This week will be shorter than usual, just because this past weekend was WrestleMania weekend and accordingly I have spent the entire weekend watching pro wrestling. See, WrestleMania weekend isn't just WrestleMania (which ran over seven and a half hours on Sunday, and yes I watched the whole thing): every other wrestling company on the planet comes to wherever WrestleMania is and runs their own card, because wrestling fans love wrestling. So you get a lot of funny and exciting indie-wrestling shows and everything gets streamed. I am still deciding if I preferred the match where an evil baddie wrestled a guy with no legs, or the match with the one-minute time limit, or the "match" that was between The Invisible Man and his enemy, The Invisible Stan. As John Oliver explained: "Wrestling is better than everything you like."

But even so, here is some stuff!

YEAH, TRUMP SHIT

As a rule I generally avoid talking about stupid hateful crap Donald Trump says or does in this newsletter, mostly because you can find people discussing the stupid hateful crap Donald Trump says or does in a billion other places and most of the time there isn't a lot of reason for me to add my own two cents, because at this point either you accept that he is a hateful idiot bigot or you don't and nothing is gonna change your mind about that either way. (I, as you might surmise, am in the camp which looks forward to one day pissing on his grave.) Still, a few things this week stood out as, amazingly, Trump somehow managing to become an even worse President than he already is, and I just want to sort of address them collectively.

First off, Trump's White House is doubling down that the Democratic House of Representatives will "never" see his tax returns. To be clear: the House of Representatives has an absolute right to see the President's tax returns. This is simply not disputable under law, regardless of whether Trump's taxes are being audited, as he claims (SPOILER ALERT: eventually it will be revealed that they were never being audited) or not. Secondly, in the same week that Trump's Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Neilsen resigned - remember, this is the person who put undocumented immigrants and asylum claimants into what can only be honestly described as prison camps and who pursued a policy of separating children from their parents, in many cases permanently, and also some of those children died in custody - Trump gave a speech where he said the United States was "full" and that asylum claimants were "animals" and implied strongly that he wants the US-Mexico border to be militarized. This last bit isn't anything new, of course, but when he's doing it with dehumanizing rhetoric we've hit yet another new low for a President who has no bottom to his barrel.

The point of all of this is, of course, that all of this is the steady onset of authoritarianism in the American body politic. (And elsewhere, of course, but more on that in a bit.) There is a sort of mindset most people adopt in first world countries that when something bad happens Something Will Be Done, and partially this is because most people aren't really in a place to Do Something per se and partially this is because when you're struggling just to get by it's hard to find the time or energy to Do Something anyway. I mean, we live in a representative democracy, right? So our representatives should Do Something. Or the government. Or what have you.

However, there is an unfortunate problem with this mindset, which is mostly: what happens if they don't Do Something? Because that's what is threatening to happen with Trump's taxes, and really that is only the tip of the iceberg because a lot of believers in the unitary executive theory of government (which boils down to, in essence, "if the president does something it can't be a crime because he's the president") have long argued that he can do so much more if he wishes. Now generally this is the point where someone says "well the rational, sensible members of his party will restrain him" and the counterpoint to this argument is that they have not done this, and have not even tried beyond a few meaningless speeches and admonishments here and there. We're talking about someone who has essentially abandoned staffing numerous positions in the American government because hiring people for those jobs would create oversight, which then concentrates further power in the executive. When this is combined with a fairly obvious desire to just start fucking shit up along the Mexican border because he's decided a bunch of families running away from unstable governments in Honduras and El Salvador are in fact serial-killers-in-waiting (and because he's a blatant racist and white nationalist and always has been), I would say "you've got a recipe for disaster" except the disaster has already been happening in slow motion for a long time now. Can you still say "this can get really bad" when multiple children have died in American custody as a result of neglect?

This isn't just an American problem, either. The same strain of enemy-seeking, top-down-controlling authoritarian conservatism is all over the world right now, and I don't want to get into a long discussion of the societal failures which have led to this point because the failures of capitalism and its conflicts with democratic ideals are too hefty a topic for when I have just spent seven hours watching professional wrestling. But it is everywhere. And yes, that certainly includes here.

THE SNC-LAVALIN SCANDAL JUST DOESN'T GO AWAY

As I wrote earlier this week, the SNC-Lavalin scandal itself is really small-ball rinky-dink shit as scandals go, which is to say it is like most Canadian scandals. If you have ever studied governmental corruption in other countries, you really get a sense of how minor and wimpy most Canadian political scandals are: we will get enraged and demand inquiries when a government contractor who is friends with someone who decides on government contracts gets a juicy contract despite charging five percent more than another bidder, and I say this meaning it as a compliment towards our national lack of tolerance for such shenanigans when we deign to notice them. (Most of the time we do not, but when we do, look out.)

