Just some news and comments:
First, I was thrilled to see this: the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal just ruled that, regardless of its notwithstanding clause, our courts can still decide whether Saskatchewan's Deadname law violates constitutional rights.
(And yes, I call this the Deadname law - the government spins it "parents' bill of rights" and most media make it innocuous by calling it a "pronoun policy". But what this law actually does is to require teachers to deadname their trans pupils unless the school outs the student to the parents.)
Brandon Harder / Saskatoon Star Phoenix
Next, a deeper dive into tariffs:
Sask. pronoun consent law case can proceed following appeal court rulingAlso, here's some more good news:
Four of five judges of Saskatchewan's highest court say a lower court can decide whether what's known as the Parents' Bill of Rights violates constitutional rights, despite the use of the notwithstanding clause.
Saskatchewan’s highest court has ruled that the provincial government’s use of the notwithstanding clause does not shield its pronoun consent law from judicial scrutiny of whether the law limits certain constitutional rights.
As a result, a legal action brought by UR Pride Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity (UR Pride) may proceed in a lower court.
...the government argued in September 2024 that, given the invocation of the notwithstanding clause, the court no longer had jurisdiction to weigh in on whether the law violates sections of the Charter listed within the law’s text. They argued the case should have been dismissed for being moot and suggested the addition of a further constitutional challenge was an attempt to get around the government’s lawful actions, amounting to an abuse of process.
UR Pride disputed the government’s positions and argued there is nothing precluding the court from declaring whether the law violates certain constitutional rights.
The majority decision, written by SKCA Chief Justice Robert Leurer and representing the opinion of four of five judges who ruled on the case, dismissed the government’s appeal in all but one area. The decision says the portions of UR Pride’s action seeking to have the policy that preceded the law declared unconstitutional “must be struck for mootness.”
But the majority ruled that the Court of King’s Bench has the jurisdiction to decide whether the PBR (specifically, what is now Section 197.4 of the Education Act and concerns “Consent for change to gender identity”) limits rights under sections 7 and 15(1) of the Charter and to issue a declaration to that end.
Further, the SKCA majority decision concludes UR Pride may also seek a declaration that the section of law is of “no force and effect” based on a violation of Section 12 of the Charter, which protects Canadians from cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.
...Egale Canada, a LGBTQ+ rights organization providing legal support to UR Pride, circulated a statement saying it was pleased with the outcome of the appeal.
“The Court of Appeal’s decision upholds the rule of law in Canada and, in particular, reinforces the critical role of the courts in determining the constitutionality of government action.”
View on Threads
Dale Smith / Routine Proceedings
Roundup: Tariffs are likely biting worse than claimedEdmond’s Substack reprints Stephen Marche's New York Times article this weekend:
You may have heard time and again that some 85 percent of goods traded with the US are covered under the New NAFTA and are not exposed to the new 35 percent tariffs, but that number could actually be misleading (and variable depending on who’s talking). In actual fact, that 85 percent figure is trade that is eligible to be compliant with New NAFTA rules, but a lot of it actually isn’t, because a great deal of that trade was simply done without the compliance with the New NAFTA rules because it was easier for many businesses just to pay the old tariff rates because there are significant costs to be compliant with the New NAFTA rules. That calculation has changed now with the Trump tariffs, and a lot of businesses are scrambling to get their compliance certification, but for many small businesses, it’s incredibly hard to do because they don’t have the staff or resources to do so. This means that the tariffs could be biting harder than some people are saying.
‘Profound and Abiding Rage’: Canada’s Answer to America’s AbandonmentHere's an interesting article -- its lengthy and I won't shred it by excerpting, but here is how it starts: Canadian Returnee
Canada is living through an era of acute, sustained, profound and abiding rage.
...All over the world, as the United States retreats from the global order it created, nations are reforming their priorities, changing their institutions and, as a result, changing their identities. By 2027, Japan’s military budget will have swelled 60 percent in five years. Germany, too, is having to remilitarize, though it is having difficulty finding willing troops; the stigma against combat has been inculcated for several generations. Brazil has already begun trading with China in Chinese currency, discovering a means of avoiding contact with America altogether. These are all drastic changes in how these countries exist, in who they are. But perhaps nowhere is the change more profound than in Canada.
