuel reserves to… well, there are no great accomplishments that we have funded with that revenue.

Conspicuously absent from the list of attendees is the United States of America. But under an only slightly different result in last year’s elections, it is easy to imagine Canada also being absent.

We cannot take Canada’s current respect and position on the global stage for granted. It may be popular to say that Canada is the new leader of the free world and to bask in the international glow and respect of our Prime Minister, but it can all change on a dime if we allow the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre to undo all that work. That can happen in the blink of an election.

As the Canada Strong and Free Network’s own conference clearly demonstrates, Pierre Poilievre is more than happy to show that he is subservient to the CIA and the American Ambassador, and will enthusiastically take Canada right there with him.

Concis Canada

Canada Is No Longer Watching Europe Rebuild the World

And what a stage to choose…

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a month ago · 73 likes · 13 comments · Shankar Narayan

What concerns me most is that we dodged this for ourselves by the skin of our teeth, and the risk has not fully passed. When I look at the MAGA-led disaster of the United States contrasted with Canada’s rising star, I am proud of my country and angry for my neighbours. We take our current position for granted, but, to borrow from an ancient proverb, ‘there, but for the grace of just enough voters, goes Canada.’

This single sentence seems to a comprehensive summary of the state of the United States today, with widespread cognitive dissonance, competing incompatible worldviews, and geopolitical fault lines that run across the entire country.

The King of England and, lest we forget, Canada tore much of it open with classic understated British humour in a 15-minute speech that went both literally and figuratively over the president’s head. It is worth listening to in its entirety.

There are two wildly competing realities in the United States. One pretends that the country is a model for democracy and freedom on the world stage — and already you are not completely sure which side I am referring to. Both claim the moral high ground on these issues, yet both often ignore and reinterpret the history for their own purposes.

After intervening economically, politically, and militarily in dozens of other countries throughout its history in the classic style of so many empires before it, the country has reached the inevitable kakistocratic death throes that can be expected when the Peter Principle is applied to the structure of an entire nation.

The great defenders of democracy have killed, in every sense of the word, more than a few democracies that did not choose to follow the American way or work in American interests. Iran and Chile are good examples, with the Shah and Pinochet being American preferences rather than the peoples’ choices.

After having free rein on the world, a significant portion of the population believes that the country is all-knowing and all-powerful, allowing someone like Trump who expressly does whatever the hell he wants with no understanding of nor interest in the consequences of his actions to take its reins. The country has, after generations of accomplishment, been promoted to its level of incompetence.

The Existentialist Republic

Latest SCOTUS Ruling Has People Asking "Are We Headed Toward Balkanizing and Becoming the States of the Former USA?

The Supreme Court just gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. If the federal government no longer guarantees that a Black voter in Alabama and a Black voter in Minnesota have the same rights at the ballot box, what country are we actually living in…

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a month ago · 589 likes · 138 comments · Christopher Armitage

In the American public discourse, there is a school of thought that believes the constitution, the cornerstone of their democracy, was written only for white people. That school of thought is not ephemeral or incidental, it is at the core of the entire administration today, and much of its support. They call themselves originalists, and then-law student Preston Damsky’s highly controversial paper on the topic asserting it is worthy of study, not only because of its profound implications for a ‘final solution’ level of racial purity for the United States, but because of the reaction it received since its 2024 release.

The paper argued that “We the people” in the American constitution only applied to white Americans, and for “shoot to kill” orders to be issued to prevent the “criminal” invasion of foreigners at the border, stating: “Criminal infiltration of the southern border has drastically increased in recent years, further accelerating the People’s dispossession.” A few parapraphs later, after setting up the implication that immigrants are criminal: “Thus, courts should order the federal government to militarize the border, begin construction of border defenses and barriers, and issue arrest or shoot to kill orders targeting criminal infiltrators at the border.”

His paper resulted in both an award being issued by the professor of his course, Trump-appointed judge John Badalamenti, and his expulsion from the university — which was overturned in court. It is a near perfect metaphor for the divisions we see.

What the people sharing those views actually hope to accomplish was spelled out, in painfully clear detail, in Project 2025, and has been systematically carried out since.

David Graham

Are you familiar with Project 2025?

If you haven’t been following social media closely since the American presidential debate two weeks ago, you are probably not familiar with Project 2025. It is imperative that you fix that; the project, led by a team of former President Trump staffers, aims to reform the United States of America into a fundamentalist Christian nation, on the level of th…

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2 years ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

When these people talk about spreading democracy and freedom around the world, it is important to understand who they believe democracy applies to, and what freedom means to them. It should make us ask ourselves if we are sure of exactly what it is that we are defending when we speak of democracy, and if the message is received the way we intend it.

It takes us back to how we end up with the British monarch, whose own royal lineage has been documented across 12 centuries and 37 generations, apparently credibly defending democracy in a speech celebrating the independence of a nation from the alleged tyranny of his own ancestors.

I say it should be rather than it is because the source of Canada’s funds differs from the world’s best known fund, Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global. Norway, with a national population similar to the province of Alberta, has been putting profits aside from its oil since 1990. In just 36 years, the fund has grown to 20 trillion Norwegian Krone, about $3 trillion Canadian dollars — comparable to Canada’s entire GDP.

In Canada, our natural resources are provincial, and we have a long-running habit of nationalising the investment and expenses while privatising the profit from their exploitation. Alberta alone has an estimated 170,000 abandoned oil wells, over 10,000 of which are classified as orphan wells, whose cleanup will ultimately fall back on the government. Capitalists like to call this type of expense redirection “externalising” — that is, the profits are internal in the moment, while the residual expenses are left to an external entity, generally the government which, of course, is all of us.

David Graham

Make Alberta Great Again

Canada is facing an existential threat from an unhinged neighbour intent on destroying our sovereignty to plunder our resources. The Alberta separatist movement is not some great defender of either; they are useful idiots to those who threaten our country…

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5 months ago · 19 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

Staying with Alberta, the province built a sovereign wealth fund starting in 1976 using small amounts of their resource royalties, then promptly squandered it. The “Heritage Savings Trust Fund” has not grown appreciably over the 50 years since its inception, when inflation is factored in. Counting only inflation, the $2.1 billion initial investment deposited in its first year alone would be worth $11.1 billion today. With oil revenues being fed in only until 1987, the fund reached less than $19 billion by 2022. After a half a century, it now holds about $32 billion in assets, much of the recent growth of which is from direct financial contributions from the government, rather than from any particular long term strategy.

