Roundup: Sophistry and the “Canadian Dream”

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A piece widely shared over the weekend in the Globe and Mail, titled “The Canadian dream is on life support,” was a curious bit of writing, as the Elder Pundits of this country treated it like a damning indictment of the current government. While Omer Aziz’s ultimate conclusions in the piece are correct—that the federal government needs to admit that things have gone wrong, throw out their old assumptions and pivot, and they need to throw away their talking points while they’re at it—his process of getting there was torturous, and full of outright sophistry.

One of the things that really stood out for me in the piece was just how shallow the analysis really was, particularly in the fact that it served as something of an apologia for the premiers. You wouldn’t know it from reading the piece, but while he levels much of his scorn at the federal government, many of the problems he described are the fault of provincial governments, even where he asserts that they are solely federal such as with immigration. His attention to things like international students were the fault of provincial governments—most especially Ontario and BC—who let their post-secondary institutions treat these international students like cash cows (because they cut funding to those institutions), and allowed the public-private partnership colleges that were largely fraudulent to flourish, again because these provincial governments weren’t doing their jobs, while the federal government was told to just trust them (and I’m not sure how the federal immigration department was supposed to be auditing these institutions in the first place). Likewise, provincial governments scream for temporary foreign workers, and the federal government has to operate on a certain level of trust that these provincial governments know their labour markets best. With his condemnation of the supposed laxity of our criminal justice system again ignores that policing and the administration of justice are provincial matters, but that is never mentioned. He even sides with Facebook on their cutting off of Canadian news and says that the Canadian government wasn’t nice enough to them. Come on.

There are things going wrong in this country, but many of them are complex, and have roots in decades of policy choices by federal and provincial governments that have taken us to this point, and it’s hard for any one government to unwind these structural problems. This kind of essay does a disservice by trying to be simplistic about the problems and solutions to those problems.

Ukraine Dispatch

A father and son were killed in a Russian missile strike on the Kyiv region on Sunday, while three civilians were killed in attacks on Kharkiv and Donetsk on Saturday. In the Kursk incursion, Russians claim that they are increasing security in the area (as videos of their troops surrending en masse flood social media), while president Zelenskyy says that this move puts pressure on Russia as the aggressor. There was a fire reported on the grounds of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, but the structure itself appears to be intact.

Good reads:

  • Canada has joined international condemnation of an Israeli strike on a school compound in Gaza.
  • Canada is considering a security review of a company selling its stake in a Peruvian gold mine to a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise.
  • Ontario First Nations communities in the Robinson-Huron Treaty area have begun receiving the first portions of the $10 billion settlement agreement.
  • Tourism associations are unsurprisingly calling for federal and provincial supports to rebuild Jasper.
  • If you needed something more to depress you, projections show that in the event of nuclear conflict, as much as 95 percent of the Canadian population would likely die.
  • Both Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh have been holding events in Hamilton, each hoping to make more gains there in the next election.
  • Kevin Carmichael disputes that Millennials and Gen Z are getting the worst of the economic battering (provided your only metric isn’t housing).
  • Michael Den Tandt is nostalgic for the political conservativism that used to exist but no longer does in the current era of authoritarian populism.
  • Susan Delacourt and Matt Gurney debate whether the Liberals have a real communications problem, or if they are simply stale as a government.
  • My weekend column looks at the underlying problems in the NDP glossed over in David Moscrop’s Walrus piece, and notes that Singh is only a symptom.

Odds and ends:

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