Manitoba is now up the Creek, Without a Paddle, in a Leaky Kinew

 I have said before that I think we Canadians owe our Sovereign, now His Majesty Charles III, although when I made the remark originally it was our late Sovereign Lady of blessed memory, Elizabeth II, an apology for the incompetent, utterly corrupt, and insanely evil clown who, through our abuse of our voting privilege, has been Prime Minister of this Commonwealth Realm for the last eight years.   Now I would add that the Canadians of my province, Manitoba, owe a double apology for putting the only politician in the Dominion worse than Captain Airhead himself into the premier’s office, with a majority in the Legislature behind him.

 

When the evil New Democratic Party led by the execrable Wab Kinew won the provincial election on 3 October, I was disgusted but not surprised.   When Lee Harding of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a local think-tank here in Winnipeg, published a piece on 29 September calling for the re-election of the Progressive Conservatives, I could not agree with his title as much as I desired that outcome.   The title was “Manitoba PCs Deserve Another Mandate”.   No, they did not.   The reason for voting PC this election was not that they deserved it but that the alternative was much, much, worse.

 

The Progressive Conservatives, led by Brian Pallister, won the provincial election of 2016 and governed well enough in their first term that Harding’s title would have been true had he written his article in 2019.   That year they won re-election and at the annual New Year’s Levée hosted by the Lieutenant Governor I shook Pallister’s hand and congratulated him on his victory.   Within a few months of this, however, Pallister’s governance went south badly and I came to loathe the man.   In July of 2021, a short time before he resigned as PC leader and premier, I expressed this in these words:

 

Brian Pallister is an ignorant fool!

He’s a stupid, ugly, loser and he smells bad too!

His one and only virtue,

I hate to say it but it’s true,

His one and only virtue is –

He’s not Wab Kinew!

 

 

It was Pallister’s handling of the bat flu scare that had so soured me on his governance.   He had imposed a particularly harsh lockdown, had done so earlier than many other provinces, and had done so in an arrogant, in-your-face, manner.   Wab Kinew and the NDP criticized Pallister’s handling of the pandemic, but their criticism went entirely in the wrong direction.   They criticized Pallister for not imposing lockdowns sooner, not making them harsher, lifting them too early and this sort of thing.   They should have been criticizing Pallister for trampling all over the most basic rights and freedoms of Manitobans, that is to say our ancient Common Law rights and freedoms not the useless and empty guarantees of Pierre Trudeau’s Charter, and acting like there are no constitutional limits to the power of government in an emergency.   Their mishandling of the bat flu panic under Pallister is the reason the PC’s don’t deserve another mandate.   Kinew’s criticism of the same, which amounted to a demand that Pallister do more of what he was doing wrong, is one reason why the NDP do not deserve to replace the PC’s as government and are a much worse alternative.

 

It was not the botched job he made of the bat flu that ultimately brought about Pallister’s resignation as PC leader and premier at the beginning of September 2021.   This was 2021, and the crazy progressive leftists who dominate so much of the Canadian mainstream media, envious as always of their counterparts in the United States, decided that Canada needed her version of the George Floyd controversy that had been manufactured by the BLM Movement – the movement for whom the lives of American blacks matter the least because their target is the American police who protect American blacks from the violent crime that costs so many blacks their lives each year – and so jumped on the discovery of ground disturbances – and that was all that were discovered – on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which the band interpreted as the discovery of unmarked graves – not “mass graves” as falsely reported – and began claiming that this “proved” the version of the Indian Residential Schools narrative that defrocked United Church minister and conspiracy theorist Kevin Annett has been spouting since the 1990s, i.e., that children were murdered by the thousands in the schools and buried in secret graves.   Imagine if the mainstream media in the UK were to start reporting David Icke’s theory that the world is controlled by reptilian shapeshifters from outer space and you will have an approximation of the degree of departure from journalistic standards and integrity that was involved here.   Their claim has since been thoroughly debunked, which is why leftist politicians now want to criminalize debunking it, but it had its intended effect.   That summer saw the biggest wave of hate crimes in Canadian history as Church buildings – whether the Churches had any connection to the residential schools or not – were burned or otherwise vandalized all across the country.   On Dominion Day, Year Zero, Cultural Maoist terrorists, toppled the statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature.   No society can afford to tolerate this sort of violent, seditious, assault on her history and civilization and Brian Pallister appropriately condemned these acts.   In doing so he made positive statements about the previous generations of Canadians who settled and built the country and who are now constantly being defamed by progressive academics and journalists, in violation of the fifth and ninth commandments.   The provincial Indian chiefs decided to take offense at this – take offense is the operative phrase, as none was given, Pallister had not said anything about them, negative or otherwise – and demanded that Pallister apologize.  Pallister should have told them to go suck an egg and stood his ground.   Instead, about a month later, he cravenly gave them the apology they didn’t deserve, and in the event didn’t accept, and shortly thereafter resigned.