Norway’s fund started 14 years later based on similar rates of oil production with a population of similar size and is worth 100 times as much as Alberta’s. The only real difference is attitude, and Alberta offers a cautionary tale.

From the get-go, it is clear that the “Canada Strong Fund” will not be the same as Norway’s Government Pension Fund. The federal government does not have direct access to resource royalties. It is also clear from who is creating it that the inspiration comes from a far more practical — and profitable — place.

While the Conservatives regularly deride Prime Minister Carney for his background at Brookfield Asset Management while also investing in the same, this is one time that private corporate experience may truly benefit the public.

Between the Lines Canada

Canada Strong Fund: A New Public Investment Model Takes Shape

Reader orientation…

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a month ago · 25 likes · 12 comments · Leni Spooner

With an initial investment of $25 billion over three years in borrowed public funds, the Prime Minister appears to be intending to create a public version of Brookfield. While it might be remarkably profitable for the government simply to hand over $25 billion to Brookfield to invest on the public’s behalf, and no doubt there have been internal joking about saving time, energy, and money by doing exactly that, it would obviously not fly.

From the government’s own press release explaining the fund:

Designed to give all Canadians a direct stake in the Build Canada agenda, it is a Government of Canada fund, but, more importantly, a fund that belongs to all Canadians. The Fund will invest in strategic Canadian projects and companies alongside other investors—with a clear objective to achieve commercial returns to build the wealth of Canada.

The gamble is that the fund will make money at a faster rate than the interest we are paying on the initial investment. It is also being set up in a way that Canadians can invest in it directly, not only through the collective, growing the fund and its power. In other words, it really is intended to be a public version of Brookfield.

While the whole idea of “passive” or “investment” income is a myth I will come back to in a moment, the idea that Canada will deliberately and consistently put money aside to create a national endowment fund is nothing short of exciting, and the risk is far more political than it is financial.

Concis Canada

Canada’s Sovereign Wealth Turn.

This is not an apples-to-apples comparison…

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a month ago · 5 likes · Shankar Narayan

The key will be putting in safeguards to make sure that future governments don’t look at the fund as a kitty to be raided rather than a growing fund from which the profits are meant to be invested more than spent. I have great faith that Mark Carney will be a conscientious steward of this fund. I have no doubt, on the other hand, that a subsequent Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre would drain it into general revenues in an election year and claim to have balanced the budget.

We also have to consider that investment income, passive income, or whatever other term you want to use for it is, for the most part, not a real thing. That income comes from the extracted value of the labour or resources of others. Somewhere along the chain of money is someone doing the work and keeping less than its value, or there will be nothing to kick upstairs to the investor. This, and borrowing non-existent money through fractional reserve banking, is at the very core of capitalism.

Rental properties offer passive income for the landlord, but the income for the tenant required to feed that “passive” income is decidedly active. Coca-Cola famously pays more to Warren Buffet in dividends than it does in salary to its own CEO, but every dollar of that comes from a supply chain made up of working people producing and distributing the products coupled with consumers spending money they had to work to earn, to create that money. Resource revenue requires resource development, resource extraction, resource distribution, and finally resource consumption, which actively feeds money back into that system.

Canada is vastly overdue a sovereign wealth fund, and it has enormous potential for Canada if developed and managed properly, in both a business and an ethical sense. It must be future-proofed, with a lifetime measured in generations, not election cycles.

For it to truly create collective sovereign wealth, we have to remember that the most important shareholder in this fund, regardless of private investors who get on board, is the country as a whole. Any wealth extracted through this collective investment must serve the singular purpose of collective benefit over individual profit.

That will be the key distinction between the Canada Strong Fund and private firms like Brookfield.

It speaks to the naive gullibility of MAGA supporters and their ilk. According to reports, the student who invented this highly profitable identity also tried to create an equivalent liberal influencer — which flopped.

If this for-profit astroturfing sounds unreasonable or unbelievable, or that Canadians would not fall for such fake and politically charged AI slop, consider what is happening in Alberta with the ostensibly rising separatist movement there.

Or not there. Just a little further east.

Well, quite a bit further east.

The Alberta separatist movement’s social media epicentre, as CBC exposed this week, is in the Netherlands. Videos made with voice actors and racking up tens of millions of views are being produced by around 20 YouTube channels in that country.

Between the Lines Canada

Alberta’s Separation Videos Aren’t Being Made by Albertans. A CBC Investigation Just Proved It.

The videos telling Albertans separation is inevitable? Made in the Netherlands. For profit…

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2 months ago · 50 likes · 17 comments · Leni Spooner

It is not hard to connect the dots between who would pay for such an oddly specific social media campaign, and who wants to break up Canada to get out resources. Funding foreign astroturf media campaigns serves the purposes of the same people who take advantage of naive MAGA support in the United States to profit.

While the American government systematically dismantles what’s left of the middle class and its senior officials — or unofficials, in some cases — accept foreign bribes by the billions of dollars in the guise of negotiating internationally, the world’s billionaires are getting richer by leaps and bounds. Right wing supporters are simply too easily fooled to catch on, as “Emily Hart” once again demonstrated.

While “Emily” was a project for a student to make money to pay his bills, Alberta separatism is an American project to steal Canada’s natural resources at firesale prices while convincing us that it is in our own interests.

Dean Blundell

BREAKING: Multiple Sources say the U.S. Ambassador to Canada is Actively "In The Loop" With Trump-aligned/Funded Separatists In Alberta

There is a lie being told to Canadians — not loudly, not recklessly, but carefully and with intent…

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4 months ago · 1395 likes · 106 comments · Dean Blundell

While Alberta premier Danielle Smith appears to being falling for it, it is hard not to wonder what she sees in it for herself. Given her association with shining Conservative lights like Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, and Conrad Black and her efforts to bring about a referendum on Alberta separation, it is far more on-brand to consider that she may not be falling for anything, does not actually care about Alberta’s future, and is pursuing her traitorous work to undermine Canada for personal reasons.

Her close friend and ally Pierre Poilievre has made bread-and-butter issues like our rising grocery prices the mainstay of his messaging, but this week, when presented with an opportunity to address truth in grocery pricing and accountability in the industry, his entire party voted with the grocers.

