Let Her Rip

Brian Mulroney as the opening salvo of a battle for the hearts and minds of the future Conservative Party? Will it be "Return of the Jedi" or "Revenge of the Nerds?" Either way it could be entertaining, just don't count on it.

Lyin' Brian will be the keynote speaker at Toronto's Albany Club as the PC contingent launch their campaign to keep their party from collapsing back into the old Reform pit of darkness.

“Before they choose a leader, they need to have a conversation about the soul of the party, and he’s the one to do that,” said a source close to the former prime minister. “How does the party make its way back to the centre?”

Or, as one Red Tory sage said of the speech, “It’ll be a great moment in sports.”

Former aide to Mulroney and, more recently, Conservative MP for Calgary Centre Lee Richardson confirmed that the Liberal Party’s stunning election results Oct. 19 after a remarkably tactical and miscalculated Conservative campaign included the votes of many senior pre-Harperite Tories who’ve voted reliably blue all their adult lives.

“The Liberals were the preferred alternative of Progressive Conservatives,” said Richardson.

...“We need to show a difference in tone and style,” says Harper 2006 campaign co-director and Progressive Conservative alumnus Philippe Gervais. “On policy, we need to renew ourselves.”

In a conservative political culture that lived through the Diefenbaker-Stanfield wars of the 60s and the Clark-Mulroney wars of the late 70s and early 80s, Gervais says he isn’t worried that soul searching will degenerate into knife-throwing.

“If we weren’t fighting, I’d be worried,” he quipped, adding seriously that the process of often fractious post-loss stock-taking is a healthy one for any party.

...“I was livid,” said Gervais, of watching the 2015 campaign unfold. He blames the acute need for re-branding, as many have, on Harper’s post-2011 political advisers.

“They had almost a Stalinistic way of looking at things,” Gervais, now vice president of The Capital Hill Group, marvelled. “You were either on-side, or you were dead.”

...In a piece for Policy Magazine being published Nov. 7, Geoff Norquay, who served as an advisor to Mulroney, then as communications director for Harper in 2003-04 and spent years defending his government on CBC panels and elsewhere, delivers a scathing indictment of Harper’s campaign organization, reserving particularly pointed criticism for campaign manager, Jenni Byrne and her “acolytes.”

“Theirs was a suspicious Canada and a Canada without dreams; they always preferred short-term tactics over a long-term vision,” Norquay writes. “They never understood governing, so they saw no use for government. They ran a closed circle, they humiliated staff, they berated candidates, they pushed every reasonable argument far beyond its logical limit, they shut out others with a different view, and they crafted a campaign based much more on anger and fear than hope. And they weren’t even competent enough to prevent guys peeing in cups from becoming candidates.

“Within the Conservative Party, great will be the celebration at their well-deserved and permanent riddance.”

Let the games begin.

Has the NDP Sown the Seeds of Its Own Destruction?

An interesting analysis from the American publication, The New Republic, questions whether the New Democratic Party, already facing a difficult future, can avoid self-destruction.

Senior editor Jeet Heer writes what NDP faithful refuse to hear - that they spent the last decade colluding with Harper to destroy the Liberal Party of Canada.

Harper’s deepest political goal was not just to defeat the Liberals politically but to eliminate them as a party. Gerry Nicholls, who worked with Harper in the 1990s in the right-wing lobby group the National Citizens Coalition, wrote in a 2011Globe and Mail column that Harper’s “desire to eliminate the Liberals is something he and I discussed way back in the days when we worked together at the National Citizens Coalition. His theory, as explained to me, was that conservatism would be better served in this country if Canada had a two-party system, one that pitted right against left, free enterprise against socialism, Conservatives against New Democrats. He believed that, in such a polarized political environment, a conservative-oriented party would have a huge advantage over its left-wing rival.”

Over the last ten years, until this recent election, Harper has been remarkably successful in trying to build up the NDP as the main rival and tear the Liberals apart. He’s done this partially by aiming his most destructive fire on the Liberals and also by occasionally working with the NDP, building them up as credible opposition. Harper’s polarization strategy reached it’s peak in the 2011 election when the Liberals under the hapless Michael Ignatieff received less than 19 percent of the vote and only 34 seats. The New Democrats became the official opposition for the first time, with nearly 31 percent of the popular vote and 103 seats, while the Conservatives won a majority with their 40 percent of the popular vote giving them 166 seats.

