February 2021 - Loonie Politics

Even in the dire circumstances of Covid and energy sector woes, the Alberta government had a chance to signal a plan for pivoting the provincial economy into the future in its spring budget.

By continuing to trim back funding to the post-secondary sector, the United Conservative Party fumbled its opportunity.

Picking and choosing private sector beneficiaries for taxpayer support is always an iffy proposition. Look at the big splash of red ink on the Alberta books created by direct investment in the Keystone XL pipeline.

But government does have broad levers available in the public sector to create paths to a more sustainable future. Education spending is not just a social good, it's a driver of investment and innovation.

Businesses in the industries of the future artificial intelligence, health technology and research locate where the workforces are well educated and the opportunities for public-private collaborations are robust.

And yet, the 2021 Alberta budget trims 6.2 per cent in postsecondary spending, with a resulting 750 job losses.

The rationale for the funding dip is the government's plan to require post secondary institutions to ultimately raise 52 per cent of their operating budgets from their own sources of revenue. This year they are expected to come up with 47 per cent. In 2018-19 they funded 43 per cent.

These incremental cuts will bring Alberta into line with the middle of the pack of Canadian provinces, argues Premier Jason Kenney.

At one time Alberta was proud to declare itself in the forefront of public spending on those big quality items like education and health. No more. Alberta bean counters want no part of being at the top of the heap.

Oh yes, there is a mounting deficit the province must deal with. Conservatives love small government and minimal public sector workforces. What better way to get back to fiscal health than hit public institutions?

In a province with a desperate need to diversify and expand its knowledge economy, cutting post secondary institutions is exactly the wrong way to balance the budget.

The University of Calgary says the budget is taking $25 million out of its operating total, which means the total budget for the university has been cropped by 18 per cent since 2019.

U of C has reduced its workforce, frozen wages, increased tuition, dropped projects and reduced spending on travel and events.

University of Alberta President Bill Flanagan says U of A is being asked to shoulder close to half the province's post secondary budget cut, even though only 25 per cent of post secondary students in the province attend U of A.

The U of A says efforts to raise its own funds to offset the provincial grant chop are limited by government red tape. The government has put a seven per cent cap on tuition increases.

All post secondary institutions are also faced with a revolt by students and their parents about tuition costs which don't reflect the diminished quality of the educational experience created by Covid restrictions and online learning.

On top of those woes, the province has decided to proceed with a plan to create a new set of metrics by which it will judge the worth of postsecondary institutions in the province. Performance-based funding will be disbursed based on the UCP's view of how a college or university is doing in terms of benchmarks including the employment and income of grads and administrative expense ratios.

That's a lot of hands-on intervention given the government's waning contribution to post-secondary financial health.

Kenney and his cabinet have begun paying lip-service to the need to change the essential mix of Alberta's economy. There are various programs handing dough to companies to retrain their workforces, grow their footprint and "innovate".

But, pulling back the focus, it's tough to see how starving post secondary fits into any longterm diversification strategy. The short-sighted chainsawing of the public payroll may satisfy hardline fiscal conservatives, but it does nothing for a longterm strategy to boost the province into the future.

Photo Credit: CBC News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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Dear Erin:

You don't mind me calling you Erin, do you? After your toilet video, I feel like I'm never, ever going to have to address you as "Prime Minister O'Toole." So Erin it is.

You remember the toilet video, don't you? You should. It may be recent, or it may be from a previous Conservative leadership contest. Who knows.

It doesn't matter, however, because it is so cringe-worthy, so puerile, so idiotic, it actually is eternal. One hundred years from now, when Canada has finally acquired sufficient vaccine doses to be injected into the waiting arms of more than three per cent of the population, your toilet video will be studied.

"Observe, class. Here is how Erin O'Toole lost," the future political science professor will say, likely in Mandarin, because Justin Trudeau wanted it to become an official language. "Watch this video, and see how Erin O'Toole could not score on the biggest, emptiest net."

In the video, which I recommend no one see because it will depress them, you a grown man are standing in front of Langevin Block, which houses the Office of the Prime Minister. And then you amble over to an outhouse that is nearby, and you chortle that this is where you are going to put Justin Trudeau.