BC Liberal MP Gurbux Saini introduced a simple private member’s bill entitled “An Act to establish a national framework to improve food price transparency” whose summary reads:

This enactment provides for the development of a national framework respecting grocery pricing and unit price display practices. It also sets out reporting requirements in relation to the framework.

The bill does exactly what it says. It is simple and to the point. But if you listen to the Conservatives tell it, holding grocery chains accountable for the price gouging and deceptive practices many use will simply add red tape and hurt the consumer.

What do “Emily Hart”, Danielle Smith, Pierre Poilievre have in common?

They all prey on people who react emotionally and accept easy-to-swallow sound-bites that have little to do with reality, who don’t take the time or effort to consider whether what they are seeing or hearing is logical, coherent, or in any way truthful.

For many on the right, the very term “thinking critically” is taken with the emphasis on the wrong word. For them, it is built around the verb ‘to criticise’ rather than ‘to think’.

The real world consequences of this gullible naivety, though, are critical. The Americans get unnecessary wars, Canada’s unity, sovereignty, and resources are threatened, and our grocery prices bound out of control — all to the profit of the oligarchs, who most assuredly do not have our best interests at heart.

It is happening again this week, with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s announcement that luxury properties worth over $5 million in the city, which are not used as their primary residence, will be taxed. Reaction from right-leaning people who will never set foot in any such unit, much less own one as a secondary property, is as comical as it is terrifying.

We have seen it over the years in Canada, too. When Justin Trudeau, near the end of his tenure as Prime Minister, planned to raise taxes on capital gains over $250,000, much of the public screamed over the idea of taxes being raised. How many of those objecting will ever make $250,000 in capital gains in a given tax year is not clear, but those upset about it greatly exceeded those impacted by it. The opposition was driven by right-wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Those impacted by it would have been paying taxes on an additional 16.66% of the profit on their sale, at the top marginal tax rate of 33%. In other words, it would be a 5.5% tax on windfall sales of capital assets, and at that only on the amount above $250,000 in a given tax year. Someone making $500,000 in capital gains in a single fiscal year would have paid up to an additional $13,750 in federal income tax — just 2.75% of that profit. Someone selling their primary residence would generally not be impacted at all, no matter the profit.

Ask the average voter, though, and this proposed policy would have chased off professionals and investors, bankrupted the people, and crashed the Canadian economy as part of an unwarranted wild tax grab by a greedy federal government. It was fed by overstated dire media warnings about how it would impact vast numbers of Canadians. Avoiding the issue altogether, the new Prime Minister promptly cancelled the policy within days of taking in office.

Often, I am told by individuals in conversation that they will support anyone who will lower their taxes, but most have little idea of their own tax burden, what they get for it, or how it is shared across society. Reminding them that the great accomplishments of the 20th century happened when upper tax brackets were over 70% puzzles them, if they believe it at all.

David Graham

The Philanthropy Myth

In a properly functioning society, charity would not need to exist. Food banks, medical foundations, historical societies, and so many other groups and organisations we take for granted as normal charitable organisations are universally a symbol of the failure of our social imagination, a logical conclusion of the common view of government as a negative…

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a year ago · 18 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

It is the inevitable result of reframing each of us not as a citizen, but as nothing more than a “taxpayer.” The modern use of the term “taxpayer," as with the pro-life movement and our cultural imperative to tip people who are not properly paid to serve customers, has its origins in American post-civil war segregationist racism, as explained by Camille Walsh in a 2021 Mother Jones article:

The taxpayer myth has deep roots, and throughout history it has been intertwined with the idea that all forms of resources from the government belong to white people, to do with as they please.

It makes sense, of course. Those who advocate against paying taxes often frame it around the idea that the poor, code for somehow undeserving minorities, will take disproportionate advantage of the resources of the commons. This is not incidental, it is fundamental to the discussion. Few people object to being the beneficiary of government programs, but many object to those beneficiaries including people they deem as inferior — who they describe as “taxeaters.”

As President Lyndon B. Johnson observed during the civil rights movement:

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

It is a critical observation. The right wing, those who opposed civil rights, abortion rights, living wages, and promote the idea that we are all just taxpayers being drained for the benefit of the racially inferior, have built their movement around this concept. They object to DEI policies because these completely undermine the core philosophy that they are fundamentally the better and more important human beings. It is also why they have no objection to the obscene amounts our governments spend on corporate welfare, given who overwhelming run corporations.

White supremacist conservatives have the strongest fundraising machines and a dedicated support that could be described as tribal rather than philosophical among those described by LBJ, and for the reasons described. Their supporters are more than happy to take government hand-outs for themselves provided that others do not get the same treatment.

David Graham

Progressives Lack Ambition

Since the advent of Reaganomics and the rise of the neoliberal movement, the working class in the west have fallen ever-further behind the obscenely rich. We, collectively, have the resources to end homelessness and hunger in our countries. We have the ability to end child poverty, make higher education and public transit free, switch our entire energy …

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9 months ago · 14 likes · David Graham

Those funding these movements and the disinformation environment that feeds them do not necessarily feel the same way — but they do see the structural advantage of a divided population where the poor fight the poorer on racial grounds instead of understanding the actual source of the financial pressures they are enduring.

This class of divided and poorly informed citizens have become so dominant in our political discourse that the so-called “left” in both Canada and the United States are often afraid to substantively challenge them on the fundamental idea of tax fairness or the root causes of the inequities we see. Meanwhile the oligarchs behind the division laugh at their useful-idiot support all the way to the bank.

Mamdani is on the right track. It is time to start dealing head-on with the ever-decreasing contributions our hoarders make to the collective while hiding their money in tax shelters, offering performative philanthropy, and fomenting opportunistic social and racial division to divert attention from their plunder.

The New York mayor’s proposed “pied-à-terre” tax is part of a 375-page document called the “New York City Preliminary Racial Equity Plan.” It is no wonder the modern right and their supporters are so up in arms; it goes against everything they stand for.

In a leaked recording, the now-defeated aspiring Hungarian dictator, Viktor Orbán, compared himself to the mouse in the Aesop fable “the lion and the mouse” as he offered unlimited assistance to Vladimir Putin.

In the full transcript of the October 17th conversation, translated and released by Bloomberg, he is reported to have said:

Vladimir, first of all it is a great honor for us. Of course we are friends. Our friendship began in 2009, when you received me at the St. Petersburg library. But yesterday our friendship rose to such a high level that I can help in any way — there is a story in our Hungarian picture books where a mouse helps a lion. [Both laugh.] I am ready to help immediately.

