This week's announcement that George Stroumboulopoulos will soon be departing Hockey Night in Canada is thrilling news — even if you're not a hockey fan.  Amid growing anxieties about this country's power imbalance between haves and nots, Strombo's fall is an optomistic reminder that there remain corners of Canadian life governed by the egalitarian laws of the free market, where the tastes of the humble consumer can fell even the mightiest giant of the establishment.

I'm told Mr. Stroumboulopoulos got his start on Much Music — the Canadian version of MTV, created because people in Ottawa said it would ruin the country if we were permitted to watch Depeche Mode videos on an American music channel — but my earliest exposure came in 2004, during his stint on the CBC's now long-forgotten "Greatest Canadian" special.  This was an adapted edutainment series the CBC had purchased from Great Britain, wherein viewers were asked to vote for the person they believed to be their country's greatest citizen all time from a ballot curated by various living national treasures.  Strombo advocated on behalf of Tommy Douglas, the eventual winner, and in doing so bears some responsibility for saddling this country with the now oft-repeated claim that the "greatest Canadian" who ever lived was a politician whose chief contribution to national politics was occasionally leading his party to third place in parliament.

A year later Strombo joined the CBC full-time as host of an interview show, originally called The Hour, but later renamed after it was sliced to 30 minutes for reasons we were assured had nothing to do with with ratings.  Which may not even be a polite lie — the CBC, after all, follows the Soviet shoe factory school of entertainment, in which sensitivity to what the public wants or needs is considered a distraction from telling them what they should.

As a host, Strombo was best-known for his casual style and… well, that's about it.  His casualness never seemed to be in the service of anything; he certainly didn't lure his guests into dropping fascinating secrets or exposing their inner core.  C'mon, I challenge you: name a single memorable Strombo interview other than his infamous trainwreck with Billy Bob Thorton (which actually might have been done by Jian Ghomeshi now that I think about it…)  More often than not, George's chats with Hollywood a-listers seemed one step above those workmanlike black-background appearances stars do when plugging films to c-list networks.  Touring actors like to pander to the Canadian market, but unfortunately many American agents seem to operate on the naive assumption — I assume spread by Hollywood Canadians like Lorne Michaels, who left the country during the Pearson administration — that the CBC is still Canada's most beloved network despite the abundance of ratings indicating otherwise.

The Rogers people too, apparently came to believe the CBC's hype, plucking Strombo from the station as a sort of impulse buy following their $5 billion purchase of Hockey Night in Canada â€” the CBC's sole profitable program. Strombo would bring "younger viewers," Rogers assured themselves, perhaps unaware that despite his perennially arched eyebrows and soul patch, their child star was actually born in 1972, and as such is considerably older than even the old men millennials actually like — John Oliver, for instance (born 1977).

That Strombo's HNIC performance has proven dreadful enough to be fire-worthy should be similarly unsurprising, given his past dabbles with private sector television. In 2006 ABC tried getting him to host a poor man's American Idol known as The One that wound up getting cancelled after four episodes. Seven years later, CNN took a chance and gave him a show called Stroumboulopoulos which was similarly canned before completing a single season. ("Devastatingly dismal ratings," said the Toronto Star).

Canada is a small, cliquey country where connections often get you much further than talent (just look at the prime minister). As government intrudes into greater realms where it doesn't belong — say, television — it has the poisonous effect of weakening the nation's fragile meritocracy further, since the virtues government rewards, particularly institutional caution and ideological conformity, are the anthesis of the instincts of innovation and disruption that foster genuine skill and achievement.

Don't cry for Strombo; I'm sure he'll be getting plenty of medals and letters behind his name soon enough. Give a cheer, instead, for the fact that at a time when state power appears to be on the march virtually everywhere, at least hockey commentary is slowly returning to the public.

Photo credit: Canadian Business

Written by J.J McCullough

Aging is an asset to the political observer since it reminds that the arguments we hear today, even those spouted with all the certainty in the world, are anything but permanent.  Take the progressive left's assured explanations for the root causes of Islamic extremism.  This has been one of the most consistently changing tunes of my own short lifetime.

I was in my final year of high school when 9-11 happened, and I vividly recall liberal teachers asserting confidently that what we had witnessed in New York was a perfectly rational — not defensible, of course, but rational — response from the beleaguered third world to decades of abusive US foreign policy.  I remember that phrase almost becoming a single word in the immediate aftermath of the attacks: yooessfornpolcy, spouted endlessly by progressives the world over.  It may have single-handedly revived the stale career of Noam Chomsky, who suddenly found his sermonic books on the historic evils of yooessfornpolcy leaping back up the bestseller lists.