 

Kelvin Goertzen took over as interim party leader and premier until the party held its leadership vote on 30 October.   Now, I am not a fan of this method of choosing a party leader.   I think that it is far more consistent with our parliamentary form of government for the party caucus – the party’s sitting members in the House of Commons or provincial legislative assembly – to choose their leader, and that selling paid memberships in the party with a vote for the leader attached smacks of the American republican system.   I also dislike the way our elections, Dominion and provincial, are now treated by almost everyone as if we were directly voting for the prime minister or premier, rather than voting for our local representatives in a larger parliamentary assembly, for the same reason.   This is a consequence of being inundated with too much American culture in the form of television and movies.   That having been said, if the party leader is to be chosen this way, it should at least be open and honest.   That is precisely what the vote that put Heather Stefanson in as leader of Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives and premier of the province was not.   Stefanson was the candidate supported by the sitting members – had the party chosen its leader according to my preferred method she would have still become leader.   She was also, however, the candidate that the backroom bosses of the party wanted as leader, and when they ultimately got their way their new leader had a huge cloud of suspicion of shenanigans over her head.   Stefanson won the leadership vote by a narrow margin – 51.1% over the 48.9% received by Shelly Glover, which looks even narrower in total vote count – 8, 405 for Stefanson, 8, 042 for Glover.   Glover, who had formerly been a member of the House of Commons representing St. Boniface, based her campaign in part on dissatisfaction with how Pallister, with whose government Stefanson had been associated, had handled the bat flu.   The party’s former CFO, Ken Lee, had also sought the leadership, in his case making opposition the Pallister lockdowns his sole issue, but his candidacy was disqualified for reasons that never really were made clear.   This looked shady, as did the fact that over 1200 members had not received their ballots in time to vote, and when Glover lost by such a narrow margin - less than 400 votes - she contested the outcome, but her challenge was quickly dismissed.    This had all the appearances of a backroom fix.

 

When this happened I realized that it would take a miracle for the Progressive Conservatives to win the next election.   You cannot treat your voting base this way and expect them to turn up in sufficient numbers to support you come election time.

 

It was apparent during the short election campaign, and the longer pre-campaign leading up to it, that Stefanson’s PCs were not remotely as committed to their winning the election as their enemies were to their being defeated.   I say enemies rather than opponents because it is not just their rivals in the legislature that I am talking about.

 

The unions have been determined to take down the PCs since pretty much the moment Brian Pallister became premier and have really stepped up their game in the last couple of years.   They have spent a fortune on billboard ads all over Winnipeg attacking the PC government.   Then there are the yard signs that began popping up like mushrooms all over the place long before the party campaign signs came out.   These couldn’t explicitly endorse candidate or party, but everyone knew what they were getting at.  The most common such signs were from the Manitoba Nurses Union and the Manitoba Teachers Society.  

 

Allied with these unions in their quest to bring down the PCs and put Kinew’s NDP into government, was the media, especially the CBC, which as Crown broadcaster by rights ought to be neutral, and the Winnipeg Free Press.     

 

These media, along with the Manitoba Nurses Union and the NDP, have been using health care as a club to bash the Progressive Conservatives with ever since Pallister, early in his premiership, indicated his disagreement with them that health care spending needs to keep going in one direction only, up, converted the Emergency Rooms at Seven Oaks and Victoria Hospitals in Winnipeg into urgent care centres, and closed the Concordia Hospital ER refocusing the hospital to transitional care for the elderly and those undergoing physical rehabilitation.   The PCs dropped the ball on this one.   They should have hammered back, just as hard, pointing out that the consultant’s report on whose recommendations they did this had been commissioned by the previous, NDP, government, and that at the same time they expanded the capacity of the three remaining ERs – Health Sciences Centre, St. Boniface, and Grace.   They should also have emphasized that health care has usually fared much worse under NDP governments in rural ridings.   The ER in Vita, a rural community about an hour and a half south-east of Winnipeg, closed three years after Greg Selinger became premier.  Two years later it was still closed, with eighteen others along with it.    ERs in many other rural communities remained open, but on a basis somewhat like a multi-point parish, with the same doctor serving several ERs, being in the one the one day, another the next.   In the second last year of Gary Doer’s premiership, the ER in Virden, a rural community along the TransCanada Highway near the Saskatchewan border was temporarily closed, mercifully for only about half a year.   These examples are representative, not comprehensive, and while the rural doctor shortage is a chronic problem regardless of who is in government, rural areas always fare worse under the NDP.  Not coincidentally, these same areas rarely if at all vote NDP.   A rural ER closure, even a temporary one, is worse than an ER closure in Winnipeg, for while there are more people in Winnipeg, the transit time to the next ER, especially if the ER to close is one that serviced a very large area, like the one in Vita, is increased that much more in the country.

 

The media also found another club to bash the PC government with in the Indians’ demand that the Prairie Green Landfill be searched for the remains of two murdered women that the Winnipeg Police believe to have ended up there.   This demand was expressed in protests, blockades, and something that is probably best described as a riot, earlier this year.   Here again, Stefanson’s PCs shot themselves in the foot.   Not so much by refusing the demand – their grounds for doing so were sound, and certainly not the “racism” of which idiots accuse them – but by bringing the issue into the election campaign.   No matter how sound the case for not conducting this just under $200 million search of an area laced with toxins, there was no way Stefanson could argue her point without appearing heartless.  It would have been better to stay silent.

 

So, no, the Stefanson PC’s did not deserve another mandate.   The problem is that those who won deserved it even less.