It is good that we can meet again, because after COVID we have not had regular meetings; before the pandemic we met almost every year. I am very pleased that we can have a personal meeting again. In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.

The context is as devastating as the words. Their conversation was following a call between Orbán and American president Donald Trump the previous day, in which the Americans had suggested meeting the Russians in Budapest. Putin was already aware of the suggestion, noting in the same conversation:

According to Donald, Budapest is a suitable venue for such meetings because Viktor Orbán is a friend of both of us.

Indeed, Orbán’s Hungary was the Russian-backed model Trump was following for the systematic destruction of American democratic institutions.

The link between Orbán and Putin illustrated by that call, and the link between Orbán and Trump illustrated by last week’s campaign visit to Hungary by American vice president JD Vance, clearly show the strength and nature of this destructive alliance.

Under Orbán, NATO has been obstructed, Europe has been weakened, the defence of Ukraine has been impacted, but, most importantly, Hungary has become the poorest nation in the European Union.

None of this is by accident. The modus operandi of the global hard right movement is to drain resources from entire nations to feed the insatiable appetites of their oligarchs. It is the pursuit of a society split between owners and workers, a return to the worst of medieval feudalism.

A population will not willingly become so subservient without motivation — or an enemy on which to blame for their incipient subservience. In the United States, the war in Iran is designed to create a distracting emergency. The rush to throw racial minorities and immigrants into concentration camps for deportation is about creating the scapegoat around the pain caused by a country whose minimum wage has stayed at $7.25 per hour since before even Orbán came to power. Accounting for inflation, $7.25 US today is the equivalent of just $4.71 US in 2009 dollars, the year the $7.25 rate was set, a real loss of over one third of its effective value. The American oligarchy will not stop pushing this down further until the majority of the population are living in shanties, as the continued drop in real wages amid rising housing costs pressure the working class to do literally anything to survive.

If there is any doubt as to the link between the feudalist movements of Hungary and the United States, Donald Trump publicly endorsed Viktor Orbán in last weekend’s election at the same time as vice president JD Vance went to Hungary to campaign for him while complaining, without any sense of irony, of foreign interference in their election.

The good news in all this is that the voters are on to the movement. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre’s obvious kinship with his brothers-in-oligarchy in the US lost last year’s election, after being the presumed winner for the previous year. All it took was Canadians understanding his relationship with and sympathy for Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

In Hungary, in spite of 16 years of efforts to suppress the opposition vote and destroy the country’s democratic institutions, the people came out to vote in such vast numbers that even Viktor Orbán could not pretend to have won the election. Nearly 80% of eligible voters cast ballots giving the opposition over two thirds of the seats in their legislature, enough to systematically undo the damage caused by Orbán’s overtly fascist government.

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

Hungary Triggered the Countdown. Trump's Regime Has Already Peaked and the Fall Has Begun.

John Everett Millais, The North-West Passage (1874). Empires often look strongest just before the thaw…

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2 months ago · 46 likes · 5 comments · W. A. Lawrence

In the United States, the MAGA team have been systematically trying to suppress votes and steal this fall’s mid-term elections. The SAVE voter suppression act is intended to keep voters who oppose the MAGA movement away from the polls, and the high turnout and high impact of Hungary’s election is an object lesson in why this matters. An election can only be won by those who can vote. Limit who can vote and you can limit who can win. Taking away this destructive incentive is the principle reason voting should be mandatory.

If the American population follows the Canadian and Hungarian leads in dispensing with their oligarchy and cutting short the path to western feudalism, the opposition may well be strong enough to defeat the MAGA movement this fall with enough force that there can be no pretending otherwise. If Orbán can be forced to concede, maybe even Trump could be forced to acknowledge that the end has arrived.

Defeating Orbán and Trump, though, will not end the problem unless it is dealt with properly and thoroughly. The path to atonement for the United States on the international stage exists, but it is bumpy, and it is not clear that it will be followed.

Those who enabled Orbán and Trump will need to be brought to swift and thorough justice. It is often said that the MAGA movement is a result of the enslavers of the Confederacy never coming to justice for causing the American civil war. It is not too late to right that wrong this time around.

The administration must be held accountable for their war crimes, their crimes against humanity, their theft of national resources, their suppression of rights, and every specific crime committed by everyone at every level of the government. No ICE agent who participated in an illegal raid, imprisonment, or assault should be spared. No oligarch who abused their financial power to destroy the working class should be allowed to keep their obscene wealth. No supreme court justice who gave license to the president to commit crimes with impunity while hiding behind the presidential seal should be allowed to remain on the bench and out of prison for such patent corruption.

David Graham

Eventually, There Will Be Another Nuremberg

The United States is considering requiring the submission of five years of social media history in order to apply for an Electronic System for Travel Authorization form, a de facto visa that many countries, including Canada, now require. There is no obvious reason to gather the vast quantities of data that would involve, in the current American context…

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6 months ago · 21 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

There can be no moving on as a society unless all of this happens. We cannot allow structures to remain in place, nor our desire to forgive and forget to overwhelm the justice that is required.

Those who seek to destroy democracy, to restore the feudalism of an era we rightly call the Dark Ages, an age of obscene wealth and obscene poverty, must be brought to heel or these defeats will be little more than Pyrrhic victories, granting the oligarchs enough time and space to regroup and come back harder in the next election cycle.

Democracy is fickle. Freedom is not a given. Rights are not guaranteed. Justice is not automatic. It will take a whole population to fix this if we want to prevent it from ever happening again.

As a practical matter, a majority parliament will still largely function as a minority until the majority asserts itself to remake committees. This will be a messy bit of sausage making that will permanently alter the tone in the House of Commons.

The House’s permanent committees each currently have ten members — 5 Liberal, 4 Conservative, and 1 Bloc, except the four committees traditionally chaired by the opposition which have only 4 Liberal members each. This gives the Conservatives and the Bloc together the majority on all committees. This impacts motions, studies, legislation, witness lists, reports, and all the work parliamentary committees do.

To operate as the majority they now have, the Liberal government will have to assert their majority on committees, either increasing the Liberals to 6 members per committee, or, more likely, reducing the Conservatives to 3. This can be done through a motion in the House, which can be debated extensively and will face plenty of dilatory — literally, ‘intended to cause delay’ — motions. You might even see an unscheduled fire drill in West Block, one of the more extreme obstruction tactics observed in the past that can never be quite proven to be anything more than a fascinating coincidence.