Still, national outrage or not, it is remarkable to see how badly the Liberals are flubbing this. Firstly, after a week or two of back-and-forth will-they-won't-they about whether they would fire Jodi Wilson-Reybould (for slights and offenses) and Jane Philpott (for... criticizing the party leader), which was a stupid discussion to have in the first place and then they did it anyway, ensuring that the two former Liberals would get media attention for months. And then the party threatened to sue Andrew Scheer for libel, claiming that he was knowingly mischaracterizing the nature of the issue, which is deeply moronic because A) it makes the Liberals look like a bunch of whiners who can't take criticism and B) these lawsuits never happen because they're quite hard to win (proving malice is tough) and because the suing party inevitably doesn't want to be put under oath to face questioning. Finally, they ended the week cheering a column from noteworthy convicted felon and former Canadian citizen Conrad Black, the substance of which was "look, sometimes in business you just gotta bribe a guy." This is honestly sort of pathetic, and it exists in large part because Canadian political culture (and, let's be honest, our culture generally) is so spineless in its desperation to provide the illusion of politeness that it cannot abide intraparty criticism, which happens all the time in just about every other democracy there is.

(Andrew Scheer is, honestly, a moderately dull man who only became leader of his party because practically every heavy hitter in the party ranks decided that Justin Trudeau was a lock to win re-election two years ago, and he has been elevated to potential Prime Ministership due almost solely to an endless conga line of Liberal political flubs over a scandal that barely rates as a scandal in the first place and which could have been dismissed solely by a little arrogance about how It Was Necessary, Dammit, To Protect The Country's Economy or something along those lines.)

If nothing else, this whole clusterfuck has reminded us that the Liberal Party is really two parties glommed together into one: a center-left progressive wing that gets most of the votes and the Laurentian party elites who have most of the money and actually get most of the policy they want - and as income inequality grows the strain between those two factions is getting more and more pronounced, and their endless determination that they are Canada's Natural Governing Party feels less and less relevant.

ANOTHER BRIEF NOTE INVOLVING JUSTIN TRUDEAU

Justin Trudeau also dropped into Toronto this week to announced $1.3 billion over ten years towards the repair budget for Toronto Community Housing, which sounds like an awful lot until you realize that TCH's repair backlog is currently over $2 billion and ten years from now, prior to the announcement, was projected to rise over $3 billion - so in ten years we'll still be $1.7 billion in the hole. This is, more or less, how Toronto traditionally gets federal and provincial money: the Prime Minister and/or Premier shows up, offers Not Nearly Enough Money, and then whichever dullard we elected Mayor thanks them and spends the rest of their term explaining why they can't raise property taxes on rich homeowners to pay for services for poor people, especially since the feds or the province gave us all that money, which was entirely because of the dullard's expert lobbying skills, and things get steadily worse in the meantime and then they start begging for more of Not Enough Money from the higher-ups again.

It's a very, very old song and dance by now. Partially I get pissed at the province and the federal government, who always seem inclined to treat Toronto like an annoying orphan begging for scraps rather than the economic engine that keeps both the province and the country fiscally stable, and partially I get pissed at our municipal government, who gives them a neverending excuse to not give us the money we need because they're never willing to try to raise it themselves. (Insert Kent Brockman screaming "THIS IS WHY DEMOCRACY DOESN'T WORK, PEOPLE!" dot gif here, I guess. Alternately, the time he hailed our new ant overlords.)

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched or rewatched this week:

Dumbo (2019, Tim Burton, theatre) - 1.5/5

Vice (2018, Adam McKay, Google Play rental) - 2.5/5

As to all that pro wrestling I watched? WrestleMania itself was passable, maybe slightly above average as WrestleManias go - a lot of perfectly okay stuff that didn't justify seven hours, but Kofi Kingston and Becky Lynch's victories were meaningful and wonderful, and pro wrestling survives on the good moments rather than the bad. However, NXT Takeover: New York on Friday was legitimately top-to-bottom one of the best and most exciting wrestling shows I have ever seen in my entire life, and Joey Janela's Spring Break 3 was one of the insane-est shows I have ever seen. I have not yet watched Kaiju Big Battel's weekend event - they are a promotion where everybody dresses up in elaborate monster costumes to wrestle and where the biggest hero is called Burger Bear, since he is a bear who is dressed up as a hamburger, so I am looking forward to watching it sometime this week.

See you in seven.