Forty years ago the Edmund Fitzgerald was wrecked

Doctor Grumpy in the House: November 10, 1975:

Great line of the day

The Mound of Sound writes about today's story on how the Harper Cons "politicized" the civil service:

The mandarins are running for cover. They failed to stand up to Harper. They chose not to defend the public service over which they presided. They allowed themselves to be intimidated into colluding with a corrupt government. They abandoned their responsibility to the nation and the Canadian people and they now, unforgivably and outrageously, depict themselves as victims.

Yeah -- after ten years of "the Harper government" taking over what used to be The Government of Canada, after years of outrageous firings and resignations, after everyone was so sick and tired of Harper that the country threw him out, NOW the deputy ministers decide to complain about politics affecting the civil service? Give me a break.

I gotta get my life some writers

Calvin and Hobbes Comic Strip, October 29, 2015 on GoComics.com:

How shocking!

I'm shocked SHOCKED that Justin Trudeau hasn't yet developed a plan for dealing with the Senate -- several ex-Liberal Senators are apparently feeling a little miffed that, in the nine days since he was elected, Justin hasn't figured out yet exactly what their role will be in his government.

With only a week before Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is to be sworn in, independent Liberal senators say they are being kept in the dark and have no idea how the new government plans to get its legislation through the Senate.
“It’s a great big black hole,” said Senator Jim Munson.

Poor babies, their delicate fee-fees are hurt.
So of course they follow the grand Liberal tradition of running to the media to complain.
Though I would imagine that Trudeau has had just a few other little things on his mind during the last week, like developing a cabinet, building the PMO, moving, making a thousand appointments... oh, and crossing his fingers that his mother doesn't say anything stupid.

So what's our excuse?

Montreal Simon has a great column on The Battle to Liberate Canada and the Betrayal of the MSM where he notes a determined effort on the part of Canadian media to "move on" and just forget all about the Harper years:

This would also be my message to Andrew Coyne, and all the other casual collaborators in the MSM, who would have us move on and forget the Decade of Darkness as if it never happened.
We will NEVER stop writing about that nightmare, until the day the guilty are held accountable for their crimes against Canada.
Until the day we can determine whether Stephen Harper used government departments and the security services as political weapons against his own people.
And of course, until the day we can be sure that his foul legacy is finally buried...

The United States has seen a determined effort to wipe everyone's memory about what happened during the eight Bush years, to the point that the US media was shocked, SHOCKED, this week when Donald Trump reminded everyone that Bush was actually in charge of the American government when America experienced 9/11.
But at least America had 9/11 as an excuse for going mad.
What's Canada's excuse?
Our FPTP electoral system?  That a few people were mad at the Wheat Board, the CTRC, and the long-form census?
And what is the excuse for years and years of craven, cowardly behaviour on the part of dozens and dozens of elected MPs -- all those Con MPs who spent years forelock-tugging, knuckling under, kowtowing to everything that the Hitler Youth in Harper's office told them to do?
I don't know, but I agree with Simon that we'd better keep on talking about what happened.
So it won't ever happen again.

Great line of the day

Michael Harris at iPolitics reminds us of why Harper really lost:

Harper’s downfall, and that of the party he built, had nothing to do with Harper Derangement Syndrome. Nor was it about the machinations of war rooms, whore rooms, evil gurus or a burnt-out lieutenant screaming at her own deckhands as the ship went down — assuming Tory MP Ron Liepert has it right.

It comes down to this: you can’t have a dictatorial liar running a democracy for the benefit of his corporate buddies and expect a country like Canada to tolerate it forever. Canadians ultimately drop the gloves when they come face to face with tyrants — and kick the stuffing out of him. [Emphasis mine]

That is what really happened here. The country really did embrace the “better angels of our nature”, to borrow the phrase Trudeau borrowed from Lincoln. It was more disgusted by than afraid of Stephen Harper.
It didn’t appreciate his lies about what he was doing and why, his degradation of Canadian foreign policy for domestic political gain, his toxic manipulation of information that belonged to everyone, and his vicious mistreatment of anyone who dared to tell him that the sun didn’t orbit around … him.