It isn’t likely to happen until the three new MPs are sworn in, which is probably about two weeks away. While the government is insisting that they will continue to work across party lines even with a majority, it is unlikely the opposition will go along for that ride. The House is just starting a four-week stretch, and until Tatiana Auguste, Doly Begum, and Danielle Martin are paraded into the chamber in the middle of it, we can expect an uneasy peace as everyone waits for the first shot to be fired.

Once the motion to restructure committees is tabled, and until it is dealt with, the House of Commons will all but cease to function as opposition-controlled committees continue to assert their majorities while they still have them, and opposition parties performatively fight tooth and nail in the chamber to prevent that from changing. In an instant, legislation will come to a grinding halt. Committees will become completely dysfunctional until their restructuring is complete.

In order to end the impasse, the government will be obligated to bring in closure, forcing an end to the debate and bringing about a vote on the motion which, from a practical standpoint, is inevitable in the circumstances.

In that moment, the opposition will begin screaming bloody murder. They will claim that the Mark Carney government, which crossed the line into a majority through last night’s by-elections, bringing them to a majority endorsed by a majority of Canadians in polls, is somehow illegitimate. They will claim that the government is abusing its new-found power, and is somehow anti-democratic. They will accuse the government of stifling debate.

David Graham

That One-Seat Difference

One feature Prime Minister Mark Carney offers Canada more than almost any other is a sense of control and stability. He is on the cusp of capturing the majority government that the general election did not provide just a year ago, as three by-elections follow a fourth floor-crossing. What does it mean for us…

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3 months ago · 12 likes · 3 comments · David Graham

With it all, Pierre Poilievre will get what he actually wants: an end to any form of accountability. Facing a majority, he can exercise his one skill — to oppose with impunity. There will be no need to negotiate, no requirement for Conservative members to suddenly find themselves facing technical problems while trying to vote from behind the curtains to prevent an unintended election. His team will no longer have a reason to compromise on legislation or find a way to make committees work.

He will get what he craves most: a toxic Parliamentary work environment where all collaboration and compromise can come to an unceremonious end. And, with it, the prospect of three years of unhinged badgering of the government in an attempt to break their honeymoon.

To get to this point, Poilievre has chased four members of his own caucus out through his obstinance. Chris d’Entremont, Michael Ma, Matt Jeneroux, and Marilyn Gladu all abandoned the Conservatives for the Liberals between November and April, joined by Lori Idlout who crossed from the NDP in the same period. Without them, this majority would not yet exist.

When Marilyn Gladu and Lori Idlout both cross the floor to join the same Liberal caucus, you know the government is on to something. At the Liberal convention in Montreal, nobody pretended that what is happening in the United States is normal, or that things will ever go back to the way they were. It has given partisans on all sides a serious degree of pause, an opening to become serious.

There is a palpable sense that the country is bigger than any one political party, that the moment we are living requires a certain gravitas that the normal cut and thrust of our politics does not offer.

In normal times politics often degrades into a team sport rather than a values proposition. The Conservatives in particular make the whole game of politics about the unity of their team — their tribe, even — take precedence over any deeply philosophical purpose beyond helping that team.

David Graham

Poilievre's Vision: Oppose Everything. Always.

Pierre Poilievre’s latest nation-building idea is a doozie: cancel Alto, the high speed rail link under development for the Quebec City-Toronto corridor. It is not clear why the Conservatives are so intent on keeping us in the dark ages of public infrastructure, but it is clear that if Poilievre sees any form of opposition to a government initiative any…

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2 months ago · 51 likes · 4 comments · David Graham

This time, it is different. In the face of unprecedented foreign threats, Canada has itself become the team. Members of Parliament and Canadians in general with diverse backgrounds and values are coming together with a unity of purpose.

For the Conservatives who still back Poilievre, the American threat is not visible. It is not viscerally understood in the way it is through the rest of Canada. They cannot see it, because the MAGA movement remains integral to the Conservative team; it is precisely who they want to help.

As they continue to see our national politics as little more than a domestic team sport, where winning is their only objective and that at any cost, they will do everything in their power to make Parliament dysfunctional. They will try to paint the Liberal government as illegitimate and undemocratic, and do everything possible to prove it.

The now-majority Liberal government will have the power to act decisively in these unprecedented times, but the spirit of unity that is driving the country forward will be under constant attack. There will be little in the way of the much-needed constructive debate that would be offered by an opposition that is offering an alternative rather than an obstruction. The unhinged toxicity that we experienced from the Conservatives through the Trudeau years will be back with a vengeance, but this time the stakes are higher.

While Carney’s majority government can get down to the serious and difficult work required, Poilievre’s team sees running Canada as little more than a game.

The first is elected: the House of Commons. It exists to bring representatives of every local community together to solve our common problems and guide the country, with renewable mandates requiring constant local engagement. It is their job, first and foremost, to operate as a permanent citizens assembly specifically there to guide our country, plan the use and distribution of our common resources, and look for solutions to the problems identified by the people.

The second is not elected. We call it the Senate. It is an assembly of citizens that exists as a house of “sober second thought.” The sobriety referenced is not from a lack of alcohol. It is from the sober position of having no outside considerations. Senators are appointed for life so that they owe no political favour, free from obligate party direction, away from the influences of donors who may have an interest in the decisions they make, unaffected by the need to plan a source of income after leaving office that may otherwise prevent votes or actions that might impact potential employers.

David Graham

The trouble with electoral reform

The question of electoral reform is one I have been passionate about since the 2007 referendum in Ontario, and a file I have been active on for the entire period. I won't dive into it too deeply unless there is an appetite to discuss it further, as my experience in this matter is that most people who have an opinion on the matter of electoral reform are…

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3 years ago · 5 likes · David Graham

Forcing a citizens assembly to exist, and worse, giving them a mandate to find a way to implement a form of proportional representation is an insult, not a complement, to our democratic processes. Proportional representation trades representation for proportionality. Having members elected purely on the basis of a political party devalues their individual ability to represent their electors. It trades local representation for an abstract idea of fairness.