In response to America’s threats, Canada is in the middle of the greatest explosion of nationalism in the country’s history...
...it’s the American system — not just its presidency — that is in breakdown. From the Canadian side of the border, it is evident that the American left is in the middle of a grand abdication. No American institution, no matter how wealthy or privileged, seems willing to make any sacrifice for democratic values. If the president is Tony Soprano, the Democratic governors who plead with Canadian tourists to return are the Carmelas. They cluck their disapproval, but they can’t believe anyone would question their decency as they try to get along.
Canada is far from powerless in this new world; we are educated and resourceful. But we are alone in a way we have never been. Our current moment of national self-definition is different from previous nationalisms. It will involve connecting Canada more broadly rather than narrowing its focus. We can show that multiculturalism works, that it remains possible to have an open society that does not consume itself, in which divisions between liberals and conservatives are real and deep-seated but do not fester into violence and loathing.
Canada will also have to serve as a connector between the world’s democracies, in a line that stretches from Taiwan and South Korea, across North America, to Poland and Ukraine.Canada has experienced the second Trump administration like a teenager being kicked out of the house by an abusive father. We have to grow up fast, and we can’t go back. And the choices we make now will matter forever. They will reveal our national character. Anger is a useful emotion, but only as a point of departure.
We have to reckon with the fact that from now on, our power will come from only ourselves.
How Canada Barely Dodged a Political DisasterAnd this is a good point too:
Poilievre nearly won. Here’s why we must rethink our media, politics, and votes before Canada tips into extremism.
There was a moment, brief, brittle, and razor-thin, when it seemed Canada might cross a threshold we would never return from. It wasn’t hypothetical, and it wasn’t something that happened in another country, on another continent, with different problems. It was here, and it was real.
Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, came shockingly close to taking power. That near-miss didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was shaped by the collapse of political consensus across the West, fuelled by an increasingly partisan and weakened media landscape, and made dangerously possible by voters ready to punish a tired incumbent government, even if the cost was the country’s democratic and social fabric.
This is about a nation on the edge. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves when institutions falter, and the reckoning we must face if we’re to have any hope of preserving the country we still want to believe in....
Next, Cole Bennett challenges us to recognize the risks of real change:View on Threads
Cole Bennett / Cole.notcole
When Heroes Were Criminals: How Dissent Shapes the WorldTurning to the news of the moment, the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska:
....History shows us something uncomfortable: real change almost never comes from polite requests. It comes from those willing to be handcuffed, vilified, and sometimes even killed for their cause
Mandela risked everything. Suffragettes endured force-feeding in prison. Viola Desmond faced arrest and public shame. They broke laws, not for selfish gain, but to dismantle injustice.
These people are remembered as heroes not because they suffered, but because they refused to stop.
But courage comes in different forms. Not everyone will chain themselves to a fence, march into gunfire, or spend decades in prison. You don’t have to be on the front lines to be part of change. What matters most is this: if you’re not ready to risk everything, at least don’t stand in the way of those who are.
Because one day, history will ask what side you were on, and neutrality will not be an acceptable answer.
Phillips O'Brien has been covering the Ukraine-Russia War since the beginning and he is horrified by how Trump is playing strongman while pandering to Putin:View on Threads
Phillips P O'Brien / Phillips’s Newsletter
I was glad to see this news today too:
Weekend Update #145: From Trump Will Sanction Russia--to--How Much Of Ukraine Does Trump Want To Give To Russia
This should have been the week when all final illusions died. It started with confident predictions, even boasts that Trump was going to drop the hammer on Russia and has ended with a discussion over what parts of Ukraine Trump wants to be given to Russia. It has left European leaders scrambling (when they should have expected this all along) and those pro-Ukraine Republicans nothing to do but delve ever deeper into their fantasy lands....
...So we await the final Trump-Putin proposal. It looks like it will be worked out this Friday (August 15) when Trump hosts Putin to a summit in Alaska—itself a massive reward to Putin. The US president is hosting a war criminal on US soil and helping craft a plan for that war criminal to be given parts of a European democracy that is fighting for its survival. Its perverse, of course, but Trump will revel in it.
Now, of course, Trump and Putin cannot dictate any peace deal on Ukraine. What will be crucial in the coming days (and I’m sure I will write about it) is the reaction of European states and Ukraine itself. If they hold together, they might be able to actually act in their own interest and not bend the knee to Trump.