Heer writes that both Harper and the Layton/Mulcair NDP were adhering to Duvanger's Law which “states that a plurality electoral system with single-member districts (like Canada’s first-past-the-post system) will tend towards a two-party system (split along left/right political lines).”

The NDP under Thomas Mulcair made a fatal mistake in hugging too close to the center. This allowed Trudeau’s Liberals to carve out a political space on the left by promising Keynesian deficits and infrastructure spending to jumpstart the economy. The Liberals found a sweet spot of winning over both disaffected progressives and also centrists who distrusted the NDP’s socialist past and lack of governing experience.

...In the desperate last days of the elections, Harper started making some strange moves, even going to an event hosted by the disgraced former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford. This embrace of Ford marked the end not just of a squalid, racist campaign but also Harper’s dream to live in a Canada where the Liberal Party was extinct. Although the Liberal Party remains an affront to both Harper and political theory, it regained its role as the voice of the Canadian center-left, which is where most voters are.

In fact, the party that is facing the existential question posed by Duverger’s law is not the Liberals but the NDP. While the NDP can and does win in provinces like Manitoba and Alberta, it is facing a bleak national future. With the Liberals once again presenting themselves as a progressive alternative to the Conservatives, does Canada need two left of center parties? If Duverger’s law ever does hit Canada, it could be the NDP that gets kicked to the curb.

At this point it's up to the NDP rank and file to decide whether they'll survive or, instead, simply double down on the bad bets they made under Layton and Mulcair. If they insist on going that route their disappearance will be no great loss and may even clear the way for a new, genuine party of the Left.

Something to Mull Over

We can't rely entirely on our government to restore social cohesion to the Canadian people. That chore falls to all of us. It is our responsibility, a duty we owe the country and each other. It's how we build on what we share in common and, in that way, overcome what divides us.

Our outgoing prime minister was a calculating, shrewd, manipulative bugger who excelled in wedge politics, dividing society, playing the margins.

I thought of how much we have to do when I came across this. Mull it over.

Damn Those Damned Immigrants!!

Who Opposes Trudeau's Move to Legalize Marijuana? Julian Fantino and the Hells' Angels.

Birds of a feather or just two sides of the same coin. Just sayin'. During the election campaign, now safely defeated Harper Con Julian Fantino said Trudeau's promise to legalize marijuana would play straight into the hands of organized crime and had to be stopped. Now the Hells Angels warn that Trudeau's promise to legalize marijuana would devastate organized crime and must be stopped.

As Canada’s newly elected Liberal government is on the verge of legalizing marijuana, thousands of Hells Angels members have taken the Parliament by storm yesterday to protest the new proposition.

The legalization of marijuana could cost the organized crime hundreds of thousands of jobs, believes the spokesman for the Canadian chapter of the Hells Angels, Jean-Roch Fournier.

“We estimate that Prime minister Justin Trudeau’s radical proposition to legalize marijuana could cost us over a hundred thousand jobs” says the former lawyer. “From growing operations, to trimming, packaging, transportation and selling, this new legislature will threaten the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers” he warns.

Somehow I don't think so unless Justin introduces a new strain of week that is self-growing, self-trimming, self-packaging, self-transporting and self-marketing. On the bright side, if Justin can do that, solving all of our other pressing problems should be a snap.

Back to Reality, People, and Put Your Shoulder Into It.

It's magical thinking, belief-based opinion making that can be completely detached from fact, reality.

It was the thought process that guided our outgoing prime minister. The world and everyone and thing in it were what he believed them to be. His was a mind not heavily burdened with the pursuit of fact. The fight against climate change was a socialist plot, that sort of thing. That's not to say he wasn't also a duplicitous, secretive, manipulative swine. He was all that and more.

I regularly indulge in belief-based constructs. It happens throughout the night as I sleep. We call it dreaming. Sometimes I imagine I can do the most amazing things as though I had never endured the toll exacted by six decades of life. Then I wake up and the switch is flipped back to consciousness and reality.

My point is that nap time is over. Back to reality. Facts in, fantasy out. Evidence in, belief out. Rationality in, ideology out. There'll still be plenty of speculation, opinion but it has to be informed opinion - expert opinion - and measured speculation, not gut instinct faith.

The embrace of magical thinking by our former prime minister and his dutiful minions has left us in a bad place - economically, politically, environmentally and even socially. This has given rise to any number of failures - on climate change; inequality in all its guises (wealth, income, opportunity); the rise of corporatism, neoliberalism and illiberal democracy; futile militarism in lieu of peacekeeping; unsustainable exponential growth; energy policy; Canada's now sullied international reputation - on and on and on.