Under the most commonly advocated mixed-member proportional system, more than half of our MPs continue to be selected by the single member plurality system we already use, which PR advocates claim is broken. The other half are topped up by the party based on the party’s collective support. Not only does this not solve the problems alleged with “first past the post,” it adds the problem of creating Members of Parliament whose existence is entirely at the whim of the party, who do not have any independence of thought or representation. They don’t even need to return constituents’ phone calls because their only actual constituents are at the office of the political party they represent.

Another common solution offered, multi-member ridings, will be devastating to rural Canada. While we cite small European countries with PR as success stories, Canada is a vast expanse of land. Many of our ridings are larger than many European countries. When I served, my riding of Laurentides—Labelle was 19,693 square kilometres. It was the 46th largest riding in the country. Had it been in Europe, it would be the 39th largest country, meaning there are more ridings within Canada than whole European countries larger than mine had been. Under a multi-winner system, adjacent ridings would be combined while keeping multiple local representatives for each.

In a large riding with multiple representatives, those representatives are going to focus on and compete within voter-rich areas. Small communities that already have trouble getting attention from their representatives to solve their issues will have their problems compounded by such a system. Having representatives from multiple parties concurrently existing within each riding will mean that their days will be spent fighting each other locally rather than being part of the national conversation. In the real world, such a scenario is not a healthy set-up, nor is it conducive to genuine local representation. It creates more problems than it solves.

In its purest form, proportional representation exists by simply having parties offer ordered lists of who will be elected based on the percentage of the vote. The MPs selected under such a system serve no purpose whatsoever, other than to be legislative assistants to the leader. If a member strays from the leader’s wishes, being kicked out of their caucus means they lose their seat. If the party diverges from its electoral platform, there is no means of accountability from the caucus, as the caucus has no teeth, no power, no genuine role. It would make more sense in such a system to crowd the leaders around a conference table and weight their votes like corporate shareholders. They are free to hire staff to perform the other roles currently performed by parliamentarians. At least it would avoid the pretence of representatives representing anything more than their party’s whims.

David Graham

Here We Go Again On Electoral Reform

Inevitably, following an election as unusual and dramatic as this one, Canadian political discourse will focus on electoral reform and the perceived unfairness of the results, of the Trudeau promise to change the electoral system, and the need to throw the strategic voting baby out with the democratic bathwater by adopting Mixed Member Proportional. The…

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a year ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · David Graham

A citizens assembly created to select from among these “proportional” systems has neither a genuine mandate from the people to change the electoral system, nor the freedom to explore all the aspects affecting the function and fairness of democracy, nor again all of the electoral options that may or may not qualify under a “proportional” mandate.

If either of our citizens assemblies that already exist lack credibility, or are viewed as unqualified or incapable of addressing questions fundamental to our society like the form and function of our electoral system, then perhaps that is the problem that we need to be solving. If the citizens of the country believe that our MPs lack the independence or competence needed to do their jobs, then the solutions need to be around solving those problems rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

There is a three-pronged approach we can take to solving the perceived ills of our representation in the House of Commons.

The first is to get money out of politics.

David Graham

Private Money In Politics Is The Root Of Our Rot

Nearly all the problems we are facing today share a common root cause: the role of money — and those who have too much of it — in politics…

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5 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

The second is to provide a preferential ballot so that votes are for rather than against, allowing electors to always vote both their conscience and their reality, and making electoral debate more fundamentally positive by forcing candidates to consider electors’ second choices.

The third is to make voting mandatory, so that campaigns are no longer about identifying and getting out the vote, which opens the door to voter suppression, but rather making campaigns about engagement, ideas, and debate. If the people are going to vote anyway, and they can do so in a ranked order, then the discussion and engagement must then necessarily be on the policies and ideas, rather on the very fact of voting in the first place.

Rather than constantly exploring the creation of a new assembly of random citizens, we should instead be focusing our efforts on ensuring that our two existing citizens assemblies which, together, we call Parliament, are the best they can be.

We are at the point where nearly everyone on Earth knows that the president of the United States belongs in a straitjacket in the secure ward of a mental institution, preferably in the Hague, not in the White House. He says and does things every single day that would disqualify any prior president, Democrat or Republican, from waking up still in office the next morning.

But the American institutional and public response is not only tepid, it is embarrassing on an international scale. The response is limited to memes on social media and the occasional No Kings rallies, after each of which the population return to their day jobs supporting the oligarchy that props up the regime.

The war being waged by the American president on a far-off land does not feel real enough or dangerous enough to a cowed population.

The institutions whose very existence are meant to curtail the power of the presidency are doing the opposite. Those wishing to oppose through legal means find themselves constrained by their constitution, while the president they need to depose shares no such respect for that same foundational document or the ground rules it enumerates.

As many people have died across the Middle East in this pointless war in the last month as died in New York on 9/11. Half of them are civilians. But the dead, for the most part, are not Americans, so opposition is limited to half-assed scheduled protests and the occasional pointed meme.

The Americans see Iran as a country run by a religious autocracy, imposing questionable moral values on their population. But the Americans, too, are a religious autocracy, imposing questionable moral values on their own population.

The Americans see Iran as a country that actively interferes in the politics and stability of other nations. But the Americans, too, actively interfere in the politics and stability of other nations.

The Americans see Iran as a country willing to launch unprovoked attacks on its adversaries. But that is exactly what the Americans have done in this war.

The Americans see the government of Iran as problematic, and the people in need of liberation through regime change. But the American government is just as problematic, and the people are in need of liberation through regime change.

Iran has a higher literacy rate and higher average education than the United States. Unlike the US, the country even has a universal health insurance plan. Meanwhile, the president of the United States says the government cannot afford medicare or child care because it needs to pay for its military, whose 2026 budget including the special requests to pay for this war are estimated at $1.7 trillion — which would make the Pentagon the 15th largest country in the world by GDP.

Popular Information

The $1.7 trillion military budget includes a massive slush fund for Trump’s political allies

Last week, President Donald Trump declared that the federal government cannot afford to spend “any money for day care” because “we’re fighting wars.” According to Trump, the well-being of America’s children is not a concern of the administration. “We have to take c…

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2 months ago · 412 likes · 37 comments · Judd Legum and Noel Sims

It is impossible to look at this war and describe it as just or warranted. Two countries who engage in religious persecution of their more secular populations are going to war for no good reason, but only the United States chose to wage this war. Worse, Iran has been preparing for this moment for generations, hardening defences, alliances, strategy, and tactics against an American attack they assumed would come sooner or later.

