Taking a step back to catch up on some interesting comments and views that have been flying under the radar lately, if my metaphors aren't getting too mixed up.
We're all in this together
First, cartoonist Graeme MacKay makes a valid point:
Housing people firstIn The Globe and Mail, physician Andrew Boozary writes Canada can end homelessness. Cities in the U.S. are showing it can be done
Whenever I raise the example of Finland [gift link] – the country that nearly eradicated homelessness through treating housing as the first intervention in health care – someone online tells me it doesn’t count. The country is too socialist. Too small. Too “homogeneous,” whatever that is supposed to mean. The objection isn’t really about Finland it seems, but about preserving a failing status quo.They hate us because Canada works
As a physician that works with unhoused patients in Toronto, I decided to set my clinical gaze on other jurisdictions – other cities that would be harder to wave away, especially amidst a trade war. The one I want to talk about now is not in Scandinavia. It doesn’t even have universal health care. It is in Texas.
Houston, the state’s most populous city, has housed more than 30,000 people since 2012 and cut homelessness by more than 60 per cent since 2011. ...
Houston is not a magical place, nor is it socialist. What it built is a system: Dozens of agencies and various levels of government started co-ordinating around permanent housing as the shared goal. To be sure, its success is fragile and contested with pandemic funding drying up and Texas still allowing landlords to turn away tenants with rent vouchers. But this is why it is a useful example – it succeeded in adverse political conditions, not ideal ones.
And Houston is not alone. Denver recorded its first overall drop in homelessness in nearly a decade this year, after moving roughly 7,700 people into permanent housing since 2023; unsheltered homelessness dropped by 45 per cent in the last two years. They followed the same formula: cross-sector co-ordination and a focus on permanent housing, not shelter as the treatment.
From these cities, and yes, even Finland, there are three lessons that travel well across our border.
First, house people first. Shift investments toward social and supportive housing. The return on investment has been demonstrated at length. We cannot treat diabetes or cancer in encampments and keep blaming individuals for poor health outcomes.
Second, co-ordinate a system of compassion and sound evidence. There needs to be better integration across housing, health, justice and community sectors. The fragmentation amongst and within sectors comes at a very real human cost.
And finally, let’s acknowledge homelessness as the generational health crisis that it is. Every dollar we decline to spend in housing, we spend several times over in emergency departments, hospital wards, prison cells and shelter beds. ...
In his substack, retired unionist Will Presley writes The Real Reason Trump and Fox News Dislike Canada Canada represents something the American right would rather Americans didn’t see: proof that a different kind of society is possible.
...Speaking to his faithful at a rally in Kentucky, Trump specifically singled out Canadian healthcare, claiming that the United States was effectively paying for our healthcare system and other social programs through its economic relationship with Canada.Notwithstanding a runaway train
Think about that for a moment.
Trump would have Americans believe that when they purchase Canadian products, they are somehow subsidizing our standard of living.
What absolute nonsense....
Canada finances its own healthcare and social programs through the taxes paid by Canadians.
But Trump’s comments reveal something much more interesting than his usual misunderstanding of economics.
They reveal just how uncomfortable the American right is with the example Canada sets.
For years, I’ve argued that one of the reasons Fox News and the American conservative establishment have such difficulty with Canada is that we demonstrate what the United States could become if it made different political choices.
And that is a very inconvenient truth....
Canada is living evidence that capitalism does not require abandoning social responsibility.
We have successful businesses, profitable corporations, entrepreneurs, investors and a market economy. Yet we have also made collective decisions that healthcare, public education and a basic social safety net are responsibilities we share.
This is precisely the sort of thinking that threatens the ideological foundations of the American right....
For decades, conservative politicians and media personalities have told Americans that universal healthcare is unaffordable, that stronger employment protections will destroy businesses, that meaningful gun regulations threaten liberty, and that government programs inevitably lead to economic disaster.
Then there’s Canada, right next door.
A prosperous, democratic, capitalist country that has embraced many of the very policies Americans are repeatedly told cannot work....
Maybe the real reason Trump and his allies are so hostile toward Canada isn’t that we’re taking something from America.
Maybe it’s that we’re showing Americans something they could have.
And for those who have spent decades convincing Americans they can’t have it, that may be the most threatening thing of all.
