As various progressive Canadian governments continue to get it wrong on basically every level, demand for a narrative that will save their bacon come election time is at an all time high.

Unfortunately, the old familiar tropes of "Evil Corporations Are Ruining Everything" and "Evil White Supremacists Are Behind Everything" don't seem to be working as well this time around as Doug Ford  rampages towards the Premiership.  So, just in time for June, here comes another great progressive brainwave: "Evil Conservative Hackers Are Using Evil Computer-Magic To Undermine Canadian Democracy."

Combining one part warmed-over post-hoc rationalization about how Russian bots and Canadian hackers stole the 2016 US election and the Brexit vote, respectively, with one part 1990's vintage moral panic about the dark powers of the Information Superhighway, the not-very-original thrust of this grand strategy is that conservative anger is in some way illegitimate, and inevitably the product of some powerful interests trying to manipulate the discourse so that they can hold onto their ill-gotten gains.  The fact that this latest round of conservative trickery is digital just feeds into the progressive narrative of fakeness.

You can see it in how they try to cast Ontario Proud founder Jeff Ballingall in the mold of some Mr. Robot knockoff, implying that if he just logged off and spent some time learning how to love his fellow man, he'd see the wisdom of carbon taxes.

Except….once again, the Liberals are the ones who find themselves with an authenticity problem.  Their narrative of conservatives resorting to cyber-duplicity while the poor analog Liberals are left in the dust repeating their mantras of caring and fairness falls apart when you remember that THEY are the ones who are the status quo in Canada, and that THEY are the ones that pretend to be fighting for the little guy, or, when things aren't going well, they are the ones who are somehow victims.

Kathleen Wynne is the second-most powerful elected politician in the country, and yet, through some amazing sleight of hand that not even the Conservative Web Wizards can match, she is able to credibly play for sympathy every time someone is mean to her.

Now when you call people out on this nonsense, they point to the backlash and subsequent "harm" Nora Loreto suffered when she was just sharing her feelings online, guys, honest!  as proof of Conservatives destroying the discourse.

What people forget, however, is that as much as Loreto is a lot more honest about what she thinks than Wynne could ever be, she isn't some kind of innocent being beaten up on by Conservative bullies.  She's deeply involved in the union movement and is a visible political figurehead, and yet, through this same kind of online magic, she's become the sort of figure that the august and venerable centrists at the CBC feel compelled to defend.

But we don't need to read this closely between the lines of code to see that this Liberal program still needs some debugging.  Recall also that Wynne has used the massive amount of political power that she wields as Premier to attack businesspeople whose behaviour she deemed to be insufficiently fair.  Then we have the other groups this government, in its various incarnations, has picked a fight with.  Doctors.  Pharmacists.  Hairdressers.  Horse breeders.  Any number of striking workers.

I'm willing to bet a lot more lives and livelihoods were harmed as a result of these scrapes than anything Ontario Proud's responsible for.  Yet we are told that the real threat to our civil society is a couple of guys on their laptops.

And just in case you think it's an issue of fundraising that the Liberals are far too pure to resort to bilking angry people for money you can check out websites like realdougford.ca and click on the prominent "Donate" button.  (What with the fundraising gap being what it is, it's only fair to the Liberals.)

Treating Ontario Proud as anything other than a persistent glitch in the Liberal Matrix, one that will cause Ontarians to free their minds and vote Wynne out in a couple of months, is a pretty good sign that you could use a couple of blue pills.

Written by Josh Lieblein

If the Kinder Morgan drama has made nothing else clear, it's that Canada could really use a few more journalists in our nation's third-largest province.  The drama, after all, is almost entirely a byproduct of British Columbian politics, a subject our Toronto-and-Ottawa centric media class has shown itself capable of grasping in only the vaguest, most superficial terms.

Here in BC, the Kinder Morgan kerfuffle certainly does not seem as shocking or audacious as it is being perceived elsewhere.  British Columbia's political centre of gravity is already quite far to the left, and Premier Horgan's opposition to the TransMountain pipeline is a boringly logical outgrowth of contemporary progressivism's perspective on natural resource management.

As I discussed in an earlier Loonie Politics column, the BC NDP is obsessed with the fiction that the province's previous administration, the Liberal government of Christy Clark, represented some manner of "hard right" rule.  Clark's government had a position on pipeline projects that was indistinguishable from Prime Minister Trudeau's — they should be regulated up the ying yang and judged arbitrarily on a case-by-case basis in tune with the politics of the moment — yet for partisan and ideological reasons, the NDP had to hallucinate that such thinking was a form of right-wing extremism.  Opposing all pipelines without even the thinnest pretense of fair consideration thus became the principled position of the true BC left.