Now, Erin, you are not the first Conservative leader to be felled by bad visuals. There was Stock Day, who put on a wet suit and rode a jet-ski to his doom at a press conference. (Seriously, he did that.)

There was Joe Clark, who walked into a bayonet, or just about did, while on an international trip. (Yes. Happened.)

And there was Andrew Scheer, your immediate predecessor, who looked like a small-town insurance salesman, even though he wasn't even able to credibly claim to being that. (Or, as it turned out, a Canadian without dual citizenship somewhere else.)

And now there's you, a guy who aspires to the highest office in the land. Who makes official video-tapes about toilets.

Oh, and were you in the Armed Forces? I don't think you've told us that 100 times yet today, Erin, like you do it every other day.

Erin, listen: listen. You could be Prime Minister, but we're not so sure you want to be, anymore. Maybe you like Stornoway a lot.

But consider this: your opponent has spectacularly, indisputably screwed up the simplest of simple tasks. Buy vaccines, buy them early. He couldn't do either. Because of that, Canadians will die who weren't supposed to die just yet.

We are now somewhere near sixtieth in the world for vaccines. We are dipping into the Third World's supply, because your opponent has no soul and because he screwed everything up. And more than 70 per cent of Canadians are mad at the government and almost half of them saying they're really, really mad.

You? You haven't benefitted politically from that stuff at all. At all. In fact, some astonished pollsters say you've dropped a bit. If an election is held anytime soon, you are going to lose it.

Wakey, wakey, Erin. Time to make some big changes. Staff firings? Caucus exiling? Policy gutting? Whatever it takes, you need to do it, and do it fast. Politics is a blood sport, and you need to spill some of your own people.

Stephen Harper fired 100 staffers when he was Opposition leader, and he won. My former boss Jean ChrÃ©tien, too: canned a terrible chief of staff, made some big changes, won the election.

You need to do likewise. Quite a bit is riding on the next election, in case you haven't noticed. Get with it, Erin.

Or, keep making toilet videos.

The choice is yours, Erin.

Yours sincerely,

Warren

Photo Credit: CBC News

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As we close in on the one-year mark of the global pandemic, it has become clear that there is a pervasive belief that the prime minister has super powers or rather, that he should, if he just wishes hard enough for something to happen. As it turns out, there's a term for this in the United States known as the Green Lantern Theory, stemming from the comic book character (and film of the same name, starring Canadian Ryan Reynolds) whose green ring is capable of creating green energy projections whose only limits are the wearer's willpower and imagination. The political theory, of course, is that a president can achieve any political or policy objective if he only tries hard enough or uses the right tactics. Sound familiar in our own context?

The theory, articulated by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, actually comes in two variants the Reagan version, and the LBJ version. In the former, if the president can only communicate well enough, the public will rally to his side; in the latter, the president only needs to try harder to win over congress to vote through his agenda. Neither of those are quite specific enough to the current Canadian context, where prime minister Justin Trudeau only needs to try hard enough to magically solve the problems facing this country.

For example, if you listen to the Conservatives, if Trudeau simply tried harder, he could make Pfizer's vaccine plant retooling happen faster, or immediately solve Moderna's supply chain issues, and we could have enough vaccine for the entire country in the blink of an eye. Or if he tried hard enough, he could force President Biden to change his mind on the Keystone XL pipeline (though the Conservatives also seem to believe that the prime minister also needs to throw more public temper tantrums, and make performative displays of screaming and crying to show the Americans, or pharmaceutical company CEOs for that matter, that he's really serious).

For the NDP, they seem to believe that if Trudeau tries hard enough and exerts more willpower, he can overcome any barrier in the constitution and override provincial jurisdiction, whether that's on rent, paid sick leave, pharmacare, dental coverage, or long-term care. It's not that it would be unconstitutional, or that it would poison the well of federalism, or that he would be declaring war on the provinces he simply doesn't care enough about those issues to exert that much willpower that his green ring will make these magical policies happen. And so on.