 

Let me spell it out for you.   At the moment, people all across the Dominion of Canada are experiencing an affordability crisis.   The price of food has gone through the roof.   Many Canadians are skipping meals, many others are buying less healthy processed food than they otherwise would, because the prices at the grocery stores are too high.   At the same time rent is sky high and houses are selling at obscene prices.   Transportation is also that much more expensive.   Much of this is the direct consequence of bad action on the part of the Dominion government.   The price of gasoline has gone up considerably due to the carbon tax, which in turn increases the price of everything that needs to be transported using fuel.  The housing shortage is a direct consequence of Captain Airhead’s decision to use record immigration, with apologies to Bertolt Brecht, to elect a new people.   While Captain Airhead seems to think that food prices are high because of price fixing on the part of the big grocery chains, a notion he borrowed from the man propping his minority government up, federal NDP leader Jimmy Dhaliwal, the fact of the matter is that he has been spending like a drunken sailor since he got into office.   When governments spend more than they take in in revenue, this is not a contributing factor to inflation, it is inflation.   The extra they spend increases the supply of money, the means of exchange, which decreased the value of money per unit, and causes the price of everything else to rise relative to it.    When you spend the way Captain Airhead did over the last few years, paying people to stay home for long periods of time and not go to work – decreasing the production of goods and services and thus causing their cost in currency to go up – you increase inflation exponentially.   Manitoba just elected a premier who has the same sort of attitude towards spending as Captain Airhead.  

 

Last month, in the Million Person March, organized by Ottawa Muslim activist Kamel El-Cheik, but supported by many faith groups and people just concerned about the rights of parents, Canadians across the Dominion expressed what polls already had indicated to be the overwhelming majority opinion of Canadians – that schools should not be keeping parents out of the loop about what is going on in the classroom with their kids about gender identity and that sort of thing.   While leftists have tried to spin this as an alphabet soup issue, accusing those protesting of various sorts of hatred and bigotry, and spinning the reasonable insistence that teachers entrusted with the education of children report back to the parents who so entrusted them, as “forced outing”, they are being absurd.   There is a word for someone who tells kids to keep stuff having to do with sex a secret from their parents.   The policy that schools and school boards have been following in recent years seems tailor-made to accommodate such people.   Heather Stefanson had promised in her campaign to protect parental rights.   The promise would have been more credible had she introduced the legislation to do so earlier when the New Brunswick and Saskatchewan governments were doing so.   However, this much is clear, if someone wanted to protect perverts in the schools rather than the rights of parents, he would be cheering the outcome of this election.

The province already has a huge problem with drug abuse and related social evils.   The CBC reported in April that provincial Chief Medical Examiner had told them via e-mail that the number of drug-related deaths per year has "risen dramatically here in recent years" and that "the deaths are only the tip of the iceberg".   407 Manitobans died from overdoses in 2021, 372 the year previously, both record numbers.   It was at least 418 in 2022.    At least 228 involved fentanyl and/or related drugs.   The city of Winnipeg also saw the largest jump in crime severity of any Canadian city in the same period.   These two facts are not unrelated, nor is the size of the homelessness problem in Winnipeg.    The left, in recent years, has been obsessed with the "harms reduction" approach to this matter, an approach that tries to lower the number of deaths due to overdose and contamination by providing a "safe" supply of drugs and "safe" places to use them.   It is usually coupled with decriminalization or outright legalization of some or all narcotics.   This approach is concerned more with the effects of drugs on those who (ab)use them and less or not at all with the effects of drug abuse on the surrounding community.   It was tried by the NDP in Alberta in the premiership of Rachel Notley, and more dramatically in British Columbia, where the provincial NDP government introduced this approach on a provincial scale earlier at the beginning of this year, despite it having proven a failure when the city of Vancouver tried it, causing overdose deaths to rise.   The NDP are incapable of learning from their mistakes on matters such as these.   Expect Kinew to try and imitate BC's mistake, not avoid it and look elsewhere, like, for example, Singapore's "harm prevention" approach, for a successful model.    This problem is about to get much worse in Winnipeg and Manitoba.

 

It will not be long before we in Manitoba rue the outcome of this election.

 

Now we owe His Majesty a double apology, first for Captain Airhead in the Dominion Prime Minister’s Office, now for Captain Airhead’s doppleganger in the province of Manitoba.

Pallister is Under Attack for All the Wrong Reasons

I don’t like Brian Pallister who is the premier of my province, Manitoba, very much.   Oh, I was very glad to see him replace Greg Selinger in that office, voted for the Progressive Conservative party which he leads in the last two provincial elections, and even congratulated him in person on his re-election, but I was never particularly enthusiastic about his leadership qualities.    In March of last year, I lost most of my respect for the man when he locked down the province harder than almost anywhere else in Canada before the bat flu had even really arrived here and did so by holding a press conference in which he arrogantly rubbed the heavy-handedness of his approach in all of our faces.  In the year and a half since then, he has whittled away at what little of that respect remained by such behaviour as scapegoating ordinary Manitobans for the failure of the dictatorial public health orders of his power-mad public health mandarin Brent Roussin, setting up a snitch line and encouraging Manitobans to spy on their friends, family, and neighbours and rat them out for violations of these petty public health orders, showing complete and utter disregard for constitutional protections of Manitobans’ basic freedoms and rights, blasphemously raising himself to the level of God by adding an eleventh commandment to the Decalogue, and, most recently, using the means of bribery and blackmail to coerce Manitobans to give up their right to not be medicated against their freely given, informed, consent.

 

I have expressed my present attitude towards the premier in the following lines of verse:

 

Brian Pallister is an ignorant fool!

He’s a stupid, ugly, loser and he smells bad too!

His one and only virtue,

I hate to say it but it’s true,

His one and only virtue is –

He’s not Wab Kinew!