We have to begin to halt the slide on all of these issues/threats.  That's a truly Herculean chore beyond any prime minister. Trudeau cannot set all these things right. He has neither the resources nor the time. What he can do, however, is struggle to slow them down as much as possible. He can buy us time so that perhaps we can find solutions, new approaches to some, perhaps even most of them.

When you explore these looming threats it's amazing how you'll find most of them are rooted in ideology. Not only are they conceived out of ideology but that same ideology nurtures and defends them by encouraging denialism. As a nation, a people, we can't live like this any more.

Justin's father had a motto: Reason over Passion. We could use a return to that now.

Drop Duffy - Not So Fast.

Veteran Canadian journalist, Geoffrey Stevens, argues that it's time to shut down the trials (and tribulations) of senator Michael Dennis Duffy.

As Stevens sees it there are two trials underway - one for public consumption, the other for the now redundant betterment of Shifty Steve Harper. A criminal trial and a political trial. Of the two, he contends, the criminal trial has already collapsed and the defence hasn't even gotten its chance at bat yet.

"To put it charitably, the Crown's case has been less than overwhelming. It has done more to help the defence than the prosecution. We have learned that Harper appointed Duffy in late 2008 as a senator from Prince Edward Island knowing full well that he had been resident in Ontario for years. We learned that the Senate expense rules were flexible enough that no one blew the whistle when Duffy declared his cottage in P.E.I. to be his principal residence and claimed accommodation expenses for his home in suburban Ottawa.

"We learned that the Conservatives valued "Old Duff" for his status as a media celebrity and his efforts as a cheerleader and fundraiser at party events; he regarded that as part of his job as a Tory senator, and some of his travel costs were charged to the upper house. Although Duffy certainly pushed the envelope, he was not the only senator whose expense claims, while accepted by the Senate, did not pass muster with the auditors.

"Of the 31 charges Duffy faces, the key one is bribery — the $90,000 personal cheque Nigel Wright wrote to enable Duffy to repay expenses that auditors had determined he should not have claimed. Yet the central question remains: how can Duffy be convicted of accepting a bribe when no one is charged with offering the bribe?

"From the outset, the Duffy trial has been two prosecutions in one — a political trial inside a criminal trial, or vice versa. The criminal prosecution is weak. The chances of a conviction appear remote. Under other circumstances, charges would never have been laid. Under other circumstances, they would have been withdrawn by now.

"The "other circumstances" were the political considerations. Bent on pursuing his "tough-on-crime," Stephen Harper could not afford to allow presumed fraud to go unprosecuted when it appeared just down the hallway in the Senate chamber. Mike Duffy being the most egregious offender identified by the auditors, he became the target in a show trial that, as it transpired, would reveal more about the PMO's frantic efforts (hundreds upon hundreds of emails) to cover up its involvement than it would about the ethical sins of senators."

"To put it charitably" Justin Trudeau cannot halt the prosecution as Stevens urges. This matter is before the courts. It is, in a nation of laws, now beyond the control of any premier. It must run its course.  As the political persecution aspect becomes more obvious, Duffy's very capable counsel can - and will - deal with that.

If, however, there is substance to Stevens' claim that this is, at its core, a political prosecution - effectively a state persecution - that is something that Parliament needs to expose and see that the miscreants behind it are held to account. It's hard to imagine there could be a political trial without an equally political investigation, one in which the supposed recipient of a bribe stands trial exposed to imprisonment while the person who furnished the bribe is declared blameless. That raises the spectre of a state police force corrupted. On that score we need some straight answers to some tough questions from Stephen Harper and his handpicked RCMP commissioner, Bob Paulson.

In fact it might be Paulson and Harper who deserve to have their day in court.

Update:  I discussed this with Geoff Stevens via email this morning. While he agrees that some sort of enquiry might be warranted, he's of the view that "Parliament won't go there."

Krugman - Canada, the Place Where the Future Happens First.

Paul Krugman has looked at Monday's federal election, and he likes what he sees.

...when it comes to economic policy ...Canada has surprisingly often been the place where the future happens first.

And it’s happening again. On Monday, Canadian voters swept the ruling Conservatives out of power, delivering a stunning victory to the center-left Liberals. And while there are many interesting things about the Liberal platform, what strikes me most is its clear rejection of the deficit-obsessed austerity orthodoxy that has dominated political discourse across the Western world. The Liberals ran on a frankly, openly Keynesian vision, and won big.