While Green Lantern Theory emerged in the US as part of the popular imagination that the executive is far more powerful than it actually is (structurally, it's very weak because of the way their constitution was framed), in Canada, that doesn't quite hold because our executive is far more powerful most especially if there is a majority parliament, though that isn't the current make-up of the House of Commons. Nevertheless, in the current pandemic context where all of the attention has been focused on the prime minister (to the detriment of premiers, who should be held to greater account given that they have much more responsibility for healthcare and lockdown orders), Green Lantern Theory seems to be emerging out of frustration with federalism, particularly given that we are bombarded with constant demands for Trudeau to invoke the Emergencies Act to take over areas of provincial jurisdiction.

Of course, just as Green Lantern Theory falls apart in the US once it comes into contact with the realities of their congressional system, so too does it fall apart in Canada when confronted with the fact that even though our executive is stronger, the number of levers available to the federal government are particularly limited. There is no invoking the Emergencies Act because, aside from going to war with provinces who want no part of it, we haven't even met the basic threshold in the definition in the Act of what constitutes a national emergency, which is that the urgent and critical situation endangering the lives, health or safety of Canadians "is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it." The capacity or authority of the provinces has not been exceeded. The only thing that is lacking is the political will of premiers to take the necessary actions, whether it's rent relief, paid sick leave, or instituting proper lockdowns to prevent transmission of the virus.

Because Trudeau has demonstrated a willingness to do what is necessary to get Canadians through this pandemic, and spend any amount of money, there seems to be a belief that this can somehow extend to all areas, even those outside of his jurisdiction. And to his credit, he has certainly attempted to fill gaps where they appear, such as kludging together the federal sickness benefit where provinces won't implement paid sick leave, or similarly in kludging disability benefits from what few levers he has available. But because he is bound by those few levers the federal government has at his disposal, he has raised expectations that he can do more if he simply has enough willpower, which isn't how this works. The constitution is a very real thing that prevents him from reaching into provinces' areas of jurisdiction.

The prime minister doesn't have unlimited powers, and it would be a very bad thing if he did. He is not constrained by the limits of his willpower he is constrained by a constitution and a federal structure that is one of the most decentralized in the world. Falling into Green Lantern Theory is both delusional in believing that politics works in a way that is divorced from reality, but when employed by opposition party leaders, it is also a cynical exercise in trying paint the government as being unwilling to take actions that they simply cannot do, and is making promises that these other leaders could not keep. Justin Trudeau does not have a magic green ring we need to stop pretending otherwise.

Photo Credit: The Things

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Back in 2009, the treatment of China’s Uyghurs was barely a blip on the political radars of western capitals. Understandably, of course: much of the world at that time was engulfed in a financial crisis the likes of which had never been seen before. Like the pandemic of today, the Great Recession provided cover for all sorts of atrocities and transgressions in authoritarian nations the world over. But there was one leader who was talking publicly about itâ€”Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan’s support for the Uyghurs was deeply personal. Many Turks, rightly or wrongly, consider their cousins in China to be direct descendants of the Oghuz Turks, the original Turkic clans that would band together in the 8th century and eventually create the Ottoman Empire. Their language is the closest you can find to the Turkish spoken in Turkey today, much closer than the Turkish in the more well-known Turkic nations of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Erdogan had reason to be angered by the mistreatment of these autochthonous Turks. And it was a rare occasion in which the Turkish president’s signature bluster proved to be more than mere diversion. Erdogan pointed a finger at a gathering atrocity in its early stages. At the time, China still had not built the internment camps where it now imprisons up to a reported two million Uyghurs; it had notâ€”yetâ€”turned Xinjiang province into a surveillance state.

But it was killing and arresting Uyghurs on a mass scale nonetheless. Indeed, since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Chinese Communist Party had followed the lead of Republicans under George W. Bush, viewing anyone who fit a certain profileâ€”in China’s case, anyone of Turkic descent who showed outward signs of religious beliefâ€”to be a terrorist. Uyghurs who had fought for years to protect their language and culture from Han Chinese colonization, were suddenly labeled, arrested, and in some cases, permanently disappeared.

"The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide,” Erdogan, who was prime minister at the time, said. “There's no point in interpreting this otherwise."

The problem was that by 2009 Turkey had already taken the bait in China’s now familiar geopolitical modus operandi: only a month earlier, its then-president, Abdullah Gul, had signed a $1.5 billion trade deal with China. Since 2001, Turkey’s bilateral trade with China had ballooned from US$1 billion a year to over $10 billion. In the years to come, it would continue to grow, peaking at over $28 billion in 2013.

