Erin, We Hardly Knew Ye

 

Erin O’Toole is out as Conservative leader. Watching the CBC speaking about the event, one would think the Conservatives were in disarray, in danger of splitting, losing their direction and losing the voters. 

I don’t buy that spin. It is just media partisanship. I think this vote was how parliamentary democracy is supposed to work. Kudos to Michael Chen, who designed this system and got it passed into law. Kudos to the Conservatives, who have now proven themselves Canada’s most responsive and democratic party.

The general public do not elect the Prime Minister. We vote for our local member. The Prime Minister is then whoever has the support of most of these members. Democracy demands that the Prime Minister serves at the pleasure of his members; not vice versa.

This system has been perverted in Canada by the legal requirement, introduced by the Liberals, that the party leader sign the nomination papers for local candidates. This gave the leader power to choose his own electorate, reversing the equation, and to punish or cashier anyone who did not do as he willed. The result has been an elected dictatorship. Debates and votes in parliament have become irrelevant to the nation’s business. Question period has become no more than rhetoric, a battle for the best sound bites.

Chen’s reform bill restored that balance. The Conservative Party embraced it, and deserves credit. O’Toole got voted out in part at least because he was being authoritarian with his own caucus.

Chen’s reform/restoration gives the Canadian or British system a significant advantage over the American system. A failing or disastrous or corrupt leader can be removed within days, if not hours, without tying up t6he nation’s business, without bitter recriminations, without requiring any particular reason or finding of fault. As Theresa May was; as Neville Chamberlain was. O’Toole was able to leave with dignity. The US, currently saddled with a declining Joe Biden in the midst of crisis, should envy us.

Nor is the Conservative Party divided by this. To the contrary, the vote was quick and decisive, so that it should be easy to come together now under a new leader. Had they been obliged to continue under O’Toole, divisions might have festered.

Canadian Election Prediction

 

As a fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic gained steam, on the day that Kabul fell, with two years left on their mandate, the Liberal government of Canada thought it was a good idea to call an election.

I cannot understand why the polls looked promising. This is a government that has careened from scandal to scandal, failure to failure. Their foreign policy has been disastrous; their spending has been profligate, even before the pandemic. The Governor-General who formally called the election was a recent replacement for a bad appointment. 

They expected to be rewarded for their management of the pandemic. But their management of the pandemic has actually been awful. They bungled the acquisition of vaccines. Canada has done well against the virus, but this is not their doing. The distribution of vaccines has been remarkably efficient: a provincial responsibility. The uptake has been fast: a credit to the Canadian public. In general, the feds have just imitated whatever the US government did in the crisis, meaning they have been spending recklessly. We will probably have an eviction and foreclosure crisis, and inflation to reckon with for some time to come. 

Perhaps the people have been paying attention. Contrary to everyone’s expectations, a week into the new campaign, the Conservatives are suddenly tied with the Libs in the polls.

The voters seem to be in the mood to punish the government for the unnecessary and cynical election. Against the backdrop of Afghanistan, there seem to be more important issues the government should be dealing with. 

Erin O’Toole and the Conservative campaign also seem to be performing so far above expectations. O’Toole has done an impressive job of improving his French. The Tory platform has come up with some novel ideas that sound forward-looking. People may want a clean broom and a fresh start after the dark days of the pandemic, just to emphasize the feeling that they are behind us. O’Toole seems to be projecting those vibes.

I dislike O’Toole’s lack of principles, running for the Conservative leadership as a “true blue” Tory, then swerving left. Having unprincipled leaders is never a good idea. But it might be good politics. It has often been said that the Liberals lose if they run to the right of the Tories. That equally means the Tories win if they run to the left of the Liberals. O’Toole seems to be trying to do this. 

Over the longer term, this is likely to shatter the right into warring factions. But over the shorter term, it might win O’Toole a term in government. Luckily for him, the further right is fatally splintered: there is the PPC, the Maverick Party, and now the True North Party. Bernier will not qualify for the leadership debates, so there will be no voice there to O’Toole’s right. 

In the meantime, running to the left as a Tory encourages the left to fragment. If the Conservatives look scary to the left, they unite behind the Liberals to keep the evil Tories out. If they look friendly, the NDP vote swells, at Liberal expense. 