Then the Iraq war happened, which was great news for proponents of this thesis because it gave them a big, shiny, new yooessfornpolcy to designate as the root cause of any subsequent Islamic violence, such as the 2005 London subway bombings or the 2004 attack on the trains in Madrid.  But then the war ended, and the killings kept coming.  Often in countries that had not only opposed major yooessfornpolcy initiatives of the last few decades, but made doing so a central pillar of their national identity.

Progressives were unperturbed.  When jihadists shot up the offices of the French comic magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 they decided it was time for a national conversation about whether the French sense of humor was too Islamophobic.  When they proceeded to shoot up the streets of Paris a few months later, we were told it was time for some hard talk about making Europe's Muslim immigrants feel more welcome.  When Brussels was blown up — a city that has done just about everything humanly possible to make Muslims feel welcome — the response was, uh, well, maybe they could try harder.

And now we have the left's response to the slaughter of 49 innocent members of the Orlando LGBT community by a self-proclaimed ally of the Islamic State, a spectacle of obfuscation and self-denial that has truly crossed the line from tragedy to farce.  Absent even the slightest pretext for victim blaming — gays and lesbians are sanctified progressive allies, after all — what's ensued has been a non sequitur thrashing of favorite punching bags: Republican politicians, evangelical Christians — mocking prayer has become standard practice â€” the NRA, Donald Trump, "toxic masculinity," and so on.

In this country, the CBC's Neil Macdonald wrote a much-shared piece on Orlando that spent more time talking about a 2008 anti-gay marriage ballot measure in California than radical Islam (though this was still better than the offering of the New York Times editorial board, which didn't contain the word "Islam" at all). Thomas Mulcair made a gratuitous fuss over the fact that a Tory MP, Robert Zimmer, had recently presented a petition to parliament requesting the AR-15 rifle be declassified from the federal government's forbidden weapons list, a fact intended to spatter Orlando blood on the Conservative Party's hands given the killer had used the same make of weapon. The fact that the killer was, objectively speaking, a fool for doing so, given AR-15s are not particularly powerful but simply designed to look that way — a "fantasy gun," in the words of National Review's Charles Cooke — hardly troubled those who elected long ago to rally against guns without learning the slightest thing about them.

The more senseless, savage, and unsophisticated Islamic violence becomes the more it seems to challenge the progressive worldview, and its various calcified assumptions about the benefits of non-judgmental multiculturalism. To concede that the defining civilizational clash of our age may in fact be civilizational, which is to say rooted in culture and religion rather than left/right politics is to begin an exercise with unsettling ramifications for everything from immigration policy to foreign aid. So basically they've refused, and instead turned to preexisting partisan debates regarding matters ever more tangential to the topic at hand. I assume it's only a matter of time before a terrorist attack is considered appropriate pretext to begin beating the drum for campaign finance reform or legalized marijuana.

The things we want to talk about are not always what we should. Eventually reality denies us the choice.

Photo Credit: al-monitor.com

Written by J.J McCullough

Because I'm chronically unlucky in love, I've had the involuntary privilege of meeting a diverse lot of gay people during the course of my dating life. Over coffee or dinner, one topic that seems to continuously come up is a deep-seeded dislike and disinterest for what today passes as mainstream gay culture. I'm not talking about the grand, gothic "marginalization" that motivated those Black Lives Matter folks at the Toronto Pride parade, but rather a more generic attitude of revulsion and apathy. Gays have even evolved their own vocabulary with which to express this common distaste; they talk about being not into "the scene" or "the drama" and even brag about being "straight acting" — a phrase which might read as a borderline hate crime of internalized homophobia to some, but articulates a sense of exasperation immediately recognizable to others.

The reasons for this distaste are always the same. Mainstream "gay culture," as offered by the parade/club-industrial complex, is often gross, loud, boring, and stupid. A lot of homosexuals don't find it particularly interesting, entertaining, or pleasant.

Homosexuality may be biological, but all it does is give you a preference for sleeping with people of the same sex. It does not make you automatically enjoy watching grown men slathered with cheap cosmetics prance around squawking off-key Madonna songs, or going to sweaty bars and downing $20 cocktails under the hungry watch of old men in rubber pants, or listening to George Takei rant on Facebook about his least favorite Supreme Court justice. A lot of us simply don't care.

It's why it was so disheartening to see Tory leader Rona Ambrose march pompously in the Toronto gay pride parade last week, arm-in-arm with the rest of her party's inner circle. What they no doubt imagined to be a breathtaking display of public tolerance actually registered to gay conservatives like me as a blaring signal they still don't get it.