...Which brings us to the issue of deficits and public investment. Here’s what the Liberal Party of Canada platform had to say on the subject: “Interest rates are at historic lows, our current infrastructure is aging rapidly, and our economy is stuck in neutral. Now is the time to invest.”

Does that sound reasonable? It should, because it is. We’re living in a world awash with savings that the private sector doesn’t want to invest, and is eager to lend to governments at very low interest rates. It’s obviously a good idea to borrow at those low, low rates, putting those excess savings, not to mention the workers unemployed due to weak demand, to use building things that will improve our future.

...So will the Liberals put their platform into practice? They should. Interest rates remain incredibly low: Canada can borrow for 10 years at only 1½ percent, and its 30-year inflation-protected bonds yield less than 1 percent. Furthermore, Canada is probably facing an extended period of weak private demand, thanks to low oil prices and the likely deflation of a housing bubble.

Let’s hope, then, that Mr. Trudeau stays with the program. He has an opportunity to show the world what truly responsible fiscal policy looks like.

This will probably send Dipper brains into centrifugal collapse but that's on them. They chose opportunism instead of principle and found the very leader who would give them exactly what they wanted. It's great to be rid of Harper but dodging a Mulcair government is just the icing on the cake.

Take Heart. David Frum Declares Trudeau a Real Radical Liberal !!

David Frum has an interesting take on our neo-Trudeau Liberalism and it's immensely comforting that he so dislikes what he sees.  From The Atlantic:

Trudeau bears the most famous name in Canadian politics, but a name loaded with multiple meanings for his party and his country. His father, Pierre Trudeau, dominated Canadian politics from 1968 to 1984. Cerebral, tough, and openly contemptuous of his intellectual inferiors—who numbered more or less the entire human race—Pierre Trudeau plunged Canada into ultra-statist experiments and massive debts from which his successors struggled for more than a decade to rescue her.

...But scripted and unscripted, Justin Trudeau has conveyed a consistent message: The government he leads will repudiate the legacy not only of the incumbent Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, but the neoliberal Liberals of the 1990s.

Chretien-Martin balanced budgets. Trudeau has committed himself to a policy of deliberate deficits in an attempt to stimulate growth. Chretien-Martin eschewed redistributive taxes. Trudeau campaigned on a promise to increase taxes on wealthier Canadians to a new combined federal-provincial top rate above 50 percent. Chretien-Martin signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trudeau has squirmed to avoid committing to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Even before 2014-15, however, the populist anger expressed by Sanders and Corbyn could be heard in Canada, too. Canada has done a better job than the United States of sharing the proceeds of economic growth. Yet even in comparatively egalitarian Canada, rewards have tended to concentrate at the top of the income distribution. Earlier in the decade, resentment among middle-income Canadians toward the more affluent was offset by relief when Canadians compared themselves to Americans. As time has passed, however, the relief has waned and the resentment has intensified. It was those feelings that Trudeau harnessed, by condemning many small-business owners as tax cheats and telling Canadian business leaders that if they didn’t accept higher taxation now, they’d face even more radical claims in the future.

Trudeau’s strategy succeeded brilliantly, at least in electoral terms. His Liberals have won at least 40 percent of the popular vote, in their best performance since 1997. Leaders of other center-left parties around the world will note the success. Imitation and emulation will follow—across the Atlantic and across the 49th parallel.

You know something? I hope Frum is completely right. I hope he sees the real face of Canada's neo-Trudeau. Christ knows we could use a guy like that!

The Guardian's Drive-By Smear Job on Justin Trudeau

Jesus Christ on a crutch! The guy hasn't even been sworn into office and yet The Guardian's Canada correspondent, Martin Lukacs, is already declaring Trudeau's progressive credentials "a ruse."

The ousting of the Conservatives was a victory, a rejection of Stephen Harper’s politics of fear and outright hatred. But Canadians now confront a Prime Minister gifted in the art of warm, fuzzy claptrap. They won’t be offered what they dreamed of: that was never an option in this election.

In fairness, Lukacs also calls for his fellow New Dems to demand that Mulcair quit and, if he won't, boot him out.

Even as an opinion piece, Lukacs' article is drivel and he's rightly called out on it in readers' comments. One thing is for sure, if he's supposed to be Canada's answer to Monbiot, we have failed miserably.

A Lesson from Down Under

A couple of retired Aussie commanders, including a former chief of defence staff, are warning that their military has neglected to plan and prepare for the challenges of climate change. Hmm, does that sound familiar?