 

That having been said, Pallister has come under heavy attack this month for reasons that have nothing to do with the draconian way in which ran roughshod over all our rights and freedoms in order to swat the bat flu bug.   On Dominion Day an angry, lawless, mob descended upon the grounds of the provincial legislature here in Winnipeg.   The mob was not angrily demanding the restoration of our rights and freedoms and small businesses and social lives.   They were mad, in both senses of the word, because for the month previous far left activists masquerading as journalists, that is to say, most of the mainstream media in Canada, had been using the discovery of graves that are currently without markers near former Indian Residential Schools to defame Canada, her founders and historical leaders, the Christian religion and especially the Roman Catholic Church, and white people in general, in a most vile and disgusting manner.    The mob vandalized and tore down the large statue of Queen Victoria that had stood in front of the legislature as well as a smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth II that had stood near the Lieutenant Governor’s residence.   Since Queen Victoria was the queen who signed the bill that established Canada as a country, Queen Elizabeth II is the present reigning monarch and this was done on the country’s anniversary this was an obvious assault on the very idea of Canada herself.

 

Pallister, quite rightly, expressed his “disgust and disappointment” at these actions, condemning them both at the time and in a press conference the following Wednesday.   At the latter he said that the statues would be restored.   He also said, with regards to the early settlers of Canada “the people came here to this country, before it was a country and since, didn’t come here to destroy anything, they came here to build, they came to build better and build they did.   They built farms and they built businesses, they built communities and churches too.   They built these things for themselves and one another and they built them with dedication and with pride and so we must dedicate ourselves to building yet again”.  This is what his enemies wish to crucify him for saying.  Much to his credit, he has so far stood by his remarks.

 

In these comments Pallister depicted those who settled here and built what became the country Canada as having been human beings rather than devils.   This is what the far left finds so unforgiveable.  The fundamental essence of the political left, its sine qua non, is the envious hatred of those who build, especially those who have built in the past those things we enjoy and benefit from as a legacy in the present, which envious hatred manifests itself as efforts to tear down and destroy.    They have to think of the builders of the past as devils in order to avoid the suspicion that they themselves are such.

 

The media, which everywhere but perhaps especially in Canada is largely synonymous with the political left, has framed the controversy which it has itself generated over Pallister’s remarks in racial and ethnic terms.   What is implied, or in some cases practically stated outright, in all the criticism and condemnation of Pallister’s words, is that speaking positively of the European, Christian, settlers who came to what is now Canada over the last four to five centuries and of their accomplishments rather than demonizing them is insensitive and offensive to Native Indian Canadians.   We are essentially being told that our country, her history, and her founders and historical figures from the early settlers through the Fathers of Confederation to the present day, must only be spoken of in terms of shame, that everything we have historically celebrated about our country must be forgotten, and that we must instead forever be beating ourselves up over the Indian Residential Schools.   Should there be anyone left in Canada still capable of thinking at the level of an adult, such a person must surely recognize that it is this attitude on the part of the progressive media rather than Pallister’s speech that is truly demeaning to the Natives as it treats them as thin-skinned bigots who cannot hear anyone other than themselves spoken of positively without taking it as an insult to themselves.   It also suggests that they are incapable of telling when the left is cynically exploiting their suffering for its own interests.  The attack on the symbols of the monarchy serves the cause of the left since republicanism, whatever J. J. McCullough, Anthony Furey, Spencer Fernando, Lorne Gunter, and the average American “conservative” may think to the contrary, is essentially left-wing, but it is difficult to see how an attack on the only Canadian symbol that unites all Canadians – aboriginal, English, French, and newer immigrants – could genuinely serve the interests of Native people. (1)

 

I will note here, for whatever it is worth, that on the day of Pallister’s press conference, the first attack on his words that I came across was on the local CBC.    The segment, which was formatted as a news report although it was in reality an editorial, was by a well-known local reporter and featured as an “expert” a man on the faculty of the University of Manitoba who was described, amusingly in my opinion, as a historian.   Both men are notorious for their left wing views, both are lily white, and both have British-Scandanavian family names.   The following day both the Association of Manitoba Chiefs and the Southern Chiefs Organization issued press releases condemning Pallister and his remarks which it would probably have been fairer to these organizations to not have mentioned as the bigoted and ill-informed terms in which they are written do them no credit whatsoever, but white leftists appear to have been the ones that got the ball rolling on this anti-Pallister campaign.

 

That ball has been picking up speed ever since.   Helping it along have been a number of defections from Pallister’s Cabinet and staff, starting with the resignation of Eileen Clarke who had been Minister of Indigenous and Municipal Relations.   The portfolio was then given to Alan Lagimodiere, the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Selkirk.  Although Lagimodiere is Metis, his appointment has not exactly improved the situation for Pallister as he began his opening speech in this office by saying that those who established the Residential Schools “thought they were doing the right thing”.   This is, as Colby Cosh has pointed out, “a flat factual truth”.   Obviously, a great many Canadians today are of the opinion that they were not doing the right thing.   Ordinarily, when people in one era do something that they think is right and people of a later era, with the benefit of hindsight, conclude that what was done was actually wrong, the latter do not refuse to credit the former for the sincerity of their intentions.   In this case, however, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has so poisoned the well of discussion with its interpretation of the schools as a “cultural genocide”, a vile expression which is a dishonest, morally outrageous, Marxist trick by which cultural assimilation, whatever one might think about it, is treated as if it were the equivalent of mass murder, which it is not, that it is impossible to speak the truth Lagimodiere spoke without provoking an irrational, emotion-driven, backlash.     Needless to say, matters have not been helped by the mainstream media’s having, in what constitutes criminal incitement that has spawned a massive wave of hate crimes, spun the discovery of graves lacking markers near the former Indian Residential Schools into a malicious blood libel against our country and her churches.   Lagimodiere was quickly interrupted by Wab Kinew, the present leader of the provincial socialists who ever since taking over that role from Selinger has been making his predecessor look better by comparison, a rather difficult undertaking indeed.     My personal opinion of Kinew you can probably deduce from the verse about Pallister above.  Kinew, applying the current left wing dogma that nothing positive must ever be said about the Residential Schools and those who established and ran them, a dogma which if applied retroactively would condemn even Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Murray Sinclair, told Lagimodiere that he could not do the job to which he had appointed while thinking the way he does.