One of the most brilliant pieces of Conservative advertising I ever saw was a postcard circulated by the Young Tory club on my college campus. It featured a photo of a guy that looked a lot like me — ie; a skinny dork with stupid hair — beside a quote saying something to the effect of, "I follow the rules, I like low taxes, I don't think my professors are right about everything… OMG, I'm a Conservative!" It was a genius ad because it showed Conservatives understood the student community contained a diverse array of youth, not all of whom fit the tired, "campus radical" stereotype. The Conservatives were not attempting to get their message heard by showing up at a tuition protest organized by the Canadian Federation of Students, they were reaching out to students of a naturally conservative disposition in a naturally conservative way.

It was, in short the exact opposite of the Pride strategy of Ambrose et al.

I will make a sweeping generalization here — gays who care about Pride are probably not the sort of gays who are in play for Conservative votes. Pride is a spectacle of sexual exhibitionism, promiscuity, vulgar humor, and progressive political posturing — not to mention the ample consumption of alcohol and drugs. It is not a scene naturally compelling to gays who value things like self-control, humility, dignity, and privacy, or distrust things which are revolutionary, anarchistic, or otherwise hostile to tried-and-tested cultural norms — conservatives, in other words. You may as well go shopping for Tory votes at David Suzuki's birthday party.

Some gays are indeed "natural conservatives," but they're the ones with careers and families; the ones who reject the lifestyle of perpetual adolescence and souless sexcapades offered by the gay cultural establishment. They're the ones who actually get married, adopt children, or serve in the military in addition to fighting for the right to do so — rights, I will note, that many of the Pride types never cared much about in the first place, since fitting into bourgeois society has never been of much interest to them.

Mr. Cameron, the now-former British PM, once quipped it was because he was a conservative that he supported same-sex marriage — he understood the importance of marriage as a conservative social institution and wanted to extend its reach. Canada's Conservatives by contrast, bring no intellectual depth to their pandering and appear to view gays exactly as the left does — a monocultural blob who will dash like a bull to a red cape towards any moron waving the rainbow flag.

Written by J.J McCullough

People who have seriously studied electoral systems — which is to say, people who are not journalists or politicians — have concluded it's impossible to devise a perfect one.  A guy named Kenneth Arrow even won a Nobel Prize for describing what he called the "impossibility theorem" of voting; basically, democracy only works as a mathematical concept when someone wins an absolute majority.  If there's no majority, no matter what convoluted style of balloting you use, the outcome will always be unfair and imperfect.

The Trudeau administration has great faith Dr. Arrow can be outsmarted by 12 politicians sitting around a table.

The government's electoral reform committee, unveiled by the Prime Minister amid great fanfare last week, is itself a fascinating illustration of the difficulties of democracy.  It contains five Liberals, three Conservatives, two NDPers, one member of the Bloc, and Elizabeth May.  The premise is this elegantly curated delegation accurately reflects the preferences of the public.  But does it?

Five of 12 is 41.6666…%. According to the official numbers from Elections Canada, the Liberals won 39.5% of the popular vote in the 2015 election, so, after rounding, we see the Liberals are over-representing themselves on the committee somewhere around 2%.  A similar comparison finds the Conservatives under-represented by 6.9% (25% vs. 31.9%), and the NDP by 3% (16.7% vs. 19.7%).  The Bloc and Greens, in turn, are dramatically over-represented by margins of 3.6% and 4.9% (8.3% vs. 3.4%, 8.3% vs. 4.7%) respectively.  Added together, that's around 20 percentage points of deception.

The fact that Elizabeth May gets an entire seat to herself is particularly preposterous when we consider the 0.7% of Canadians — over 130,000 people — who voted for equally small, pointless parties have no representation whatsoever.  And let's not forget the millions of Canadians who didn't vote at all — around 31.7% of registered voters representing 47.5% of the national population.  The committee claims it is interested in placating Canadians who "don't engage in or care about politics" yet it consists entirely of representatives of Canadians who do.

(Just as an aside, there is absolutely no evidence anyone stays away from the ballot box because they dislike the electoral system.  A 2003 study commissioned by Elections Canada found the most oft-stated explanation by non-voters for their behavior was a broad dislike of politicians, political parties, and government; a mere 1% cited the mechanics of the elections themselves.)

The Liberals never wanted to change our electoral system this way.  They only embraced the paradox of using an unrepresentative committee to change what they claim is an unrepresentative method of electing parliamentarians because their previous paradox — we'll just use our unrepresentative parliamentary majority to ram through whatever — was too galling.  The Conservatives have proposed a national referendum as a rational solution, to which the Liberals have offered a series of increasingly bizarre, if not dadaist, rebuttals, from accusations of racism and sexism (women and minorities don't vote in referendums, scolds the democratic reform minister) to the Prime Minister's dishonest, but revealing claim that referendums are too often used to "stop things."