We will see.
At least, though, we will have a coming week where we do not have to listen to science-fiction like discussions about how Trump is turning against Putin and will bring in sanctions. This coming Friday, we will see their relationship for ourselves, and it will make all good-thinking folk more than a little nauseous.
I was glad to see this news today too:
When you get it, you get it:www.cbc.ca/news/politic...
— JeffTrnka (@jefftrnka.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 4:39 PM
[image or embed]
Finally, this: And check out the whole Paul Krugman piece here - its priceless!View on Threads
View on Threads
8 comments:
On Trump and Putin . . . It doesn't matter much what Trump does. Or what the Europeans do, really. At this point it also doesn't matter whether Putin is a crazed aggressor or whether he really saw the invasion as a last ditch effort to stop NATO, an anti-Russian military alliance, from putting troops and missiles a day's drive from Moscow. It doesn't matter whether NATO for its part was trying to avoid war or whether they originally invited the war as a way to weaken and perhaps precipitate the dismemberment of Russia.
Whatever anyone intended, at this point, Russia is winning. I watch a fairly neutral daily video that shows the movement of the front lines and an overview of what's happening. And in the end, the thing is that while the Ukrainians are hanging tough, the movement of the front lines is almost entirely in Russia's favour, exceptions are short-lived and generally involve Ukraine spending a lot of soldiers for a short-lived movement. And the reason is that Russia has much more, and often better, war materiel. They are successfully outproducing NATO at the things that matter in war. They have more artillery, more drones, more armoured vehicles, more anti-air, more planes, more bombs, more missiles. The Ukrainians fight bravely and, with all the experience they've had, pretty competently. But the Russians do as well, and they've got enough ordnance to blow up most defenders before they have to come to grips with them. This results in lopsided casualties, and Ukraine is slowly running out of people to put in combat.
And there is nothing the US, the EU or Ukraine itself can really do about this, short of a really major political/economic transformation. If the EU and US decided to nationalize all their arms companies and run them on a war basis for maximum production, maybe they could turn things around, although it's a little late at this point. Short of that, forget about it. And there's no political will to do that. When it comes to sanctions, they don't have much they haven't already done. It didn't work, because Russia has lots of its own resources and China knows they're next so they won't allow the sanctions to work.
So what comes next is either someone makes a deal or everyone says "but we're the West, nobody gets to push us into compromise!" and everything just keeps on until Russia achieves all the military objectives Putin feels are worth it and dictates a deal. The bottom line, and this is something that has not happened in a long time so the West is finding it really hard to wrap our collective brains around it:
We do not have the power to stop him.
On Poilievre and the media . . . So, first, we could do worse than go back to the 1980 Kent Royal Commission on Newspapers. It talked about how newspaper ownership in Canada was too concentrated and should be broken up. That was then . . . it's way worse now. But of course newspapers are kind of yesterday's news these days, and that on one hand requires extending the same ideas into the digital sphere . . . but on the other hand, it's a problem that needs solutions. Because the issue with newspapers is not so much that media have shifted. It's that the total employment of journalists, in whatever medium, has plummeted, so we're just not being informed very much. There is tons of truth that would be good to know that there is just nobody whose job it is to find it out. And the thing is that the online models for making money presenting news are not very good. We have two basic models:
1. Put information up on the web at your own expense, try to get traffic, and hope that ad revenue which is mostly pocketed by the middleman Google will add up to enough to keep you afloat. This was never that great a model. As google "enshittified" this model, it got worse. As they double down on that by scraping your information and presenting it in search as an "AI summary" so that nobody has to go to your site in the first place, it's getting WAY worse.
2. Subscription models. Nobody wants to pay. There are too many little outfits wanting your cash to give to them all, and too much free stuff (often worth every penny, but it's THERE). These don't work great either.
We need public subsidies of media. One big problem with that is gatekeeping. I have suggested a model where the government maintains a Patreon-like website, except every Canadian citizen gets a certain amount of money per year they can use there. People go to the website and divvy up their cash to go to whatever Canadian media they want. Maybe it could be split up into categories too--"News", "Music" et cetera. The money of people who don't go gets split up according to the decisions of the people who did.
We also need serious laws about propaganda, bots, AI bots and so on, to stop oil companies from buying fascism in this country.