 

Since then, there have been more resignations, more condemnations and ultimatums from the chiefs, and more calls from the progressive media for Pallister to step down.

 

If only all of this were in response to what he has done wrong – suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms, treating in-person social interaction which is both bonum in se and absolutely essential to our wellbeing as if it were a crime, destroying small local businesses, declaring religion and worship to be non-essential but places that peddle mind-destroying , highly addictive, substances to be essential, basically turning the province into a police state for a year and a half, and holding normal life ransom in order to bully us all into accepting a medical treatment whether we have made informed decisions as to whether the benefits sufficiently outweigh the risks or not – rather than to what he has done right – refusing to go along with the wholesale demonization of Canada, her European Christian settlers, and her historical founders and leaders, by the left which can only ever tear down and never build up, the media that is so totally in its thrall, and those Native leaders who have shortsightedly joined forces with the left.

 

(1)   English Canada grew out of the United Empire Loyalists who parted ways with the Americans by declaring their loyalty to the monarchy when the Americans rebelled and became republicans.  It was the Crown’s guarantee of protection of French culture, civil law, language and the Roman Catholic religion in Quebec following the Seven Year’s War that preserved French Canadian identity and kept French Canada loyal during the American revolution and down through Confederation in which all the French Canadian Fathers joined the English Fathers in unanimous support for making the new country a parliamentary monarchy rather than a republic.  The Crown is the other signatory to the Indian treaties – Queen Victoria, whose statue was so insultingly treated by the left wing mob, was the reigning monarch when most of these treaties were made.   All new comers to Canada from whatever other country and background have sworn loyalty to the monarch and her heirs to become citizens.  Therefore the monarchy is the one and only national symbol that belongs to all Canadians, albeit in different ways, and thus unites them.    To attack this symbol as a symbol of “imperialism” and “colonialism” in the derogatory sense which Marxists attach to these words is to insult all Canadians of all races, religions, and languages.

It is Way Too Late for That Brian

Brian Pallister should have been an actor.   Judging from his performance last Thursday he would have been much better in that career than in his chosen profession of politics.   Granted, prior to this year, he did a fairly decent job as premier of the province of Manitoba.   He was certainly a major improvement over his predecessor, Greg Selinger of the NDP, although that is setting the bar of comparison extremely low.   This year however, faced with the true test of leadership, a crisis manufactured by the irresponsible news media and the even more irresponsible medical profession, he failed that test big time.   His tear-jerking, emotional-laden, speech on Thursday may very well indicate that he has missed his true calling, the stage.   His timing, however, needs some work, for the performance would have been much more convincing had it come in March.   Adjustments would have had to be made, of course, as it would have made little sense to talk about stealing Christmas in the middle of Lent.   An emotional appeal to Manitobans to follow public health guidelines would have been much better received if he had led with that, however, instead of tacking it on after nine months of arrogant posturing, threats, and bullying.

 

Pallister’s speech came a couple of days after the release of an Angus Reid Institute survey that indicated that his approval rating had dropped to the lowest of all premiers in the Dominion.   Although he had been asked to comment about this on the day the poll results were released and gave a brief answer it is generally understood that his remarks on Thursday were his real response.  

 

He claimed that he understood why do not like him.  “I understand that, I totally do” he said.   Certainly, he seemed to be aware of the reasons:

 

I’m the guy who has told you that you cannot shop…I am the person who has told you you can’t go to work.  I am the premier who has said you can’t run your business because we have the toughest restrictions in Canada, and it affects people who put their lives into their businesses.  I am the person who has come before you and said you can’t go to church, you can’t see your friends, you can’t travel. I’m that guy.

 

While some dispute this explanation for his drop in approval – Wab Kinew, the current NDP leader, and his butt-kissers in the media think it is due to his having re-opened the economy, which, except for the fact that he shouldn't have closed it in the first place, was the one thing he did right this year – these all seem to be fairly good reasons for disliking him.  It would appear that being aware of the reasons does not actually translate into understanding them, however, because from this starting point, Pallister launched into a bunch of self-justifying hocus pocus about the difference between being liked and respected, illustrated by a story from his school days about being disciplined by the principal for being late and told by the headmaster “You don’t like me right now, son, and that’s okay.  I want you to respect me in ten years.”

 

Does he seriously think that lesson applies here?

 

A teacher who disciplines a child for being late does so to prevent the bad habit of tardiness from forming.   Tardiness is a habit which hurts people both professionally, because employers don’t like to either hire or advance people who are tardy, and socially, because, formal occasions where it is fashionable to be late aside, people do not like to be kept waiting by their friends, dates, etc., all the time.   Like all bad habits, it is easier to break when it is just forming than when it is fully developed.   The principal who yells at a student for being late is, indeed, doing him a favour, and so the line from Pallister’s anecdote does indeed apply in that situation.

 

What Pallister is doing is completely different.

 

To tell people that they cannot go to work or run their business is to do the very opposite of what the teacher who tries to discipline tardiness out of his student does.   Rather than correcting behaviour that is bad and harmful it forbids behaviour that is both good and necessary.   Rather than helping people it is hurting them.   There is nothing in what Pallister is doing that deserves respect, either now or years down the road.