I bear no romantic illusions about Canada's present electoral system.  Like everything else in government, it is a flawed creation of man.  But it is not an actively evil system, and its existence is not an unambiguous crime for which some self-evident solution exists.  Canadian democracy is worse than that of many other western nations, but a slightly inaccurate tally of MPs hardly tops the list of its most pressing problems.  Indeed, changing the electoral system will almost certainly make what's truly bad even worse.

As discussed previously, a ranked or list-based voting system will deform the process of electing our all-powerful prime minister from something relatively intuitive and predictable into something chaotic and obtuse over which the public will exercise little control.  It will even likely fail to make parliament as representative as promised, given the constitutional barriers preventing effective rep-by-pop.  It will, however, almost certainly make it easier for Liberals to get elected, and it's on those grounds the government mounts the barricades.

The progressive drive for electoral reform is motivated by anxiety that government's right to exert power over increasingly large realms of life is compromised by public doubt about the method in which that government is chosen.  A conservative would respond that an easier solution would be for government to simply do less.  That is, alas, another forbidden tangent in the tightly scripted conversation we're supposed to be having.

Photo Credit: CBC

Written by J.J McCullough

The main reason I was skeptical about the movement demanding the Conservative Party abandon support for the one-man-one-woman definition of marriage (aside from the fact it was led by an unauthorized gay Tory group that seems perennially obsessed with sowing division in the party) was because I knew it would produce the headlines it did.  I assume many important and consequential decisions were made at the Conservative convention in Vancouver last weekend, yet the sensationalistic gay marriage debate — which let's be clear, served zero practical purpose — was the only thing most news outlets saw fit to cover.

Granted, many Tory delegates seemed to relish the attention.  Abandoning the fight for traditional marriage by a vote of 1,036 to 462 was an entirely voluntary gesture of self-flagellation from a party that has been under heavy pressure to offer atonement in the aftermath of its 2015 defeat.  Reporters who declared the episode a manifestation of the party's existential anxiety in the age of Trudeau were not wrong.

Whenever a conservative political party loses office, a trite dichotomy is offered: the party can either become more liberal, and obediently follow the trail blazed by the left on social and economic policy — the option favored by the press, and often many grandees in the party itself — or they can double-down on the orthodoxies of the past and become even more repulsive right-wing demagogues.  Less discussed is the idea that 21st century conservatism does not need to alter its philosophy so much as change its priorities, objectives, and arguments.

Marriage policy is a good study.  Though I'm gay myself, I never found the Tory party's early-2000s opposition to homosexual marriage overly distressing.  I recognized most of it was rooted in honorable motives; not rank bigotry, but a desire to protect marriage, one of the most important institutions of human civilization.

In time, of course, same-sex marriage proponents triumphed by rebuking this concern. We are not threatening marriage, they said, but expanding it to include more couples who embody the virtues of love, commitment, monogamy, self-reliance, and stable parenthood that make the institution worth protecting in the first place. The truly anti-marriage position — one championed by a great number of progressives, incidentally — is to dismiss marriage as oppressive or irrelevant. In spite of reams of evidence demonstrating that getting married is one of the best things you can do for yourself, and especially your children, many progressives continue to insist its virtues are actually shackles binding the body to archaic moral restraints.

These true foes of marriage appear to be winning. Over the last half-century, Canadian marriage rates have been in steady decline, while single-parent families have doubled and common-law couples quadrupled. The institution remains vulnerable, and in need of creative incentives and initiatives to strengthen and popularize it. Yet since losing the gay marriage fight, Canada's conservatives have shown scant interest in doing so.

Perhaps it hits too close to home. Many of the party's leading lights, including Kellie Leitch, Jason Kenney, and Maxime Bernier have never married at all. Rona Ambrose is currently separated from Mr. Ambrose and lives in the opposition leader's residence with a new man, whom the press politely describes as her "partner." Policy debates these days are often extraordinarily personal and cruel, with accusations of hypocrisy and privilege the preferred weapons. It's understandable if many Tories have come to favor a social policy agenda that prioritizes simply "accepting" lifestyles over one infused with implicit judgments that could invite their own lives to scrutiny. Yet judgement — or more properly, the defense of proven, historic truth from speculative post-modern theory — is the essence of the conservative disposition.

The most fashionable thing in the world is to claim to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative, yet the two are not quite so easily separated. In the absence of strong institutions like marriage and the nuclear family, citizens inevitably become more atomized and helpless, and thus inclined to turn towards big government as their source of provisions, structure and comfort. It may make a sort of libertarian sense to argue the state has no interest in how people organize their lives, but the state certainly benefits when they do so poorly.

Conservatives who wring their hands worrying voters will think them cruel for having opposed same-sex marriage a decade ago should consider how the public will regard a party that rallies against state reliance without offering a plausible alternative.

Photo Credit: Business Insider

Written by J.J McCullough