As Turkey’s economic reliance on China grew, Erdogan’s latitude for tough talk shrank. It wasn’t so much that China was pouring money into Turkeyâ€”equity capital investments by Chinese investors totalled a mere US$1.9 billion in 2019, compared to over $100 billion from Europeâ€”but the promise of favoured nation status at a time when Turkey’s relationships with its western allies were crumbling was too much to ignore.

“Now, with its traditional alliances in jeopardy, the Erdogan government wants to use the China and Russia cards in its dealings with the western world,” Ilhan Uzgel, the former head of the political science department at Ankara University, who was fired for his criticisms of the AK Party, tells me. “It does not want to be on bad terms with China.”

Turkey’s predicament is a cautionary tale of how not to deal with the Chinese Communist Party. In its fevered quest to be self-sufficient and independent, Turkey has found itself isolated and, in recent years, as the full scale of China’s crackdown on its Uyghurs have come to light, Erdogan has, out of necessity, remained uncharacteristically quiet.

Canada, Uzgel says, should be careful not to make the same mistake. “If you show weakness or division, the Chinese will try to exploit it,” he says. “If you are isolated, the Chinese will try to take advantage of you. It’s surprising that the Canadian Prime Minister would not join with the parliament to call what is happening to the Uyghurs a genocide. Canada is not Turkey; it is not isolated; it has a good relationship with the U.S. and with the Europeans. Confronting China is going to take this entire united front working in unison. That’s the message Canada should be sending, that it is on board with a global effort to confront the Chinese.”

Unlike Canada, Turkey faces a much more fraught predicament. Most recently, rumours have spread that China is using vaccine diplomacyâ€”delaying delivery of the Sinovac vaccineâ€”to arm-twist Turkey into ratifying an extradition treaty the two countries signed in 2017. Turkey is home to the world’s largest Uyhgur exile community, and much of the activism to bring attention to the plight of the Uyghurs, and preserve Uyghur culture, is centred in Istanbul. If that community is turned over to the Chinese, the last Uyghur-led resistance to China would potentially disappear.

Both Chinese and Turkish officials deny that the delay in vaccine deliveries has anything to do with politics but Turkey’s substantial Uyghur population is nonetheless terrified.

“We appreciate that Turkey has resisted ratifying the treaty so far,” one Uyghur activist in Istanbul told me recently, requesting anonymity. “But we also know how China operates and this pandemic has created opportunities for it. We’re living day by day here with the fear that we could be deported back to China at any time.”

In the fall of 2019, the same activist spoke to me openly, and on the record, about what Uyghurs faced in China (I never ended up using his interview for the story I was researching then, thankfully in retrospect). He described how Chinese authorities were “systematically trying to erase our culture” and how the world was doing nothing to stop them. It was heartbreaking to hear the stories of Uyghur’s in exile in Istanbul, of families torn apart for the grave crime of faith, of a language and history deemed a threat and in need of erasure.

During our recent telephone conversation, I told him about the decision in the Canadian parliament to call what was happening to the Uyghurs a genocide. His voice perked up. “Really?” he said.

Then I told him about the Canadian Prime Minister and his cabinet refusing to join the declaration. He let out a cynical laugh. “Yeah, just like Erdogan.”

The post ‘Just like Erdogan’: The mistake Trudeau is making with China appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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Have you ever witnessed someone do something utterly shocking, but because they have done it so many times, you are no longer capable of being shocked on an emotional level, even though intellectually you know you should feel something?

That is where everyone who pays any attention to Canadian defence procurement is right now, and has been for years if not decades.

This week the parliamentary budget officer, Yves Giroux, went through the annual ritual of revealing that the Royal Canadian Navy's badly needed frigates will now cost more money, and will arrive later than expected. What began as a $26-billion project 13 years ago will now take an extra decade, and will likely cost $77 billion. And, spoiler alert, Giroux added that the final price tag may (read: most certainly will) exceed $82 billion.

How many thousands of ships will we get in return? 15.