In 2017 Horgan ran on a platform that vowed to use "every tool in our toolbox" to stop construction of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain Alberta-to-BC pipeline, contrasting himself with Premier Clark, who had come to begrudgingly tolerate the thing after both the federal government and Kinder Morgan Inc. called her bluff and satisfied her "five conditions," which had been widely mocked (outside BC, at least) as obstinate and unconstitutional.

In fairness, Horgan's position was probably far more reflective of his voting base than Clark's was of hers.  As the 2017 results demonstrated, the BC New Democratic Party has become exclusively the party of urban and suburban ridings where the energy sector is but some distant, abstract thing one can safely demagogue against to demonstrate righteous commitment to fighting climate change.  The age of an NDP with any interest or understanding for blue collar industrial or resource jobs is but a distant memory, today's New Democrats are very firmly the party of middle class bureaucrats, teachers unions', social justice warriors, college radicals, and media activists.  To call them the province's party of "labour," in the heady way that word was initially used, now seems painfully anachronistic: it is the BC Liberals who now sweep — by large margins — the BC's east and northeastern ridings where the hard-hat industries of mining, natural gas, and oil dominate.

All this helps show that the eastern media's narrative that Horgan's position on Trans Mountain — that it's somehow all about the Green Party holding the balance of power in BC's fragile parliament — is a crude simplification.  The NDP does not need any encouragement to be an enemy of the Canadian oil industry — it was a clearly stated campaign promise.  The so-called "2017 Confidence and Supply Agreement" that laid the formal foundation for the Green-NDP legislative coalition that unseated Premier Clark's minority government last July merely reiterated Horgan's "tool in the toolbox" promise.

The only thing the Green Party of British Columbia honestly wants is for Horgan to change the province's electoral system to its benefit.  Self-serving electoral reform has been the only issue that has animated the Greens with any degree of genuine passion, as theirs is a weak, unpopular party whose primary interest has always been long-term, institutional survival, rather than any deeper policy goal.

A promise to change the electoral system is issue number 1 in the Confidence and Supply agreement's list of legislative priorities, and is spelled out in language far more explicit and precise than any of the promises on other topics.  Per the terms he agreed to, Horgan's government is set to hold a referendum on electoral reform this fall, one explicitly designed to pass and establish a new voting system that will benefit the Greens.  It's hard to imagine the Green Party's three MLAs abandoning Horgan for anything beyond breaking this promise, given how high they imagine the existential stakes for themselves to be.  Unlike Clark before him, the new head of the BC Liberals, Andrew Wilkinson, has been virulently opposed to electoral reform of any sort, and vows to bring the initiative to a grinding halt should his party again form government.

All this said, the NDP and the Greens have never exactly been bosom buddies; during the last election New Democrats, and their various boosters, portrayed the Greens as phonies and crypto-conservatives, and it's clear the antics of the swaggering, self-important Green leader Andrew Weaver, a man who never met a camera he didn't love and speaks constantly off-script, are probably more trouble than they're worth.  A party as ideologically self-righteous as the BC NDP is not one that naturally shares the spotlight, and no doubt New Democrats spend much time fantasizing about running a majority government on their own terms, and dread the thought of a permanent Green-Orange alliance of the sort Dr. Weaver's vision of electoral reform clearly anticipates.

Perhaps this explains why the New Democrats, as of late, have made the breathtakingly revisionist argument that anything they promised to the Greens is, at best, just a polite suggestion.  As the Vancouver Sun's Vaughn Palmer observed in a remarkable column last week, NDP environment minister George Heyman insisted in the face of Liberal questioning that "what allows myself and other members of executive council to be government is the invitation of the Lieutenant Governor" and not any silly agreement with anyone — a bizarre technicality seemingly indicating that Horgan feels less beholden to the Greens than conventional wisdom dictates.

The future of Trans Mountain rests with the political calculations of BC's New Democrats, and their effort to remain electorally viable in a province that has never once granted them a majority of the popular vote.  It is a regional story, but also a useful case study of what 21^st century urban progressivism does when placed in charge of a natural resource economy.

Photo Credit: The Columbia Valley Pioneer

Written by J.J. McCullough