Australia's former prime minister, Cap'n Coal, Tony Abbott, didn't have much time for climate change issues and apparently his top military staff didn't either.

"I don't think it's any secret that we've spent three years in the wilderness" on these issues, Chris Barrie, a former admiral who served as ADF chief from 1998 to 2002, told Fairfax Media.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott's aversion to making global warming a priority meant the issue was downplayed. "When the Abbott government said you will not use the words 'climate change', the senior leadership had to do as it was directed, but at the same time they know this is important work," Admiral Barrie said.

The challenges may be illustrated within weeks if - as expected by aid groups and others - Papua New Guinea seeks help from Australia to deliver urgently needed food to remote highland villages hard-hit by the unfolding El Nino-linked drought.

"If the situation gets out of hand, and by that I mean people are starving, they will act unlawfully and then it turns out in a monster security situation," he said.

Michael Thomas, an army major who retired in June after 22 years of service, said the politicisation of climate change had been "a huge distraction to defence". 

Real militaries, such as America's and Britain's, are, by contrast, fully engaged on this issue seeing it as an immediate and growing threat to international and domestic security. 

Which begs the question, what of Canada, where Tony Abbott's alter-ego ran the shop for nearly a decade? How has our military leadership assessed the climate change business, what is their level of readiness, what have they got in the works?

 

Climate Change Update - Mexico Hunkers Down

Southern Mexico is bracing for what could be the strongest ever hurricane in that nation's history.

Hurricane Patricia is bearing down on the Mexican coast, having reached a maxed out Category 5 over the past 12-hours. Maximum sustained winds have reached 200 mph/320 km/h. That's more than enough to rip the place apart.

The interior minister, Miguel Ángel Osorio, told Mexico’s Radio Formula on Friday morning that officials are especially worried about the safety of people in the Puerto Vallarta, in Jalisco state, and in the nearby community of Bahía de Banderas, in Nayarit state.

“We need people to understand the magnitude of the hurricane, it is a devastating hurricane, the biggest one ever registered.”

The Great One Says He's At the Call of Any Prime Minister

Wayne Gretzky has set the record straight. He really didn't mean anything by his blowjob endorsement of Stephen Harper in which he praised Shifty as an "unreal prime minister" who had been "wonderful for the whole country."

He wasn't really being partisan. It's just that, for Wayne, prime ministers are 'friends with benefits.'

“In 1981, I did a luncheon for prime minister (Pierre) Trudeau at the time. In 1986, Mr. (Brian) Mulroney and (his wife) Mila asked me to host an event for a charity of their choice, which I did,” he said in an interview about his No. 99 Wayne Gretzky Collection fashion line.

The 54-year-old Gretzky also recalled joining Jean Chrétien in the Czech Republic in 2003 to help promote Canada’s bid for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

“When Mr. Harper reached out to me and asked me to do a Q&A with him, it’s simple: I can’t vote in this country. But . . . when the prime minister of Canada calls you, you say: ‘OK, I’ll do the favour for you.’ So whoever is going to be the next prime minister, if they call me for the favour I’d reach out again.”

Keep an eye on Justin, Sophie. Wayne's ready to "reach out again."

Re-visiting the Execution of Sammy Yatim

Jurors in a Toronto courtroom had to watch video of the July, 2013 killing of Sammy Yatim by constable James Forcillo who now stands charged with 2nd degree murder.

Forcillo emptied his nine-round revolver, eight of his bullets striking Yatim. What I believe is particularly telling is the five second pause.

Forcillo fired three rounds, dropping Yatim to the floor of the TTC streetcar. Then five seconds elapsed before Forcillo resumed firing. Three more rounds, pause, the eighth shot, pause, the ninth and final shot.




Forcillo fired from the curb, several feet from the door of the bus, further still from his victim. The shooter was surrounded by fellow cops not one of whom intervened to prevent Forcillo from unloading the rest of his clip into the already downed Yatim.

Not seen until today was the onboard video which, at the 4:20 mark shows Forcillo begin to fire. The video leaves no doubt that a) Yatim never even set foot in the bus stairwell and b) that he went down with the first shots. After that Forcillo was simply emptying his gun into a dying body.  It's also telling that, prior to the arrival of police, the bus driver casually exits the bus. He doesn't flee to safety but remains at the bottom of the stairwell and then, just as casually, returns to his driver's station. Eventually he does leave the bus only this time he's running.