How ironic is it that his kingdom of secrets, that bubble once hermetically sealed, is now leaking like an old rubber boot. Party brass like Jenni Byrne and Ray Novak at each other’s throats. Ex-PMO lawyer Benjamin Perrin saying the PM had lost the moral authority to govern. Tory Blue Bill Thorsell saying throw the rascals out. And now even pipsqueak MPs daring to unload on the autocrats at CPC headquarters who made their lives a living hell as long as Harper rode the back of the tiger — before he ended up inside.

What scares me? These people still won 99 seats. For some of them, it should have been 99 years.

And so it begins

That didn't take long, did it
By describing one of Canada's most prominent and well-respected first nations leaders, Phil Fontaine, as just a pipeline consultant, the Montreal Gazette is already trying to fit the Trudeau government into a "corrupt Liberal" frame.
Fontaine, by the way, is the grey-haired guy applauding, at the bottom left of the photo that the Montreal Gazette ran with this smear story.
ALSO very suspicious, isn't it, that Fontaine is standing next to a woman with a red cell phone -- get it RED????  Maybe she's actually a Russkie commie sympathizer so how some SHE was at Trudeau's victory celebration?  Huh? Huh?
And whose baby is that in the back, wearing headphones?  Is Trudeau subverting our youth already with his neighbourhood dope houses????
And how come Sophie is wearing those silver earrings?  This must mean she is against Canadian gold miners....

Justin Bat-Flip

from the Halifax Chronicle Herald
Listening to the pundits tonight, I found out that they all knew two months ago that Stephen Harper was going to lose the election. Yep, Harper was doomed from the start and everybody on our TV news shows absolutely knew it all along
Too bad they didn't get around to telling the rest of us.
In fact, I noticed they didn't mention it until well after the Ontario votes were counted -- and it was absolutely, positively guaranteed that Harper and all the Hitler youth in the PMO were completely gone, finished, kaput.
I still don't think they really believe it, though.  Right at the end of the CBC coverage, one of the bright young things on the national set -- it might have been Rosemary Barton but I'm not sure -- anyway, she started babbling pathetically about how she had never covered politics except when Harper was PM and how great it was going to be now, because the press gallery reporters would actually know about when cabinet meetings were going on and they might actually being able to ask a government minister a question and all like that.
Of course, the older and supposedly wiser pundits on the set quickly started shouting her down about how naive she was and how she shouldn't get her hopes up that the Liberals would change anything -- which is the kind of cynicism that Trudeau has promised to end.

Newspaper endorsements are just another corporate press release

At the end of an election campaign, a newspaper's endorsement used to mean something. It used to be taken as considered and authoritative judgement by the newspaper's editorial office about that particular election campaign and that particular set of candidates.
Now? Its just another corporate press release.
The Globe and Mail started it off last week in a ridiculous editorial that endorsed the Harper Cons, without Harper, and it was widely mocked on twitter.
Then all of the Postmedia brand newspapers in Canada ran so-called "editorials" written by their corporate office supporting the Harper Cons, and the Edmonton Journal editor described it as the "right" of the Postmedia owners to do this.
Now the National Post has lost their editorial board chair, Andrew Coyne over their refusal to let Coyne endorse the party he wanted to endorse. Their corporate endorsement, of course, went to the Harper Cons.

There's no pearl-clutching in baseball

#THIS. Joey Bat Flip.
https://t.co/CO59JyFCsa

— MLB (@MLB) October 15, 2015

Wasn't that a party?
And its a side-note on the whole thing, really, but illustrative of how Americans think they own baseball.
First, I was amused during yesterday's stunning Blue Jays win by the pearl-clutching of the announcers over how the Toronto fans erupted during the disputed run ruling. The announcers seemed amazed at how angry the Toronto fans were -- why, they acted just like the fans would in any American baseball park and they threw stuff on the field! They so scary, must suspend game!
And then it was hilarious how the Rangers and the American sports media got so busy tut-tutting about Bautista flipping his bat after he saved the day, the game, the downtown, and the season -- how dare he act just like any other player would in any other American baseball park!
CBS Sports writes:

Dyson comes off as whiny little baby in all of this. I understand the Rangers just suffered a crushing defeat and they're looking to lash out, but of all the things to get mad about, they're mad about the bat flip?
Know what's disrespectful? Telling a player how to act after a career-defining moment. Dyson has no business telling Bautista he "needs to calm down," especially considering Dyson instigated not one, but two benches clearing incidents that inning.

