Tag Archives: LGBT

Roundup: Ford is steering Ontario into the third wave

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Ontario is seeing the biggest rise in the B117 variant of COVID – known colloquially as the UK variant – and yet Doug Ford is promising to start lifting restrictions later this week. We’ve only just gotten first doses to residents of long-term care facilities, and even those vaccinations won’t have a dent in ICU admissions, and yet, Ford and company are barrelling ahead with nonsensical plans. Another example was to delay March Break until April, ostensibly to prevent travel (because there is always travel over holidays), but it seems to also fly in the face of measures related to closing schools to prevent more spread, and that it could have had that utility.

Nevertheless, the province’s own modelling shows a disastrous third wave oncoming because of these more transmissible variants, and point to the need to keep up current restrictions. Ford plans to go ahead with loosening them. And then there was this remarkable exchange where a TVO reporter asked if the province was headed for disaster on this current course, and the public health officials essentially confirmed it.

Ontario is being governed by a group of murderclowns. There is no other explanation.

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Roundup: Bernier’s dog whistles

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While we’re on the topic of bozo eruptions, we got another one from Maxime Bernier over Twitter on Sunday evening, railing about Justin Trudeau’s declaration that diversity is our strength. While I won’t reproduce all of Bernier’s feed, some of the commentary around it has been interesting, and in particular, just what kinds of dog whistles and language that Bernier employs in his language – and likely not a coincidence that this happened on a day of counter-protests to white supremacists in the United States. Also worth noting that his tweets were in rapid succession and in both official languages, which indicates that they were premeditated and not spur of the moment, and that does mean something as well.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1028812175673094146

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1028834166849368064

I might be willing to suspend enough disbelief around Bernier to suppose that he’s really not all that bright and that he really doesn’t know what he’s doing when he tweets stuff like this, but the people who surrounded him in his leadership campaign absolutely knew what they were doing when they tweeted things like red pill memes, and one presumes that they’re still in Bernier’s orbit. But Bernier has consistently demonstrated that he doesn’t have particularly adept political sensibilities (witness his ejection from shadow cabinet), and the fact that he went from going to Pride parades during his leadership campaign to insist that his libertarian values meant that he valued freedom over social conservatism, to becoming a Jordan Peterson convert who was paranoid about “enforced speech” and the bogus fears about being jailed for mis-gendering someone. But as is pointed out below, we are two weeks away from the Conservative policy convention, and it’s possible that this dog whistling is also about Bernier trying to gather support to oppose Scheer in some capacity or other.

Michelle Rempel also put out a tweet thread in response (which again, I’m not going to repeat), and some of the points she made seemed to be refuting Bernier, but at the same time, she makes her own coded appeals about planned migration and the language of pitting groups of newcomers against each other, in very Jason Kenney-esque ways.

Ultimately, however, we are back to the notion of where the adult supervision is with this party, and we recall the reasons why Harper put the party into communications lockdown – before they won in 2006, they went into lockdown because the 2004 election saw them lose because of precisely these kinds of bozo eruptions from the likes of Cheryl Gallant and others. And the strict message discipline seemed to work, but it causes as many problems as it solves (not to mention it’s terrible for democracy). But with this kind of tire fire over the past couple of weeks, you have to imagine that Scheer, whose own Twitter strategy is a lot of lies, obfuscation, narrative building and populist memes, is all for this kind of air war that he thinks will rile the base in ways that appear to have worked for both Trump and Ford. Maybe this kind of “shitposting” (as it is colloquially known) is the message discipline, in which case, we’re probably all doomed.

https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/1028816033610575872

https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/1028816045262307328

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1028416748331126785

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QP: Good administration for veterans

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It was a full house for caucus day, and there were numerous paeans to Jean Beliveau before things got started. Thomas Mulcair led off by asking about the staff reductions at Veterans Affairs, to which Stephen Harper said that they were increasing services for veterans, before he offered his own statement about Beliveau. Mulcair turned to veterans service centre closures and wondered why he wasn’t firing the minister instead. Harper insisted that they took resources away from back room bureaucracy and were delivering more services, calling it “good administration.” Mulcair moved to the government’s court arguments that the sacred obligations for veterans were just political speeches signifying nothing. Harper insisted that he would not comment on matters before the courts, but that the substantive measure was that they enhanced veterans services in numerous ways. Mulcair pressed, to which Harper insisted that the items he was listing were not political rhetoric but were real action for veterans, which the opposition voted against. Mulcair promised that an NDP would reopen every one of those offices, before pivoting to the issue of funding for thalidomide victims. Harper said that the meetings were ongoing, before returning listing to the veterans programmes that the NDP voted against. Justin Trudeau was up next, and asked about the underfunding of military cemeteries, to which Harper insisted that the government enhanced funeral services for veterans, which Liberals voted against. After another round in French, Trudeau asked about the government meeting with an École Polytechnique survivors group, Harper insisted that they knew why Marc Lepine targeted those women and they would continue to support victims.

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