Canada could buy similar frigates from the Americans, French or even Australians. Our current price tag is between four and five times more expensive than theirs. Why? No one ever really has an answer. Our defence officials continually tweak the designs, with more and more expensive additions. Our sclerotic shipbuilding industry can't tie its own shoes on time or on budget. And both have small armies of supporters who convince gullible Canadian politicians that there is nothing more sacred than a shipbuilding job. All of them and none of them are to blame. It is what it is: a chronic, painful, incurable, mess.

If you stop reading here, I get it. I want to stop writing. There is possibly no other issue in Canadian politics as tedious and draining as defence procurement. Literally everything the Canadian military buys turns into an obscenely expensive mess. Just off the top of my head I can list uniforms, supply vessels, used submarines, search and rescue aircraft, drones, tanks, trucks, strategic lift aircraft, F-35s, Chinook helicopters, their new headquarters, rifles, and of course the legendary Sea Kings, as recent examples of purchases that took decades to complete and went over budget by astronomical amounts.

As a result, Canada's armed forces have become increasingly ill-equipped (to the point that we no longer even have workable submarines or a navy capable of crossing the Atlantic unassisted). Every Canadian government, as far back as the 1960s, has dealt with a procurement scandal. And every single Canadian has picked up the tab, year after year after year. It's long past time we put an end to this insanity.

Let's accept the fact, proven repeatedly for decades, that Canada is simply incapable of building ships for our navy. And then, let's just buy the damn things from the French, get them years earlier, and save ourselves $66 billion.

"But what about the jobs?!" I can hear the lobbyists cry. Yes, let's talk about the jobs. According to the government of Canada's own figures, only 11,100 people are employed in Canada's shipbuilding industry (we have more massage therapists). If we were to add on those indirectly employed, that number creeps up to 15,200. Now, let's pretend the Canadian frigate contract is the only shipbuilding job out there, and buying from France would mean every one of those 15,200 people would be out of work. If we were to give each of them $1 million in compensation, Canada would still save over $50 billion (in addition to getting the ships faster).

After that is done, let's make sure this never happens again by making it illegal to buy warships made in Canada. This would relieve pressure on future governments to re-open this Pandora's Box of madness and waste. When some future scion of the Irving family demands to know why Canada is not paying billions for new ships, future prime ministers can just shrug and explain their hands are tied. "We tried that. For a long time. It never worked. Sorry."

To be extra safe, we may also want to legislatively remove all Canadian defence officials and bureaucrats from any future ship procurement process. We could implement a form of conservatorshipâ€”appoint experts from countries that can build ships (such as Australia or France), and task them with deciding what we need and when we need it. This sounds extreme, but let's be objective here: how many more decades of waste and failure do we need to prove our officials are utterly incapable of this task.

I wish I was being satirical, but really, at this point the question is not, "Can Canada figure out how to buy naval frigates responsibly?" The only question is, "What can we do to end this insane cycle of waste and incompetence?"

The post It's time to ban the buying of made-in-Canada warships appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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Can you think of anything more satisfying than watching a really, really, really, really big gorilla with an axe smash a really, really, really, really big lizard on a tiny little aircraft carrier? Because I can't.

Godzilla vs. Kong, out in March, will be the 36th Godzilla film, the 33rd to feature a gigantic co-star. We undeniably love a good monster movie: the dose of unreality, the escape, the jolt from our doldrums; the feeling when our off-screen concerns become, fleetingly, as inconsequential as the ant-sized humans whose habitats are being ravaged on screen.

Critical acclaim is beside the point. Bad writing, plot holes or poor (human) character development will never eclipse the rip-roaring visual of two behemoths locked in an extended wrestling match. A Rotten Tomatoes score is no match for the exquisite CGI of an angry colossus refusing to back down. It is unlikely that Godzilla vs. Kong will fail to meet my expectations, roughly summed up as "giants brawling destructively."

READ: What does the future of Black filmmaking look like?

The premise feels like an echo of our vulnerability, our powerlessness next to forces we struggle to control. As Godzilla lays waste to city apartment blocks, tearing through urban populations across the globe, no one is safe from his path. No one is immune to the violence. Only a small, multinational group of experts can hope to understand how the titan ticks; the rest of the world relies on their ingenuity. Sound a bit familiar? (The symbolism gets a little derailed once the scientists' ingenuity is revealed as "let's wake up this other baddie.")