Great line of the day

One of the commenters on a Huffington Post about the Ford brothers showing up at a Harper Con rally:

The Ford brothers were there to advise Harper on drugs and whorehouses. Who better?

Don't make me laugh

Once again following along with the Harper Con agenda, the Globe and Mail is "reporting" that Trudeau's spending promises are "under more scrutiny":

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is coming under mounting pressure to spell out just how his campaign spending promises would add up.

Yeah, sure.
The Liberals announced their spending and budget plans weeks ago; if the media hasn't scrutinized them until now (too busy focusing the election on Muslims like Harper wanted them to) then this isn't Justin's fault.
The only pressure that Justin is coming under right now is from the panicked Harper Cons, who are throwing money away trying to halt Liberal momentum.

Predictions

Sorry for the lack of posts -- we have been away.

But I notice that news outlets are now reporting the Liberals are within reach of forming the next government. So maybe for a change my mid-September prediction that Trudeau was beginning to pull away from the crowd will turn out to be correct.
Today's Nanos tracking poll confirms the Liberal's upward trend:

The current Nanos nightly tracking shows the Liberals at 35.1% support nationally followed by the Conservatives at 29.0%, the NDP at 25.0%, and the Greens at 5.1%.

The Harper Cons have done themselves no favours in this election with their niquab-baiting. When even Conrad Black turns against you (even considering how he must feel about the Liberals) you're doing it wrong:

This government has scraped the barrel in symbolic pandering: building new prisons and hiring new hosts of correctional officers as the crime rate declines, dispensing with elemental safeguards to due process in Bill C-51, claiming the right to expel and revoke the citizenship of dual citizens found guilty of terrorist offences, all in the name of enhanced public security, and now conducting the concluding phase of a general election campaign on an issue of no relevance involving a trivial number of people.

And Tabatha Southey's brilliant bear-in-a-bar analogy raises the question we now have to ask about the Harper Cons -- who is next?

Trudeau breaking away in the home stretch

The election campaign is starting around the clubhouse turn, heading for the tape.

Mulcair is getting bogged down by trying to out-Con the Harper Cons -- to the despair of NDP supporters.

And Harper has spent way too much time in his prettified, stage-managed photo ops.  The Harper Cons have drifted into a state of such boring irrelevancy that even the Aussie wunderkind will be unable to get their voters out.

I think it is Justin Trudeau who is beginning to break away. His ideas are the ones that are getting talked about --  Trudeau emerges as leader with new economic vision for Canada - The Globe and Mail -- and his bold infrastructure plan is supported by Canadians.

Here are some Trudeau lines from the debate:

Trudeau to Mulcair "Mr. Mulcair, who's talking about child care, the fact is that a young family with a two-year-old doesn't need child care eight years from now when their kid is in Grade 5. They need it right away, but Mr. Mulcair is not making a choice that's going to allow to invest in his promises. They're puffs of smoke."



Trudeau to Harper on the need for public transit: “What Canadians can’t afford is to continue to be stuck in traffic every morning because there’s no reliable transit because the federal government hasn’t stepped up as a partner. You’ve been stuck in a motorcade for the past 10 years.”