 

He, of course, justifies what he is doing on the grounds that it is “saving lives”.   He said:

 

I will do what I believe is right, and right now I need to save lives.

 

We have been hearing this from him for quite some time.   It is, however, utter nonsense.  

 

It is only ethically permissible to hurt Person A to save Person B under certain very limited circumstances.   If Person A pulls a knife on Person B with the intent to kill then we are justified in harming Person A to prevent Person B from being killed.   In this scenario, however, the action of Person A which threatens Person B will definitely have the effect of the death of Person B if not prevented and is done with malicious intent.   Neither of these things is true with regards to the lockdown scenario.    If Person A opens his store there is no certainty that anyone will die from the Wuhan bat flu as a result.   Indeed, when we consider the survival rate of the disease, who the people most likely to die from it are, and the circumstances pertaining to their contracting it, it is, in fact, extremely unlikely that anyone will die as a direct result of Person A opening his store.   Furthermore, there is no malicious intent, no mens rea, in Person A’s opening his store.   His intent is quite good and honourable, to earn a living for himself and his family, by selling people goods that they want or need rather than to be a burden on the public purse.   There is nothing wrong with what he is doing, unless, of course, he is selling nuclear waste to children or some such thing.   Finally, that forbidding Person A from opening his store will harm him is certain, the only uncertainty being the extent of the harm, whether it completely destroys his business and drives him into bankruptcy or not.   The lockdown scenario simply does not meet the standards of when it is ethnically permissible to hurt Person A to save Person B.

 

Immediately after that self-justifying prattle about saving lives Pallister said the following:

 

If you don’t think that Covid is real, right now you’re an idiot. 

 

What an interesting remark from someone who claims that he is doing the right thing and hopes we will eventually respect him for it.    In the same sentence he completely misrepresents the views of those who oppose him and insults them.   To say that someone does not think that Covid real is to say that he questions the existence of either the SARS-CoV-2 virus or the sickness it can produce with symptoms ranging from shortness of breath, fever, and cough to a life-threatening, organ-damaging, severely painful, pneumonia.   I think very few of those who oppose the lockdown question the existence of either of these things.   Opposition to the lockdown is based upon the fact that lockdowns do a lot of very real harm - they devastate the economy, load future generations with piles of debt, damage the fabric of society, dissolve communities, and create mental health problems that themselves result in many fatalities that would not have occurred sans lockdown - and only a small amount at best, of questionable good.   The most informed opposition to the lockdown is also based on the fact that the government imposing what amounts to a total suspension of our constitutional and prescriptive basic freedoms for the supposed sake of keeping us safe from a disease with a survival rate higher than the seasonal flu for otherwise healthy people under the age of 65 and with which the average age of those who die is higher than the average lifespan of Canadians is a giant leap away from civil freedom and towards totalitarianism.

If Mr. Pallister really wants to do the right thing and be respected for it then he had better learn to himself respect the Common Law, the constitution, and the limits these place on his powers as First Minister of the Crown in this province, for until he respects these he is a disgrace to his office.

His speech culminated in an emotional appeal to Manitobans to stay apart at Christmas, full of self-pity about having to be the Grinch that steals Christmas from us this year to keep us safe, so that we will have plenty to celebrate next year.

Well, it was a good performance, but to return to the point made at the beginning, it would have been a lot more persuasive if it had not followed ten months of ordering us around, telling us to snitch on neighbours who don't do as their told, threatening us with punishment, calling us names, setting obscenely high fines for breaking very petty rules, and wasting a million dollars that would have been put to better use hiring extra hospital staff and opening extra beds on contracting a private security organization to help enforce his draconian rules.

Hic et Ille

Happy Birthday Your Majesty!

Congratulations to our divinely anointed and appointed, Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth II on the achievement of her ninetieth birthday. While I am not ordinarily in the habit of apologizing for things I am not personally responsible for – and indeed, consider it to be one of the most reprehensible and contemptible forms of the liberal virtue signaling that plagues the age in which we live – I nevertheless thought it appropriate on Facebook yesterday to offer Her Majesty an apology on behalf of my countrymen for “the narcissistic, empty-headed, megalomaniacal humunculus we elected to head her government in Ottawa last year, proving ourselves unworthy of the privilege of electing her ministers.” Of course, as I had voted neither for Justin Trudeau nor any of his underlings, it is other Canadians who truly owe Her Majesty this apology.

Good Riddance!

If my fellow Canadians proved themselves unworthy of the voting franchise last fall, those here in Manitoba partly redeemed themselves this past Tuesday. The NDP, which had governed the province since 1999, and disastrously mismanaged its affairs under Greg Selinger, has been tossed out on its backside. It was reduced to 14 seats, losing a number of seats that had been regarded as safe for the NDP for decades, while a majority of 40 seats were won by the Progressive Conservatives. It was a humiliating defeat that the socialist party had certainly earned. It had raised the Provincial Sales Tax by a percentage, ignoring the law that says that this could not be done without holding a referendum first, and despite this and other tax increases, ran massive deficits during each year that Selinger was premier, ignoring another law that required him and his cabinet to take pay cuts if they could not balance the provincial budget. Meanwhile the quality of government services, most noticeably in health care, declined all over the province. The most disappointing thing about the outcome of Tuesday night was that Selinger retained his own seat, leading us to ask what judgement impairing chemicals might be in the water supply of St. Boniface.