Let My Lab Coats Go!

Monday was a great day for science in Canada. The siege was lifted. Evidence-based thought was freed of its shackles. The Guardian celebrates Canada's return to rational thought.

Harper’s assault on science was extensive: with government scientists censored, budgets chopped, data monitoring programs eliminated, scientific libraries shuttered and the contents thrown into dumpsters. The long form census was axed, depriving decision makers of vital information about their citizens.

The cumulative consequences for government scientists were profound. “You don’t become a biologist to get rich or powerful,” says Jay Fitzsimmons, a biologist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. “You become a biologist because you love nature and science. To work under a government that tries to silence scientists is pretty demoralizing.”

The issue that received the most attention was the so-called “muzzling” of government scientists. This week, Liberal MP Marc Garneau said that these restrictions would be eliminated “right away.”

...“We’ll reverse the $40 million cut that Harper made to our federal ocean science and monitoring programs,” said Liberal leader Justin Trudeau at a September campaign stop. “The war on science ends with the liberal government.” In tweet after tweet aftertweet, opposition candidates argued that they were best positioned to defend scientific integrity.

Now that it’s been elected with a healthy majority, the Liberal Party says it will make data openly available, unmuzzle scientists, bring back the long form census, appoint a chief science officer, and make the agency Statistics Canada fully independent.

Of course, more is required to make this agenda complete. Fortunately, Canada now has a Scientific Integrity Project, which has put a lot of thought into these issues, and the new government would be wise to consult them.

Appointing a science adviser and removing speech restrictions should be pretty straightforward. Cultural change will come more slowly. And there’s not a moment to lose. “To maintain the status quo would be to leave the festering wound to rot, leaving no option but to cut off the limb,” says freshwater ecologistMichael Rennie of Ontario’s Lakehead University. He calls for immediate reinvestment in government-based research, as well as the scrapping of bureaucratic rules that make it difficult for departments to hire scientists and for scientists to travel to scientific conferences.

In the context of science, evidence-based decision making, even rational thought, Harper was Canada's Khmer Rouge. It was this, more than anything else, that fueled a fierce public opposition that the rightwing media and even some fair weather Liberals derided as "Harper Derangement Syndrome." Yes, we were deranged, not Shifty Steve and the denizens of his 'faith based' edifice.

Do You See Where This Might Be Going?

September was the fifth consecutive month this year to set an all-time high temperature record.  May was hotter than any May on record. June, July, and August - ditto. September was the hottest September since reliable global records were kept back in 1880.

So, just as 2014 was the hottest year on record, 2015 - barring some freak winter conditions - is almost certain to knock last year off its record perch.  When the "hottest year" is a record that lasts just one year, it gives you something to chew on.

But there's a little more magic in September's figures. September, 2015 also logged the "greatest rise above average" for any month in the 136-year historical record. That suggests that not only is the heating continuing but it's not linear and may be accelerating. We seem to be getting hotter faster.

Part of this could be attributed to the Pacific (multi-) Decadal Oscillation. The Trade Winds for the past 15-years have been dumping atmospheric heat into the ocean depths. When the PDO switches, as some think it's beginning to do, that heat energy (that cannot be created or destroyed - the thermodynamics thing) will be returned to the atmosphere, compounding anthropogenic global warming. It's sort of like putting global warming on anabolic steroids.

People in their mid-30s today have never experienced a month, not one, of below average temperatures. Their status quo has been steady increases and a train of record temperatures - monthly, annually and decadally.

Meanwhile, our here on the Left Coast or, as we like to call it, our Harper-Free Zone, we're being told to expect our warmest winter ever. That means I probably won't have to get the snow shovel out of the garden shed again this year. But winter anxiety here is focused on our snowpack. Last year was disastrous - there was almost none. This year, even if warmer than last winter, may be better. AccuWeather says we'll have more snow on the mountains but Environment Canada disagrees. For once I hope the government types are wrong - but they rarely are.

The Considered Wisdom of Gerald Caplan

As one who yearns for a NDP reformation yet supports a different party, I've looked for helpful insights from prominent, 'old school' New Democrats on how the legendary party of Douglas, Lewis and Broadbent was transformed into the party of Layton and Mulcair.

One of these New Democrat rabbis is Gerald Caplan. Presented here are a few of his thoughts from two weeks before the election and in the immediate aftermath. On October 6th, Caplan wrote this in the Globe and Mail:


Where has the NDP’s neoliberal economic platform come from? Certainly not from the NDP policy book or the party’s members who overwhelmingly disagree with the promises about no deficits and balanced budgets.