Of course, in the planning stages for this particular blockbuster, it's unlikely anyone considered that a plot loosely described as "two monsters fighting all over the place" would feel metaphoric of a deadly virus. No one would have predicted its release direct to streaming platforms at a time when most people are unable to visit a theatre. No one imagined WW84 as a cure for the pandemic blues either and, well, it's good they didn't.

Over the last century, Hollywood has reacted to humanity's scariest moments with fodder that, at least through an American lens, gave audiences an outlet to reclaim their fears and watch their enemies be vanquished anew. Anti-terrorism serials gained massive popularity after 9/11. Fully 75 years after the end of the Second World War, movie heroes are still punching Nazis to great effect.

How will the world of entertainment react to COVID-19? With the United States hit especially hard, will other countries' film industries rise to greater prominence? Will the next generation of action-adventure romps fetishize scientists in line with soldiers and intelligence agents? Will the next soapy drama or hit sitcom centre on the lives of a ragtag crew of epidemiologists? Or will we lean even harder toward flicks with plot lines that are basically "HULK SMASH"?

Those of us who miss the cinema are eager to find out. As winter drags on and the apartment walls close in, I'll take a monster movie or two in the meantime.

This article appears in print in the March 2021 issue of Maclean's magazine with the headline, "Monster smash." Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Why Godzilla vs. Kong perfectly captures the tenor of our times appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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Eleven months is an excruciatingly long time, it turns out. But that's how long we've been living in the pandemic. And it's also how we've been swirling around the same attitudes.

Take this week when a video of an absurdly long line at a York-region Homesense started circulating on Twitter. Outrage was rampant. 'How could people be so selfish to go get home decor â€” in a pandemic, no less!' the tenor of the outrage went.

Ultimately, this line of thinking buys into what premiers have been trying to sell from the start: the severity of the pandemic is our fault, not theirs. People are doing something explicitly permitted by the government, so what's the use at getting upset at them?

For months now, leaders have tried to voluntarily curb our activities for the good of safety, while at the same time refusing to make those suggestions orders until well after it's clear the voluntary measures have failed.

So why are we so mad at these people?

I can't help but feel the outrage is misplaced. People have been taking the implicit message in the decision to re-open stores: It wasn't safe before, but it is now. Why else would stores be open?

The people to blame for this aren't standing in line, they're sitting in Queen's Park.

By pointing anger at the individuals in line, you're letting Premier Doug Ford coast on his decision to open things up. Diffuse anger is a useless political force. It's not going to accomplish anything, and it's not going to make you feel any better.

There is a line somewhere that separates what is unacceptable even if it is permitted. Besides, expecting us to get out of this pandemic with a reliance on people's perfect selflessness just isn't going to happen. Not now, not anymore.

It might have been possible earlier in the pandemic. There was a moment, a fleeting one, where "We're all in this together" didn't seem like completely naive bullshit.

That time has long passed. We've seen now the craven underbelly of our own rotten world. And that cravenness is most fetid right at the top.

Once the first reopening took place, there was a clear message from our leaders. If you're spending money, getting together with other people is just fine. There's nothing clearly happening in this video that's far outside the lines of public health guidelines. This isn't a mass of anti-mask lunatics, storming a mall. It's people waiting in a line, more or less on their distance marks. (Amusingly, the person who took the video is one of many people walking opposite to the direction arrows pasted on the floor.)

It's easy to get mad at a bunch of people lined up buying pillows and sheets and pictures for the living room wall. (It veers quickly into what you might call a bit of casual sexism, with sneering at "suburban wine moms.")

Shaming people hasn't proved to be a very useful tactic in fighting the virus. If it was, surely we would have tweeted our rage at random people and found our way out of COVID by now.

But we haven't.

We have been locked away in some form or another for these 11 months. That's an achingly long time. And so I'm having a difficult time seeing these people as the enemy.

Premiers have been giving us mixed signals for as long as COVID has been with us. The whole time, they've essentially been telling us to take the bus, all the while building highway lanes.

We know by now how ineffective it is to ask people to stop doing things voluntarily. If it isn't safe for people to be shopping, then shopping should not be permitted.

