Item: To become the mayor of the most conservative big city in Canada, you pretty much have to be a liberal.
Calgary voted for a new mayor in 2021, and even though circumstances seemed to be decidedly favorable to a conservative candidate – economic hardship in the oil industry, sky-high vacancy rates in downtown offices, ever-increasing property taxes – the winner was Jyoti Gondek, who while describing herself as a centrist, in reality has views that are decidedly liberal. This makes it five straight mayors that have at least leaned left, going all the way back to Ralph Klein’s first win in 1980 (people here seem to have forgotten that Klein used to be a member of the Liberal Party early in his political career).
At first glance, this seems very weird. Calgary is a conservative city, and one need only look to election results at the federal and provincial level to see this. For example, in the 2021 federal election, held just a few weeks earlier than the municipal election, the three conservative parties (Conservative, People’s and Maverick) got roughly 56 percent of the votes.
While some argue that Calgary really isn’t that conservative other than on energy policy, I think it’s simply turnout that best explains the mayoral results. Municipal elections get lower turnout than provincial and federal elections. Conservative-leaning voters are far more likely to vote their own pocketbooks, and local elections will have relatively little effect on that. Liberal-leaning voters are often concerned with specific local issues – mass transit, housing affordability, funding for the arts, etc. - and therefore are probably more likely to vote in municipal elections.
Item: While the Left and Right bicker over cancel culture, real free speech is under attack.
What do I mean by real free speech? I mean actual political speech, in the form of political protests and the right of the media to cover events that might cause politicians embarrassment. What I don’t mean is using the right to free speech to protect Twitter trolls, Facebook disinformation, pornographers, racists and all the other trash that both the far-right and far-left seem to think merit protections that don’t actually exist. To reiterate, free speech simply means that the government can’t arrest you for saying things; it does not mean that you are entitled to a platform and an audience. If people don’t want your garbage in their lives, they can take steps to remove it. Welcome to capitalism and free markets, where people get to make choices and are allowed to refuse to support things they find objectionable.
After BC Premier John Horgan blatantly broke a campaign promise to prevent the logging of old growth forests, protesters gathered at the Fairy Creek logging site and began a campaign of civil disobedience to stop the logging. Their activities were frequently illegal - that’s the definition of civil disobedience. The greater issue was how the RCMP dealt with this disobedience. There were reports of excessive force being used but no one can say with full certainty what did or didn’t happen, because the RCMP blocked the media from accessing the site and reporting on the events taking place. This is a clear and disturbing violation of charter rights. Horgan took the weasel way out and denied all accountability, pointing out that the RCMP is a federal agency. Trudeau, as is often his way, spouted out some platitudes but did nothing of substance. In July, the BC Supreme Court found that the RCMP’s treatment of the media was illegal, but the wording of the ruling was ambiguous enough that not much changed on site. Whatever your views on logging or civil disobedience, it’s elemental that the media be allowed to cover the events. If you don’t understand this, please consider a move to sunny North Korea.
In Alberta, the Kenney government passed the stupidly named Critical Infrastructure Defense Act. The stated goal of the act is to put stiff penalties in place for people engaged in active civil disobedience - for example, blocking pipeline construction by chaining yourself to the equipment. But the wording is such that ‘critical infrastructure’ can be any sidewalk or street that ordinary protesters would gather on. Basically, it seems like it’s meant to deter all protests, not just those that cross over into civil disobedience. Several states in the US also passed anti-protest laws, with some even absolving drivers who hit protesters with their vehicles.
The right to demonstrate should be sacrosanct. As the divisions in our society become more pronounced, issues become more contentious, and one person’s riot is another’s march for justice. We saw these duelling narratives with both the George Floyd demonstrations and the events at the Capitol. Instead of blathering about which buffoon was banned from Twitter today, we should focus on how to balance public safety with a free media and the right to demonstrate. It’s clear to me that some governments have gone way too far with these restrictions.
Item: The residential school atrocity was far worse than we thought.
In May, the news broke that over 200 bodies of indigenous children had been found on the grounds of the former residential school in Kamloops, BC. Over the rest of the summer, more than 1800 unmarked graves were found at former school sites. I think many Canadians were in a state of denial and/or ignorance regarding the full story of what happened at the schools (I will freely admit to the latter) but such blithe indifference is no longer possible after these discoveries.
Every Canadian should be horrified and ashamed of what happened. While political rhetoric often gets amped up to the point of absurdity these days, calling the schools an attempt at cultural genocide is completely accurate. Fortunately the attempt failed, but the cost of this disgraceful episode is incalculable. The schools caused generations of Indigenous people to be traumatized, and that trauma is still with us today because trauma gets inadvertently passed on to succeeding generations by its resultant dysfunctions – addiction, abuse, poverty, etc. The social ills suffered by the Indigenous are well documented but never seem to get solved, fuelling further racism and marginalization.
In the past, the Left’s answer was to talk a lot and occasionally throw more money at problems, while the Right’s solution was to either ignore them or worse, use the Indigenous as a scapegoat to further divide us. The revelations of this past summer are an opportunity to shed past failures. Yet, all we’ve seen is a lot of virtue signalling and flowery speeches, exemplified by Trudeau, who said all the right things but then unconscionably decided that Truth and Reconciliation Day was the perfect time to take a vacation. Indigenous self-government and special status in a society that is based on individual rights is always going to be a thorny issue because it fosters resentment and creates a backlash in the non-Indigenous population. I don’t know how to fully solve this problem, but hopefully the realization of just how badly Indigenous peoples have been wronged lessens this unthinking resentment and helps us proceed to better outcomes.
Item: We should all be worried about the future of democracy in the U.S.
The aftermath of 2020 US election and Trump’s attempt to overturn its results culminated in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. While the idiocy and insanity displayed by the would-be insurrectionists might make you feel that there is nothing much to worry about, I think that’s a mistaken notion. Events since 1/6 have shown that the Republican Party is irremediably morally bankrupt, with no principles whatsoever. Their only value is gaining political power and they no longer care about democracy.
Trump and other Republicans continue to spread the lie that the election was rigged. Despite not having so much as one single fibre of evidence, and despite every single court ruling (some 50 in all) dismissing his claims, two-thirds of Republicans believe Trump’s lies about the election. The GOP have used these fake claims to make real changes. Numerous states have moved to restrict voting rights, often imposing rules that are thinly disguised impediments to minorities being able to cast their ballots. Several key states have removed independent election officials and replaced them with GOP hacks. Laws are being drafted to allow legislatures to override their states election results. Republicans have even embraced all sorts of pathetic lies about what happened on 1/6. In short, the GOP is undermining faith in the electoral process while at the same time preventing people from voting and putting in place methods for election results to be circumvented. This is nothing less than a wholesale attack on democracy.
I’ve always maintained that trying to predict the future is stupid, but if Trump runs again in 2024, it’s easy to imagine a pretty awful scenario. With mistrust now rife on both the Left and Right, the potential for chaos and even violence become more realistic possibilities. If Trump loses again, the GOP might be able to successfully set aside the results; or if he wins, the Left might consider the result invalid because they believe all the restrictions prevented many Democrats from voting. Either of these would be catastrophic, and having the world’s oldest running democracy come apart at the seams in this fashion would be great encouragement for authoritarians the world over – monkey see, monkey do.
On that cheery note, let’s hope 2022 is a much better year for us all.
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