Trudeau on refugees: People cross oceans to come to Canada, only to have Harper take away their health care, Trudeau said, and security concerns should not be an excuse to close Canada's doors.
"Mr. Harper plays (to) fears all the time," Trudeau replied.
"Fears of others, fears of different communities. We have a prime minister who prefers to pander to fears. That's not right, sir."
Trudeau continued the attack while speaking to reporters following the debate, taking issue with Harper who differentiated between "new, existing and old-stock Canadians."
"The fact that he referred to something called old-stock Canadians demonstrates that yet again, he is choosing to divide Canadians against another," Trudeau said. "(He's) undermining new Canadians' legitimacy. For the Liberal party, for me a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian and it will always stay that way."

The Harper Cons set up our refugee system to fail

It's now clear that the Harper Cons set up our refugee system to fail.
They can pretend to have compassion but they don't have to actually admit any of those pesky refugees to Canada. Win-win.
Because three years ago they changed the rules to make it all the refugee's own fault that they can't get in -- now, they can say that the refugees just didn't have their paperwork done right and so what can we do? /shrug/
Compare and contrast: in 1979, the Canadian government bent over backward to fast-track desperate refugees:

Mike Molloy was the Canadian government official who oversaw the airlifting of the Vietnamese boat people and removed bureaucratic obstacles. “The motto out there was not ‘do the thing right,’ it was ‘do the right thing,’” the 71-year-old, who lives in Ottawa, said in an interview.
...“When the government said, ‘Go,’ the civil servants knew we had clear instructions.” Many of the refugees were on remote islands in southeast Asia. Mr. Molloy sent over teams totalling between 20 to 25 people to process the applications. They worked fast and in rough conditions – no bathroom facilities, rats crawling over them as they slept.
“Typically, you had about 12 minutes per case. You had to figure out who they were, and make a guess about whether they were capable of landing on their feet.” A written explanation of why an applicant was expected to succeed in Canada and a description of the family composition constituted the entire visa, he said. “That’s it. There was no intermediary paperwork.” Only medical papers and a security clearance were needed before final acceptance – usually no more than eight weeks after the interview.
“When the sun went down, they would light oil lamps and they would continue until they couldn’t keep their eyes open,” Mr. Molloy said. A small team at the Anambas Islands off the coast of Malaysia interviewed families amounting to 1,200 people in four and a half days, and when they began to pack their bags, they realized thousands of people had gathered. “The refugees stood up and gave them a standing ovation.”
He said another difference from today is that the Canadians tried to keep extended families together. “If there was an old granny, she’s an asset. Brothers and sisters, bring them along. We know from experience that when refugees arrive, if their family is intact, they have a better chance of establishing more efficiently.”
Mr. Molloy said he had “fantastic” assignments in a career that included being ambassador to Jordan, but the highlight was the Vietnamese-refugee project. “We never lose with refugees. Refugees arrive with no place to go but up.”

The Harper Cons don't agree.  The Conservative base don't like all those poor people cluttering up the country. Better we should be admitting more teenagers to work at MacDonalds and protect business from having to raise Canadian wages.
So the Harper Cons deliberately set up our refugee system to fail:

The refugee groups say they have repeatedly called on Immigration Minister Chris Alexander and the government to exempt Syrians from the rule — which says the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) or another country must first designate a person as a refugee before immigration officials will consider letting them be privately sponsored to come to Canada....Then-immigration minister Jason Kenney implemented the new rule in October 2012 as part of a broader Conservative government overhaul of Canada’s refugee system....Briefing notes obtained by the Citizen say the change was intended to protect against fraud, but also to deal with a large backlog of applications from private sponsors while speeding up applications. “It is anticipated that this regulatory change will reduce G5 submissions by 70 per cent,” reads one memo to Kenney.

The goal wasn't to help people, it was just to reduce the number of applications.  The results has been to slow-track our refugee system

The government pledged in 2013 and in January of this year to take in a total of 11,300 Syrian refugees, and Mr. Harper promised during the election campaign to bring in another 10,000 from Syria and Iraq over four years. But just 2,347 have been resettled in the past three years, and the current process has so many bureaucratic stumbling blocks that refugee advocates doubt the target will be reached.

And the Harper Cons can blame the refugees for not completing the paperwork correctly, so its their fault not ours.
I tell you, it used to be a lot easier to be proud of Canada.