But it's not entirely clear to me this is the most egregious thing to be doing.

At some point the logic of "if it's allowed, people are fine to do it" breaks down. I'm not sure exactly where the line falls. Air travel, especially international pleasure travel, is clearly irresponsible. (This is why strict and costly quarantine measures make sense, even if they're months late in coming about.)

Indoor dining is another that probably falls beyond the pale even if it is allowed. But it probably shouldn't be allowed.

This is where things get fuzzy. And one of the big problems is we all have an internal line in the sand we've drawn. Where it lies can vary widely. I haven't had a meal inside a restaurant since last March, the night things really seemed to fall apart. But just last week I put on two masks and went for a haircut, soon after the barber opened up.

You wouldn't find me in a Homesense line that long, the place isn't my jam. You probably wouldn't find me in any place that is crowded right now, masks or not. I find it deeply uncomfortable to be among so many people for any length of time these days.

But I've waited in some pretty long grocery lines. Could I have gone at a different time? Maybe. Is that more acceptable because buying food is more important than buying housewares? Perhaps. But is there an actual difference in safety or risk if I'm waiting in an IGA instead of a Homesense? I'm not so sure.

This is why the individual responsibility model of pandemic response cannot work. This personal risk assessment we all take part in, deciding what is worth leaving the house for and what isn't, is no way to fight a collective problem like COVID.

We have governments with both the information and the power to know what is safe and what isn't. If they aren't doing their job, it's not the fault of the governed for that failure. The failure lies with the people making the decisions.

I'll save my ire for them.

Photo Credit: Forbes

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He haunts us still.

20 years after his death and 37 years after retiring from politics, the ghost of Pierre Elliott Trudeau is part of our political landscape, and will remain so.

This time, the CBC informs us Pierre Trudeau actively tried to undermine Quebec's economy in the aftermath of the election of the Parti Quebecois in 1976. Trudeau Sr. apparently approached Canadian power brokers, such as Power Corporations' Paul Desmarais and Canadian Pacific chairman Ian Sinclair to ask them to move jobs out of Quebec.

The information comes from a very reliable source: U.S. State Department documents from the then American Ambassador in Canada, Thomas Enders. "The idea would be to increase the current unemployment rate from 10% to 15% and even 20% next year," Enders wrote to his bosses in Washington.

For many Quebecers, this is not surprising news. A long held federalist mantra about Quebec separation is that it would be bad for the economy. Logically, if separation is bad for the economy, so is a separatist government.

In April 1970, two days before the provincial election, the first demonstration that the rise of separatism would lead to economic woes happened with "le coup de la Brinks", when a convoy of nine Brinks armoured trucks moved billions in Royal Trust securities from Montreal to Ontario. Pierre Trudeau has been accused of being behind this move.

Trudeau also took it upon himself to try to make sure it would be the case after the 1976 election. The analysis that Trudeau's move was in retaliation for the historic election of the PQ falls short, however. He was not retaliating so much as illustrating the real-life consequences to scare people away from separatism. A fear-campaign can work, but it'll work better if people can witness their fears become reality.

The fact that the PQ was democratically elected by the people of Quebec? The fact that job losses would bring poverty and misery to Quebecers? Not a concern for the then Prime Minister of Canada. The end justifies the means in Ottawa when the unity of the country was at stake.

Having a deep aversion to Quebec nationalism does not justify the lengths to which Pierre Trudeau was willing to go. But does it matter today, now that the PQ is fighting with another separatist party for 3rd place in Quebec and the soft nationalism of FranÃ§ois Legault's CAQ has taken over?

It was certainly interesting to watch Bloc QuÃ©bÃ©cois MPs pick up the story and try to get Justin Trudeau to wear his father's actions. Will it work? The window for Quebecers' outrage for these kinds of actions is smaller than ever. Millennials do not care about the flag battles of the past, while Justin Trudeau is praising Bill 101 to attract nationalist voters.

I'd be hard pressed to tell you if his father would laugh or cry.

Photo Credit: CBC News

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I've been a political columnist for 25 years. Every so often, I like to step outside the box and create an unconventional piece. These pieces are crafted to be provocative, thought-provoking and above all, fun.