No rational president would wage such a war. Nothing tangibly beneficial can be achieved by conducting this war. It exists only to exercise the irrational vision of the rapture and armageddon by the religious fundamentalists controlling the White House and the Pentagon, and to suppress one of history’s worst-ever sex trafficking and child rape scandals in which the president and his closest supporters are at the very core.

There are no good guys in this war. It should not be fought. It serves no purpose. No good can come of it.

Americans will die in this war, if the president continues to prosecute it as he is threatening to do. They will do so in far larger numbers than they realise at this point in the process, as the country completely loses control of a war it started without a plan or a purpose. Whether we want to be or not, other countries will be dragged into it some way, some how, as Iran activates its networks and alliances and weapons systems to force America’s traditional allies to pick sides, in an effort to isolate the dying empire.

The lack of serious and effective opposition in the United States, at all levels, tells the rest of the world that Trump does, in fact, represent the American psyche and the country’s collective self-image and objectives. He is objectively insane, but his country, in spite of numerous processes and methods available to address his abuse of power — power he should never have been allowed to hold in the first place — allow him to continue.

Americans seem to believe Trump’s lunacy is someone else’s problem to solve. Their slacktivism will lead to nuclear confrontation and possibly deployment because nobody thinks they have any role in stopping it. Someone else, surely, will come to their senses and save the country and the world!

They are taught through their education system about American greatness, about American individual and collective heroism, how the good guy always wins — and how Americans are always the good guys. The true lessons of history, plainly visible to the rest of the world, are not learned or understood in a country eager to destroy itself through wilful ignorance.

This is not a matter for this fall’s midterm elections, likely to be stolen by the crippling corruption the country is allowing to fester. It is not even a question that can wait for tomorrow. It is a matter for today, and the people of the United States are simply not rising to the challenge.

Where are they? What are they waiting for?

Thinking about...

The president speaks genocide

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again…

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2 months ago · 1747 likes · 57 comments · Timothy Snyder

As a country, we have been systematically destroying our domestic mass transit infrastructure for decades. Pierre Trudeau created Via Rail, then slashed its routes by 20% and funding by 40% just three years later. Then Brian Mulroney slashed Via Rail with even greater ferocity, cutting it by more than half in 1989. The Chrétien government then cut the Atlantic, Via’s service that ran through Sherbrooke, Quebec to St John, New Brunswick, which happened to be the only two ridings still represented by Progressive Conservative MPs after the 1993 election.

Meanwhile, federal funding for inter-city buses that connected small communities across the country have been slashed repeatedly by governments of all stripes, with regional governments taking over where they are able to. Even Greyhound, the company most closely identified with inter-city buses in North America, gave up and left Canada altogether five years ago.

Throughout it all, Canada has never seriously implemented any kind of coordinated transit system. You cannot open a website or an app, enter two addresses, and make a booking that links municipal or regional buses to inter-city buses or trains to municipal or regional transit systems at the other end. It is up to each traveler to sort out all the different services and connections, tickets, passes, and tokens.

David Graham

A Permanent Universal Transit Token?

If you have ever tried to park downtown in the middle of a weekday in nearly any Canadian city, you’ll find that it is expensive or difficult, often both. But if you have considered taking transit, it’s slow, requires an oddly specific amount of exact change, a ticket you have to ride transit to find a place to buy, or a pass you have to get in advance…

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a year ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · David Graham

The opportunities are there. In 2011, I traveled around western Europe with a single consolidated EURail pass, one of two such competing services, that let me take virtually any train virtually anywhere across several countries for two weeks, most without additional fees or reservations required. I used it to travel from London to St. Moritz to Venice, starting in the UK and stopping in Belgium, Holland, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and even dropping in on Liechtenstein, and that for under $800. I could plan all my moves through the German national carrier, Deutsche Bahn’s BlackBerry application, regardless of country or carrier. We could do it here. We just… don’t.

It might be in part because we have so little infrastructure to integrate. Our country is built around the automobile because our country builds the automobile. Driving anywhere is easy. And we have convinced our population that due to our vast distances and low population densities, flying in Canada must be obscenely expensive yet completely necessary while public infrastructure — other than over one million kilometres of roads — is out of the realm of possibility.

It is, of course, an attitude question. Many people who travel from Toronto to Ottawa, as an example, will fly, seeing the one hour flight as a short trip. The time to travel to, through, and from airports rarely factors, but door-to-door time by train or car can be equal or better than flying, and that is before we bring in a project like Alto. Worse, there are at least six flights a day between Montreal and Ottawa lasting just 45 minutes gate-to-gate and reaching a cruising altitude of 12,000 feet as the flights simply aren’t long enough to reach any higher. At that altitude and duration, it is not even necessary to pressurise the cabin. It is the height of absurdity.

Canada has studied high speed passenger trains for generations and there is no guarantee that Alto won’t turn into yet another generational study. Each generation, the projected cost increases exponentially. And each time, Canada balks not only at the direct cost, but at the impacts to the country’s well-heeled oil, automotive, and aviation industries, and succumbs to the NIMBY movements of those on whose land such infrastructure must necessarily cross.

Which takes us back to the Conservative leader. It was the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, that he was a part of, that started reinvesting in passenger rail service, restoring previously cancelled capital funding. It was Stephen Harper’s own parliamentary secretary, Dean del Mastro, who pushed for the very corridor that Alto is exploring.

When he came out earlier this week to announce that a Conservative government would oppose and cancel Alto, he abandoned any remaining principle or ambition he has for Canada. Worse, it is not about the infrastructure, or even the impacts to individual farms whose lands risk being bisected by it.

He could have come out and said he wanted to consider how to build such modern infrastructure in a way that minimises new corridors, reduces impact to land owners and farmers, or any of a dozen variations of that theme. He could have said that it is ridiculous that we are only considering high speed rail between Quebec City and Toronto, when the Edmonton-Calgary-Lethbridge corridor could gain equal benefit from such modern infrastructure.

Metaviews: Future of Authority

296: Alto Demonstrates Meta's Opposition to Democracy

This is part two in an ongoing derailment of the hopes of high speed rail. Part one is here…

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2 months ago · 12 likes · 2 comments · Jesse Hirsh

But that is not what he did. He did simple, shallow, division politics as he always does. He saw a NIMBY movement rising in large part thanks to social media algorithms amplifying small pockets of resistance, and he saw an opportunity to oppose, for the sake of opposing. To look for division where little exists, and build on that division for short-term political benefit. Long term vision? Pah! Not for these Conservatives!