An interesting piece in the Literary Review of Canada by journalist John Lorinc about the history of the Notwithstanding clause and its use by provincial governments, titled Clause and Effect How section 33 barrels along
... the case is before the Supreme Court of Canada. Following last fall’s epic hearing featuring dozens of intervenors, the court is expected to hand down a ruling later this year or early next.Rally to nowhere
The decision is widely expected to be seismic. The judges have been essentially tasked with determining whether the notwithstanding clause, which has been used with increasing regularity, is eroding the Charter rights that Canadians thought they’d enshrined in April 1982, when Pierre Trudeau presided over the historic patriation of the Constitution. They’re also aiming to interpret a contentious provision of the Constitution that has not, to date, been shaped by much in the way of legal precedent....
For many critics, including Alford, section 33 now looks more like a runaway train than a rarely used corrective. The notwithstanding clause, according to some observers, will topple the entire Charter if provincial legislatures normalize its use to suppress politically inconvenient rights and then renew those limits every five years, which the Charter allows and Quebec has done on numerous occasions.
The lawyer and constitutional law scholar Peter Biro, who edited a fascinating and timely 2024 anthology, The Notwithstanding Clause and the Canadian Charter: Rights, Reforms, and Controversies, likens section 33 to Chekhov’s gun. “If in Act 1 you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act,” Biro writes about the Russian dramatist’s advice. “Otherwise, don’t put it there.”...
...From a structural perspective, the rule of law in Canada exists within a tight triangular configuration that consists of democratically elected legislatures, the courts, and the Constitution, which includes a provision known as the “supremacy clause,” stating that the whole document is the highest of Canadian laws. All three are constantly pulling and pushing against one another, which is a feature, not a bug. This unresolvable tension is, in theory, an equilibrium.
Some Charter experts, including Alford and Biro, have come to see section 33 as something akin to a worsening hairline fracture that threatens to undermine the integrity of the whole edifice....
In Public Notice, Paul Waldman writes The end of the Trump rally The defining political event of this era is going out with a whimper.
In The Oncology Underground, Hans Casteels writes about how Atlantic current changes may mean colder European winters
..Even for the diehards who still come to see him, Trump’s rallies have become a slog as a sleepy president rambles pointlessly from one subject to another, like a musical act whose hit-making days are decades in the past, playing the old songs with little of the verve that made them popular in the first place to an audience that has to work hard to convince themselves they’re having a good time.
. One of the purposes of Trump rallies was always so that they could be viewed by the rest of the country, to say Look at how beloved I am, how fervent is the love my supporters have for me. Trump still insists that’s true, even as he bleeds support among those who voted for him in the past.
“When you stand up here, it’s just like, the love,” he marveled at a rally in Tennessee. “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.”
That much is still true, even if those applauding are smaller in number than they used to be. But one can’t blame them for being tired, given how often they’ve had to perform their part in his show.
According to lists compiled on Wikipedia, he held 323 rallies during the 2016 campaign, 96 in the 2020 race, and 117 in the 2024 contest. At least if you were following the Grateful Dead or Phish in their respective heydays, you knew the set list would change from night to night. Trump, on the other hand, is more like a second-rate tribute band, playing the same songs over and over...
Finally, this
For sale: Canadian Winter, cheapIn The Oncology Underground, Hans Casteels writes about how Atlantic current changes may mean colder European winters
...I read a headline suggesting that Canadian winters could threaten Europe, and my first thought was that we really ought to have been consulted. We have been trying to get rid of the bloody thing for years. If Europe is interested, we can arrange delivery, although I would recommend being home when the package arrives. You do not want February left on your doorstep.
Apparently, sending smoke into the United States was insufficient. Now we are implicated in the possible refrigeration of another continent. For a country whose international reputation has depended heavily on being pleasant and relatively easy to overlook, this is an alarming expansion of our activities. At some point someone will accuse us of weaponising November, and I will have difficulty providing a convincing defence....
...Should Europe need practical assistance, we can send someone who understands frozen locks, wet mittens and the particular betrayal of stepping into slush that is deeper than the boot. I would advise against sending a goodwill delegation in January, though. Canadians who discover that their destination still has green grass may prove very difficult to get back on the plane.
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