Meanwhile at the Federal Level…

Greg Selinger had inherited the leadership of the Manitoba NDP from Gary Doer after the latter, a much more popular and capable premier than his successor, stepped down in order to accept an ambassadorship to the United States. Thomas Mulcair, who had been the official Opposition Leader during the premiership of Stephen Harper, had also inherited his leadership of the federal NDP from a more popular leader, the charismatic Jack Layton. It was Layton who had led the NDP into the 2011 election, winning them a record number of seats, only to step down shortly after the election, and to die of cancer soon after. Mulcair lost over half of these seats in in the 2015 election, a sizeable chunk of which loss can be attributed to his decision to take up cudgels on behalf of the niqab, alienating much of his support base in Quebec. Earlier this month, at the NDP convention in Edmonton, the party voted to hold a new leadership race, essentially doing what the Manitoba NDP had attempted but failed to do to Selinger two years ago when the handwriting on the wall had become apparent and turfing him, although Mulcair will remain in the position until the new leader is chosen.

Duffy Exonerated

Apart from his boneheaded defence of the Islamic face veil, perhaps the stupidest thing Thomas Mulcair had done during the last federal election campaign was to make the abolition of the upper chamber of Parliament a key plank in his platform. Canada is very fortunate to have inherited the Westminster parliamentary system of government from Great Britain, a system of government that developed over centuries to be the very embodiment of the idea of the stable, balanced, constitution that is a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy that Aristotle theorized about twenty three centuries ago, and the Senate, as I have argued at length in the past, is an essential element of that system. Mulcair’s contempt for our constitution and traditional institutions is reason enough for any patriotic Canadian to rejoice that he will not be leading a federal party much longer, not that his successor is likely to be much better.

Mulcair’s attacks on the Senate had arisen in the context of the scandal surrounding Senator Mike Duffy. The initial accusation against Duffy, was that he, despite having been a television journalist in Ottawa for years before his appointment to the Senate, had falsely claimed his home in P.E.I., the province he represented in the Senate, as his primary residence in order to claim living expenses from the Senate. The scandal grew as the CBC and its echo chambers among the privately owned media stations, seeing in it a noose wherewith to lynch then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose office made things worse in a clumsy attempt to make the scandal disappear, piled on accusation after accusation. Other voices in the media sought to impugn the institution of the Senate itself. With an irony of which they themselves were undoubtedly ignorant, in many cases the same voices that could frequently be heard accusing Prime Minister Harper of trying to Americanize Canada, condemned the Senate for being unelected and undemocratic, implying that it was therefore also unaccountable and illegitimate, drawing upon the theory that the legitimacy and accountability of government institutions depends upon their being elected and democratic, a theory that belongs to the American tradition of republicanism and not to the Canadian tradition of parliamentary monarchy. It is also utter nonsense, as if the worst culprits for abusing expense accounts and fleecing the taxpayer have not always been our elected Members of Parliament, who recently voted themselves a significant salary increase.

Eventually, after the RCMP were hounded into an investigation, they charged Duffy with thirty one counts of fraud, bribery, and the like. Yesterday, he was acquitted of all charges. The verdict came as no surprise to anyone with better sense than to believe a word spoken on the CBC, but to the extent that this scandal contributed to Justin Trudeau's attaining power, the damage has already been done. Perhaps the RCMP should investigate the CBC over their role in imposing the madness of Trudeaumania on Canada a second time?

Thomas Mulcair, Quit Your Day Job! You Have a Promising Future in Comedy!

I had never thought of Thomas Mulcair, federal leader of the New Democratic Party, as a particularly humorous individual. He is a progressive, after all, and progressives are generally noted for their lack of a sense of humour. Mulcair, whose visage is as constantly plastered with a scowl as his predecessor’s was with a cheap grin, gives off a particularly strong vibe of being allergic to anything funny that would bring a smile to a normal man’s lips and fill his heart with cheer.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover that the joke of the century had been uttered last Tuesday, in the unlikely setting of the Economic Club of Canada, by none other than the present Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, which title, as applied to the leader of a party that is full of outspoken, severe-our-ties-to-the-monarchy, republicans, is itself a pretty good joke.

Addressing his audience of businessmen, he said, apparently with a straight face, that “The federal department of finance’s own reports show that NDP governments are the best at balancing the books when in office”.

Upon first hearing of this, I thought that perhaps Mulcair was referring to the old etiquette class exercise of balancing books upon the top of one’s head to learn poise. Perhaps, in an effort to improve himself and obtain a little culture, he had been watching My Fair Lady, the musical film version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza Doolittle is made to do this by Rex Harrison’s Professor Henry Higgins. I hoped this was the case because the NDP could use some of the class and culture that their British counterparts, like the Fabian Mr. Shaw, far more frequently possess than socialists on this side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, he was talking about the budget.

Now boasting is generally considered to be rather gauche but if you absolutely must play the braggart there are some basic guidelines as to how to do it without ending up looking like post-metamorphosis Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The most basic guideline is to actually have the qualities of which you crow. If that is not possible, the next guideline is that your boast should at least be believable. If Mr. Mulcair wanted to boast of his party’s strengths, perhaps he should have chosen something more credible than budget balancing. He could have said that NDP governments are the best at killing rural economies, shutting down rural hospital services, and forcing consolidation upon rural municipalities. Or he could have said that the NDP are the best at increasing people’s tax burdens, killing businesses, and transferring employment from the private to the public sector. All of that would have been believable. But balancing budgets?