Besides, can this possibly be the real change the NDP promises?

...Given that Mr. Harper has run one of the most destructive governments in modern Canadian history, why is Mr. Mulcair giving him almost a free ride while attacking Justin Trudeau at every turn? After all, when Mr. Trudeau talks about deficits, inequality, taxing the very rich, he’s talking NDP. And aren’t we going to have to work closely with him after October 19, to keep Mr. Harper out?

...And yet the NDP seems to have decided to go after Mr. Trudeau even harder in a new series of ads. Isn’t it considered madness when you double down on a failed strategy and expect different results. As one of my many correspondents on this matter typically wrote: “I have to say that if the ‘He’s Not Ready’ stuff didn’t work, the ‘He Just Lost My Vote’ stuff certainly won’t. Besides it sounds surly and curmudgeonly. And don’t they understand that it helps Mr. Trudeau? Why are we obsessively targeting the wrong person?” Another good question. The new ads merely draw attention to Mr. Trudeau, reminding Canadians that he’s still flying high. And as usual, they ignore Mr. Harper instead of lambasting his record and demonstrating who the real anti-Harper leader is.

In today's Globe, Caplan laments the loss of so many fine NDP stalwarts - Megan Leslie, Peter Stoffer, Paul Dewar and Peggy Nash among others - and they will be missed.

The Trudeau government has its clear priorities, many of them embarrassingly more progressive than the NDP’s platform. The NDP caucus can hardly oppose any of them, but nor can it expect the Government to pay attention to NDP overtures. Why should they? To fight the dreaded Harperman, the Liberals, and specifically their leader, received nothing but abuse during the campaign, often gratuitously personal and always strategically dubious. The Liberals will hardly be grateful for NDP advice about the right way to run Canada.

Now that it can’t seriously pretend to be the government-in-waiting, the NDP must rethink its role in parliament and indeed in the country. For decades the NDP were policy pioneers, promoting social policies especially until the governing party was forced to accept them – old-age pensions, medicare, unemployment insurance, and much more. Where are the equivalent NDP policies of today? Where are the tough but realistic policies that would address Canada’s scandalous inequality?

...And where does it leave the party now? That’s the question that New Democrats must start debating, the sooner the better. The answer is by no means preordained. For me, keeping the new government honest remains a pretty good cause.

Keeping the new government honest, indeed. For decades the NDP paid Canadians invaluable service by working to keep governments honest, by standing as the 'conscience of Parliament.'  Just as Conservatives disdained peacekeeping for warfighting (albeit in vain) during the Harper era, so too did New Democrats jettison their traditional role - and progressivism - for a shot at power during the Layton/Mulcair era.

Why did the NDP squander its credibility "obsessively targeting the wrong person," Justin Trudeau? Because that was what was ordained in the Layton/Mulcair playbook. They were always out to take down the Liberals even at the cost of advancing Harper. Layton helped Harper ascend to power. Layton was instrumental in Harper achieving his disastrous (for Canada) majority. Mulcair sought to play the same game.

It's encouraging that the Caplans and Laxers and others are now speaking out and pointing the way for the New Democrats to rehabilitate their party. I can't see how they'll do that with Mulcair at the helm.

The Lies That Bind

There's a powerful but perverse psychology that keeps nations stuck in quagmire conflicts. Foreign Policy offers an analysis by USMC aviator Michael van Wyk that is a "must read" for Canadians as Justin Trudeau prepares to withdraw Canada's contribution to the pointless air war on ISIS.


In a recent article, Gen. David Petraeus and Michael O’Hanlon voiced their support forPresident Obama’s announcement to maintain an increased U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan through 2017. A lot of the familiar rhetoric abounds  — statements that Afghanistan “needs help” and that the situation is “not hopeless, but it is serious” combine to produce a non-specific threat narrative. But the authors offer only one real argument for staying: “the right approach is for Obama to protect our investment in Afghanistan.”

In other words, we should stay because of sunk costs. In 1985, Arkes and Blumer published a study titled The Psychology of Sunk Cost that addressed the idea of the sunk cost effect. It had roots in several other theories to include Kahneman and Taversky’s 1979 Prospect Theory, of which there are two applicable parts  —  prospect theory’s value function, and thecertainty effect. The value function presents the idea of an investor deep in loss perceiving the prospect of relative gain (even if still achieving a net loss in the end) as far outweighing the risk of increased cost (and further loss). An example is given of the increased popularity of long shots at the race track during the final race of the day. The second part is thecertainty effect, noting that a choice between a certain loss (completely pulling out of Afghanistan leading to its presumptive total collapse) and a long shot (the Afghan government becoming self-sustaining sometime in the very, very distant future) favors the latter.