Thanks for all this info - I hadn't realized Ukraine was doing so poorly now, that is awful. I just can't believe anything Trump will do could make it any better
Interesting concept here. I read a lot of substacks but only pay for a few, plus I subscribe to some news outlets also but nowhere near as many as I want to.
I think the SKCA made the right decision. The Charter section 33 notwithstanding clause doesn't shield the law from judicial review. It simply prevents a rights violating law from being struck down. It's important that the courts rule on the constitutionality of the law because the operation of the notwithstanding clause is limited to five years. This means that an election must be held before the clause is renewed, and people are entitled to know the court's opinion before voting.
That said, while you obviously disagree, I don't think the SK law goes far enough in requiring that a child's parents approve a new name and pronouns. If the schools notify parents when their child is 5 minutes late for class, they'd better be letting parents know when their child is showing signs of a mental health issue. And yes, gender dysphoria is a mental health issue evidenced by a strong desire to be of the opposite gender or "some alternative gender."
In my view, the province is well within its rights to require parental approval of name and pronoun changes. Children's mental health is at stake. But using the notwithstanding clause in this way was unnecessary and shows a lack of confidence in the government's position. People in a free and democratic society deserve a full and frank discussion of these issues in court and elsewhere, and trying to shut that down is wrong regardless of the side doing it.
I agree that the 5 year term of the use of the notwithstanding clause makes it very important to determine whether a piece of legislation in fact requires the use of the notwithstanding clause. I think it's also important in a democracy to know when a government's legislation violates the constitution.
As to whether parental approval should be required for calling children a different name . . . well, if my child wanted to be called a different name, THEY WOULD TELL ME. If yours do not want you to be told, that says something about you and what they fear would happen if you were told. And the record shows that such fears are often serious and ACCURATE, and that children's lives have been ruined, or even ENDED, by parents who are prejudiced against various gender or orientation related aspects of their children.
So, balancing the children's rights against the parents', I think the children's rights are a lot more important here. The parents aren't in danger of being made homeless, being abused, or dying.
Plg, regarding the children's lives ruined, as Hitchens used to say, "what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." Schools have a positive duty to report child abuse. If they suspect it they're required to contact children's aid.
Children don't have the right to vote, smoke, toke, drink, get tattooed, etc. Society recognizes their diminished capacity for consent by restricting their right to enter into contracts, limiting the age of marriage and sexual relations, and criminalizing pedophilia. Children require parental consent to play organized sports, get vaccinated, and go on school field trips. But they should be free to make potentially life-altering name and pronoun changes suggesting a DSM-5TR mental condition without parental knowledge or consent?!
If I were the class shit-disturber, your policy would be pure gold - "Teacher, today my name is Jimmy and I go by she/their pronouns. I'll let you know what I want everyone to call me tomorrow. Oh, and no mistakes or I'll report you for misgendering and transphobia. And don't even think of reporting this to my parents, that's illegal."
Without evidence? So, admit you know nothing whatsoever about the subject without admitting you know nothing whatsoever about the subject.
My proposed policy? I'm pretty sure my proposed policy was, unusually for me, the previous status quo . . . which was NOT having a law criminalizing teachers for not ratting out kids to their parents. I don't believe I had proposed a counter-law forcing anyone to do anything. Your concern there seems amazingly lame, like even lamer than "But what if a trans kid were to have fun playing sports?!?!!!" But if you can point me to some examples under the previous status quo of class shit-disturbers successfully making helpless teachers' lives miserable, name me some chapter and verse. Otherwise you're just making (extremely trivial) shit up.
Similarly making shit up is the idea that teachers calling children by the name they ask to be called by will magically cause them huge amounts of mental damage. I'm pretty sure that no matter what the gender issues, if any, might be, a lot more damage is generally caused by people insisting on telling kids what their name is even if they don't consider that to be their name. If I think my name is X and you say "I'm the authority here, your name is going to be Y whether you like it or not" . . . THAT'S damaging.
I have zero respect for the ethics of your position and I have zero respect for the way you argue it. Your pretence of care for the children is a very thin mask over the authoritarianism and prejudice. You know perfectly well your position will hurt the kids, but that's OK if they won't stop being the kids you don't want them to be. You talk just like those people pushing for therapy to make people not gay.
Post a Comment