To be fair, Mulcair did not just pull this astonishing boast out of thin air. He pointed to the examples of Tommy Douglas and Roy Romanow in Saskatchewan and Gary Doer here in Manitoba to back up his claim. With regards to the rather obvious counter-example of Bob Rae in Ontario, he said “There was one exception — but he turned out to be a Liberal.” Rae, as provincial NDP leader, was premier of Ontario from 1990 to 1995. Upon taking over from a Liberal government that had been running over their budget, he ran Ontario’s deficit from the millions into the billions. In his first budget, despite raising taxes he set a record breaking deficit of over nine billions dollars. No wonder Mulcair tried to explain away Rae by saying that he was really a Liberal, i.e., that when he re-entered politics at the federal level, he did so as a member of the party in which Mulcair had spent his years in Quebec provincial politics.

Mulcair is mistaken, however, in thinking of Rae as the exception. The exception is the provincial NDP in Saskatchewan. They have indeed, been exceptionally fiscally responsible, despite their other failings, and we will consider the significance of that shortly. Countrywide, the NDP’s budgeting record has far more often resembled that of Bob Rae than that of Roy Romanow.

Outside of Saskatchewan, the NDP has formed governments in BC, Manitoba, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and the Yukon Territory. It has never formed governments in Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, or Prince Edward Island and only formed a government in Alberta for the first time earlier this year, obviously too soon to be considered in any kind of comparison.

They seem to have been fairly fiscally responsible in the Yukon. Darrell Dexter’s NDP governed Nova Scotia for a single term from 2009 to 2013 in which their first and last budgets were balanced but the two inbetween had large deficits. In BC the NDP governed for three years in the 1970s, then again from 1991 to 2001. Dave Barrett inherited a surplus in 1972 and turned it into a deficit. In the ‘90s under Mike Harcourt and Glen Clark, the NDP produced Rae-style budgets with billion dollar deficits. It was only in their last year and a half in office, after scandal forced Clark to resign, that his successors managed to get their books into balance..

This brings us to my own province of Manitoba where the NDP has governed longer than anywhere excepct Saskatchewan. In the 1970s Ed Schreyer balanced most of his budgets going into deficit in his last year. His cousin-in-law, Howard Pawley, reversed that pattern in the 1980s, balancing the budget only at the end of a string of deficits. It is the more recent NDP governments that are particularly relevent, however, because Mulcair gave Gary Doer as an example of fiscal prudence in his speech and has repeatedly held Greg Selinger up as an example for other premiers, even going so far as to say that a federal NDP government would follow Selinger’s example.

The NDP have governed Manitoba since 1999, when Gary Doer inherited a balanced budget from the Progressive Conservative government of Gary Filmon which had passed legislation requiring the government to balance the budget every year and to call a referendum before any major tax increase. Doer declared that this legislation would stand, and accordingly his Finance Minister Greg Selinger announced every year that he had balanced the books. There are a few things peculiar about this seemingly laudable display of financial prudence, however.

Selinger took over the leadership of the NDP and the premiership of Manitoba in the fall of 2009. Since then, his government has run deficits of hundreds of millions of dollars, each year, despite raising the Provincial Sales Tax by a percentage point in 2013 without holding the referendum they were legally required to call. If Selinger’s handling of the budget as premier seems to be an rather drastic contrast with the way he handled it as Doer’s Finance Minister, realize that the provincial debt has more than doubled since the NDP took power in 1999. Even the large deficits of the last six years cannot acount for that debt, much of which had to have been acquired while Doer was premier. Selinger has gone through four Finance Ministers since becoming premier, whereas Doer had been able to make do with one. It looks like Selinger has been unable to find a Finance Minister as capable of making a deficit look like a surplus as he was.

So, no Mr. Mulcair, Bob Rae is not the exception. In Nova Scotia and BC, the NDP were more like Rae, as the NDP has been in Manitoba under Selinger and earlier was under Pawley. The NDP claimed to have balanced the budget under Doer but this claim is highly questionable in light of the way the debt has skyrocketed since 1999.

The real exception, therefore, is the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party. It was in Saskatchewan, that the NDP’s predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, first formed a government under the leadership of Tommy Douglas in 1944. Douglas governed Saskatchewan for sixteen years, never running a deficit. After this, he moved into federal politics as first leader of the NDP, which was formed in 1961 when the CCF merged with the Canadian Labour Congress. Under the new name, the Saskatchewan NDP formed governments under Allan Blakeney from 1971 to 1982, then again under Roy Romanow and Lorne Calvert from 1991 to 2007. These leaders all followed Douglas’ example and the NDP almost never ran a deficit in Saskatchewan.

This is to the credit of the provincial NDP in Saskatchewan but is it to the credit of the party as a whole? Mulcair seems to think so, and in the 2011 Ontario provincial election Andrea Horwath made this “the NDP are the best at balancing books” part of her campaign. The problem is that this is asking people to believe that because the Saskatchewan NDP have been fiscally responsible, other NDP parties will be fiscally responsible elsewhere. This kind of claim cannot be based on just the percentage of years in which an NDP government has balanced the budget because the province in which the NDP has been extremely good at avoiding deficits is also the province in which they were in office far longer than anywhere else, and their record there is radically different from their record elsewhere.

Thomas Mulcair has said that he thinks Greg Selinger is doing a great job as Manitoba’s premier and that he would govern the same way federally. That tells us all we need to know about what kind of budget to expect from a federal NDP government and is what makes Mulcair’s claim that his party is fiscally responsible such an excellent joke. Unfortunately, judging from Mulcair’s rising popularity in the polls, the joke may end up being on us.



.