...The hardest aspect in shedding the sunk cost fallacy is the seeming irreverence of not “honoring” the sacrifices of our dead and wounded. We need to tread lightly on the ground of our fallen comrades. But I believe the “sunk cost” view actually dishonors their sacrifice, because it converts them into a kind of political-emotional “currency” that is used to gain argumentative advantage. This often comes in the form of declaring whether their sacrifice was or will be “in vain” or not based on a subjective determination of outcome. Matt Cavanaugh, Jim Gourley, and Dan Berschinski all have recently wrestled with addressing this complex and sensitive topic. For now, suffice it to say that the consideration of hazarding further American lives deserves the utmost gravity, but the hard truth that manyhave died does not and cannot justify whether more should die.

In Afghanistan, the money and effort spent up until this point have gotten us to exactly where we are and no further. To see the situation clearly, we need to rid ourselves of the sunk cost fallacy and view the option of our enduring role in Afghanistan in the light ofopportunity costs. That is, we should try to assess all the costs, both explicit and inherent, of one alternative versus the other going forward. Even if the desired outcome of staying in Afghanistan is sufficiently viable, reasonably achievable, and rationally probable, our continued involvement will certainly result in the loss of American lives.

My assessment is that such an outcome is not achievable without the loss of more of our people than is worth it. Hence, I believe it is time for us to leave Afghanistan, undeluded by the hope that we can somehow recover the unrecoverable.

Van Wyk argues for the complete withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. To him the future costs of staying aren't worth the prize. Squandering lives and treasure on lost causes is for the French Foreign Legion. Without that, the Legion might not have any songs.

Canada needs to stop serving as America's Foreign Legion. No more wars unless we know, going in, that we have the ability and the will to win them. No more wars without end. No more doubling down on bad bets. Enough.

Hey, Justin. Looking for an Environment Minister? Look No More.

Elizabeth May.

Change.org has put up a petition urging prime minister Trudeau to invite Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, to serve as his environment minister. You can add your name here.

When I signed there were nearly 41,000 supporters. Change.org is looking for 50,000 before submitting it to the prime minister elect.

BTW, I first heard this suggestion from friend, Lorne, of Politics and Its Discontents.

13C, It's Where You Need to Be.

It's considered the perfect temperature for economic success. 13 degrees Celsius it is. Nations with an average, annual temperature of 13C simply perform better, they always have and they always will. Which, with temperatures on the rise, is about to throw a wrench into a lot of places.


Underlying the link is the impact that rising temperatures have on people’s ability to work, their health and even their ability to think, as well as harm to crops and machinery. Today, the US, Japan and China have average annual temperatures close to the sweet spot of 13C, meaning that further warming will begin to harm their economies.

But Brazil, India, Indonesia and Nigeria are already much warmer, meaning the impact of climate change on their economic growth will be even greater. The UK and Germany are currently cooler than 13C, meaning their economies may improve a little as temperatures rise, before starting to decline.

...The new analysis, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, began by examining the economic performance of countries between 1960 and 2010. When a country’s average temperature was above 13C, they found that national economies performed worse in warmer years than in cooler years. Below 13C, the reverse was the case.

“This relationship we have uncovered is almost like a law,” said Solomon Hsiang, at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the research team. “Over the last 50 years, this relationship between how temperature fluctuates and how economies perform hasn’t changed a bit.”

...“When we hear of a few degrees of temperature change, it doesn’t sounds like a lot, but when you look in detail at what will happen on the ground, you are looking at a completely different planet,” said Hsiang.

“So it shouldn’t be too surprising that it is going to reshape the global economy in ways that are going to be quite traumatic. We can then ask whether or not we want to subject future generations to that turmoil and change, or if we want to invest what seems like a relatively small amount of today to avoid that scenario.”

Climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern, at the London School of Economics, said: “This paper recognises that climate change could have impacts that increase very steeply with rising global average temperature. This is an advance on other previous studies [which have] made severe underestimates of the economic effects of unmanaged climate change.”

But he said even the new estimate could be unduly lower, because many possible and severe disruptions suggested by scientific evidence had not been included.