Some of my unusual creations have included: Family Guy Libertarians, Murdoch Mysteries and conservatism, Hee Haw and politics, and right-leaning philosophies in Sesame Street.

The newest entry? The political tao of Daft Punk.

On Monday, the French electronic music duo announced the end of their highly successful partnership after 28 years. Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter combined various musical genres, including rock, funk and techno, into their original sound. They had many hit songs, including "Da Funk," "Around the World," "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and "Get Lucky" with Pharrell Williams on vocals. They won six Grammy Awards and have been regularly called one of music's most influential electronic/dance groups.

While I don't care for electronic music my modern tastes are firmly ensconced in alternative, hard rock and heavy metal I have a soft spot for Daft Punk. The band's homage to Japanese anime was what first intrigued me. Kazuhisa Takenouchi's Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (2003) served as a visual backdrop for the band's second album, Discovery. I found them to be multi-talented musicians with unique tastes and an uncanny ability to merge different sounds into one brilliant theme.

There were also some odd characteristics about Daft Punk that set them apart from their contemporaries.

Their music catalog was surprisingly bare. Daft Punk produced a mere four studio albums (Homework, Discovery, Human After All and Random Access Memories), two live albums (Alive 1997, Alive 2007) and the soundtrack for the 2010 film Tron: Legacy. Their only number one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 was "Starboy," a 2016 collaboration with Canada's The Weeknd.

They also shunned the public spotlight.

Homem-Christo and Bangtaler performed as robots with elaborate outfits, including helmets and gloves. They were rarely seen without this facade, although photos of them in the flesh obviously exist. Their private lives, including families and children, floated under the radar (although Bangtaler is married to French actress Ã‰lodie Bouchez). Interviews with the media were few and far between.

Daft Punk's success can be partially attributed to the shroud of mystery surrounding its performers. In an industry where many performers talk way too much, silence can be golden. Having a somewhat invisible stature in a medium where high visibility is sought after and demanded only served to create further intrigue.

Yet, the quiet duo's provocative music actually spoke volumes. It can be viewed in the guise of tao, a Chinese word which means "way" or "path," with occasional glimpses that had a light aura of political thinking.

Daft Punk wasn't a political band. In the 2002 French presidential election, they wouldn't allow either right-leaning incumbent Jacques Chirac or his left-leaning opponent Lionel Jospin to use their song "One More Time" during the campaign. Establishing a break between music and politics was abundantly clear.

Then again, Bangtaler told Interview on Feb. 8, 2017, "The way we listen to Chicago house music, disco, heavy metal or punk is completely artistic, without the political side of it. But then we used it in a political way ourselves, which is making music at home, recycling and by combining those styles at home and doing it in a very new way." When asked to elaborate, he said the album Homework "was completely done in a very small bedroom. It's mixed on a small ghetto blaster. Selling millions of albums recorded that way is something new. I don't know if it's political, but it's a way of thinking that record companies aren't always going to dictate to artists."

During a Jan. 27, 2014 NPR interview, both men made revealing comments.

"It's not the music of today or the music of the future or the past," Homem-Christo said. "Some people would think that it's kind of retro to work with these guys and to have this type of, like, disco or funk, but to me it's just putting back some soul or some life in music." Bangtaler then said, "It's a very subjective, personal, instinctive approach as musicians of saying, 'We don't want to replace what's around; we just want to widen the possibilities.'"

What does all this mean?

In the Bible, Matthew 5:5 reads, "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." When the two faux robots in Daft Punk hid behind the helmets, they could be perceived as being meek: modest, shy, unwilling to discuss or convey ideas. But when they spoke, it was from a position of strength, confidence and intelligence.

Daft Punk's message was powerful and forthright. They respected tradition. They built on existing musical themes rather than destroying them. They refused to be pigeonholed as musicians. They cultivated original ideas into new, exciting possibilities. They wouldn't succumb to interpreting music with politics, but used political principles to record and promote the musical styles they enjoyed.

You can agree or disagree with Daft Punk's philosophies. But their tao seemed to convey a personal path where their musical vision, rather than their personal visage, is what they wanted to be most remembered for.

That's admirable, and worthy of discussion even in a creative, outside-the-box column such as this!

Photo Credit: Pitchfork