Canada has struggled for generations to modernise our infrastructure, repeatedly and destructively failing to arrive at national consensus on how to move forward, falling into short term political traps like this.

In 1994, lest we forget, Ontario premier Bob Rae announced the expansion of Toronto’s subway line westward along Eglinton. A year later, Mike Harris came in on his “common sense revolution” messaging, cancelled the expansion and, to make sure that such ambition dare not be tried again in the future, had the tunnels already dug filled back in.

Poilievre’s opposition is in the same vein. Not only does he want to stop all progress, he wants to ensure any actual achievements are rolled back to the starting line.

To what end?

It will take him some time to connect with Canadians, if he can at all. First impressions matter. I have seen friends who have been long-time members of the NDP walk away since Sunday’s leadership vote in disgust, comparing him to the Waffle movement his grandfather, former NDP leader David Lewis, fought off half a century ago.

The NDP has largely lost its labour base. Unionised labourers, benefitting from years of the fair pay and benefits brought to them by organised labour, often support the Conservatives without a hint of irony, seeking only lower taxes. And on that side, Lewis will have an enormous hill to climb.

Avi and his partner, filmmaker and author Naomi Klein, were key to the launch of the Leap Manifesto going into the 2015 election. That manifesto is built around the statement: “We call for a Canada based on caring for each other and the planet, moving swiftly to a post-carbon future, upholding Indigenous rights, and pursuing economic justice for all.”

The Progress Canada Podcast Substack

Avi Lewis's Vision for Canada

This weekend, Avi Lewis won the NDP leadership with the highest first ballot total of any NDP leader not named Tommy Douglas…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · Progress Canada and Theresa Lubowitz

Reading the manifesto’s points objectively, as summarised far more clearly on wikipedia than on their own website, they seem logical, obvious even, as the path forward for Canada:

1. Fully implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

2. A shift to a “100% clean energy economy” by 2050

3. A moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure projects

4. Support for community-owned clean energy projects

5. A universal program for energy efficiency and retrofitting, prioritizing low income communities

6. High-speed rail and affordable, nation-wide public transit

7. Re-training and resources for workers in carbon-intensive industries

8. A national infrastructure-renewal program

9. An overhaul of the agricultural industry, prioritizing local production

10. A moratorium on international trade deals that infringe upon democratic rights

11. Immigration status and full legal protection for all workers, including immigrants and refugees

12. Investment in expanding “low-carbon” sectors of the economy, including through the development of a national childcare program

13. A “vigorous debate” on the implementation of a universal basic income

14. An end to austerity and subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, paid for with cuts to military spending and robust progressive, wealth, and corporate taxation

15. An end to corporate funding of political campaigns and examination of voting reform

In the current threat environment, cutting military spending would not be wise for Canada, and so too each point has to be considered as a discrete debate from the point of view of reality. However many stop at the word ‘manifesto’ and assume it to be radical. One need not agree with every point to see the overall objective of taking power away from the ultra wealthy and returning it to the people, which upon looking south of the border at the opposite should not be considered terribly radical as a desirable outcome.

The real win for Canada though in Avi Lewis’s weekend victory is in what he offers that Pierre Poilievre does not: ideas. Agree with them or disagree with them, at least he has them.

In the 2016 election in the United States, Donald Trump turned the election into a referendum on the status quo. The Democrats fell for it, vigorously defending a status quo that more and more Americans saw as the problem. They pushed out Bernie Sanders and the “radical left” of their party who were and are advocating for what are largely common-sense policies that help the average citizen rather than the ruling class.

David Graham

The ever-increasing dichotomy of America

Seven years ago, Donald Trump was elected 45th President of the United States. And he’s trying to come back for another round. The forces that brought him to power in 2016 have not disappeared, and they are not unique to the United States; they’re very much relevant to Canada as well…

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3 years ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · David Graham

In what could have been a major policy debate for the United States on Sanders’ vs Trump’s vision for how to replace the status quo with something better, to deal with rising angst across their country, the ballot question Trump wanted triumphed, and the status quo was itself defeated. The Democrats, never understanding what happened, presented the status quo again in 2020 and 2024 and, sure enough, Americans said to the Democrats: no, you’re still not getting the point.

Mark Carney is seen as a reformer, but he is a completely different kind of reformer from Avi Lewis. He is a pragmatic centrist, crisis managing Canada away from the havoc and destruction Trump has brought to bear on the world since his return to office last year. Carney is getting it right on the macro points; he is setting up Canada to survive in a post-American world. In an environment where we are only a single misstep from finding ourselves at war with our American neighbours, he will make the tough and necessary decisions necessary to protect our sovereignty and our economy going forward.

In short, and fortunately for Canada, he is here at the right moment in our history. In the face of a functioning, stable, progressive United States, Carney would have been seen as the status quo candidate, there to protect the profoundly unradical centre, to keep the boring and stable boring and stable. In that world, he would not have been a reformer.

For his part, Lewis offers the NDP a chance to bring a conscience back to Parliament and to Canadian political discourse, a role the NDP has largely abandoned since Jack Layton and Stephen Harper worked together to polarise Canadian politics and squeeze out the centre, in the pursuit of mutually-beneficial left-right power swings as we see in so many other countries.

As we get past the pure survival mode that we are in as a country today, and start considering domestic policies to get rid of the voter angst that has given rise to the MAGA and Maple MAGA movements, there will be a need for serious, deep, structural policy discussions. The status quo remains untenable and Canadians will run out of patience if we do not materially address that fact.

Having Lewis at the helm of the NDP will give Canadians an opportunity to have a genuine debate on the path forward on each issue to come up, to gently start pulling the country back across the centre and toward the left, toward benefitting the many over the wealthy, to showing strength in unity over division. While Poilievre attacks Canada and its government, offering nothing of substance and never-ending regression, Lewis has an opportunity to be the voice in the House — once he figures out how to get there — to say: what about this, instead?

Canadians don’t have to agree with his ideas, but as a country we may find it refreshing to finally have an adult conversation around public policy. If Lewis brings that approach to his leadership — and avoids the many landmines that elements of his own party will place in his path — he may greatly exceed current expectations.

The Walrus

Avi Lewis Takes Over a Diminished NDP. Can He Make It a Force Again?

This story was originally published on thewalrus.ca…

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2 months ago · 32 likes · The Walrus