The NDP’s Jagmeet Singh is personally rather popular. Yves-Francois Blanchet, leading the Bloc Quebecois, is also popular. The BQ pulls votes in Quebec mostly from the Liberals.

For now, the Conservatives have the momentum. Momentum feeds on itself. It can shift, but the Liberals, cynically, chose the shortest possible campaign, in hopes of freezing in their advantage. Now it tends to freeze in the Tory momentum.

Biden’s collapsing popularity in the US also hurts the Liberals. Nobody wants to admit it, but Canadian politics is largely monkey see, monkey do. Canadian leaders tend to be chosen in imitation of a recent popular American leader. Trudeau came in as a Canadian Obama; his father rose as a Canadian JFK. O’Toole was selected by his party because he looked faintly like Trump. Justin Trudeau got a second wind when Biden beat Trump. Now that Trump is looking better and Biden worse, the Canadian kid brother factor tilts in O’Toole’s favour.

I predict the Conservatives will get the most seats.

Gunter: O'Toole Is a Dud

 

I'm getting the same feeling.

A Blood Libel and a Public Lynching

 

The freshly-minted leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Erin O’Toole, is suddenly in serious trouble. People are calling for his resignation. Unfortunately, he came dangerously close to semi-publicly telling the truth about Indian residential schools.

Of course, once found out, he quickly walked it back and denied everything. But in such cases, repentance is not enough. There can be no forgiveness or reconciliation. Ever. 

The now-exposed racist actually said that the schools were intended to educate the Indians.

Imagine that—schools intended to educate. Who could have imagined such a lie?

No, in Canada, on pain of losing your job or even imprisonment, one must believe an elaborate conspiracy theory: that the Indian schools were actually always and solely, if secretly, intended for genocide—the term used repeatedly and insistently by one panelist in reaction to O’Toole’s blasphemy.

An odd sort of genocide, of course, considering that there are far more Indians in Canada now than there have ever been. They are the fastest-growing segment of the Canadian population.

And the founding document O’Toole was referring to, written by Egerton Ryerson, explicitly states that the students in the proposed residential schools were to be taught reading, arithmetic, geometry, history, chemistry, writing, drawing, music, bookkeeping, religion, and morals. That does sound rather like an education.

The “genocide” is supposedly “cultural genocide.” Nobody dies in this sort of genocide; a seeming contradiction in terms. That is, the schools were supposedly an effort to destroy Indian culture. To support this claim, the old quote was wheeled out by a panelist, that they were intended by “some politician” to “kill the Indian in the man.” 

No Canadian politician ever said anything close to this. It is a misquotation instead of US General Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. What he actually said was “kill the Indian; save the man.” And in the speech where he said this, he pointed out that residential schools would not do this.

If the intent were ever to destroy Indian culture, fairly obviously, it would not have been the Indian bands themselves who demanded and partly funded them. The obvious way to do that, as Pratt pointed out, would not have been to set up separate schools for Indians; it would have been to integrate the Indians and have them attend the public schools. Rather, the residential schools were an attempt to retain a distinct Indian culture. It was taken for granted from the start that, having graduated, the students would remain on the reserves and live apart. That may have been a mistake; but it was the opposite to the common claim.

Modern radical leftists may be upset that the schools taught religion and morals. They may assert that this at least was an attempt to subvert Indian culture. Apparently they think Indian culture had no morals, and morals are a bad thing. This is both depraved and historically ignorant. Ryerson, in the founding document, specified that pupils attend the church of their own denomination, not that of the official denomination of each residential school. He could take it for granted, rightly, that Indians were Christian. Indeed, when the British took possession of Canada after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, their first act in order to ensure peace with the Indians was to formally guarantee them the right to keep their Catholic priests. The first Protestant church in Ontario, in turn, was probably that built in Brantford by Mohawks emigrating from New York State. Without benefit, at the time, of clergy.

The current delusional attitude towards our history is profoundly prejudicial to Indians, and, at the same time, an extreme example of hate speech against Canadians of European extraction.

And the CBC, taxpayer-funded to provide information and sustain public discourse, is instead openly censoring and suppressing public discourse.