THE WEEK IN DOUG

If you’re living in a first-world nation, until recently you’ve probably been pretty used to a relative level of governmental competence. A lot of you might shake your head at this, but it’s mostly true: you probably live in a country that has a large, modern bureaucracy that, while at times inefficient and slow to adapt to change, nonetheless has an enormous amount of institutional knowledge of which you can’t begin to fathom the depths, and all the wait time you spend at your local whatever-you-call-the-place-you-renew-your-driver’s-license doesn’t begin to compare to having a government that will generally know what to do when, say, a flood knocks out half of the power grid, or it turns out that all of the lettuce now kills people.

What Donald Trump and his administration brought to the table, in 2017, was the ongoing experience of living in a first-world nation with governmental incompetence, mostly because the operating philosophy that drives a lot of conservative policy thought now is simply hostility (and usually self-motivated hostility) to the concept of governance at all. To veteran political observers, Trump’s massive failures on all levels were shocking, mostly because the entire system in which he operates is designed to not let idiot leaders fail. (Meanwhile, a lot of regular folks who might not like Trump are probably thinking “well, the economy seems to be doing well enough right now.” The response to this is always “wait eighteen months, and you’ll find out then how well he’s doing right now.” And indeed, recent economic indicators in the USA are… concerning.)

You have to be actively stupid and malevolent and lazy to fail as comprehensively as Donald Trump has failed to govern the United States in any reasonable manner: you need to be not only indifferent but outright hostile to the bureaucracy which knows how to do everything you need to do your job. And I say this because in the past week, Doug Ford and his government:

1. saw the province’s debt rating downgraded by Moody’s, the independent credit ratings agency, and the reason given by Moody’s was expressly that they did not believe the Doug Ford Tories were willing or able to raise governmental revenues enough to prevent downgrading their debt. Now, granted, debt ratings are kind of an iffy thing sometimes and the overall impact on Ontarians in the everyday will probably be slight for a while yet, but the one thing it will likely do is make Ontario’s future debt slightly more expensive (IE: more interest), especially if other independent credit agencies like Standard and Poor’s follow suit.

2. were revealed to have looked at multiple senior roles in the new government for Ron Taverner, the former Toronto superintendent and Ford family friend who was totally unqualified for pretty much every job they considered giving him, which of course raises the question of why they’re so desperate to give this man a job. Taverner has since requested that his appointment as OPP Commissioner be postponed pending a review by the province’s Integrity Commissioner, following an open letter by the interim OPP Commissioner Brad Blair which requested a review from the Office of the Provincial Ombudsman of the entire process (which might appear innocent to some, but is in fact all but a declaration of war, politically speaking).

3. announced that they will only manage to open twenty-five cannabis stores by April 1, claiming that there were supply shortages. (The Liberals were on track to have opened forty stores by this point, but Team Doug has decided to revamp the Ontario cannabis market from top to bottom and thus far it appears they are doing the exact opposite of a bang-up job.)

4. cut funding for early education programs and Indigenous student programs - many of which have as their primary goal “make sure poor children are fed breakfast,” which seems like something you don’t want to cut spending on because the knock-on costs of not feeding poor kids breakfast are way, way more expensive than simply giving them a hot meal to start off the day, but it wouldn’t be the Tories if they didn’t feel obligated to punish poor children for being the children of poor parents.

5. cut funding for the Ontario College of Midwives retroactively, which will make a lot of student midwives a lot poorer because there’s a difference between cutting future funding and cutting funding which was already promised.

6. broke an election promise when they stated they were abandoning binding arbitration with the Ontario Medical Association and then, when doctors across the provinces got really angry about that, stated that, okay, they would still do binding arbitration with the OMA after all. (The Ford argument against arbitration was that the OMA is ineffective because members voted down the last agreement they negotiated with Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals in 2016. The problem they have is that the OMA members voted down the last agreement because the rebel faction of medical specialists who think they don’t get paid enough money - and who swung heavily for Ford in this past year’s election - are expecting to be rewarded, and Doug Ford needs to find money to cut from the budget.)

7. sent out an email to 8,000 management-level public service employees suggesting that they might want to take a buyout on their contracts that would amount to early retirement, which is tantamount to begging the public service to just quit so they don’t have to fire people. (Spoiler alert: very few people will take the buyout, and then Doug Ford will either panic and just run huge deficits or get angry and start firing people, which would cause the hugest labour dispute in Ontario history. My betting money would be on the latter proposition, because Doug is a very stupid man.)

Again: this was one week. Any of these stories would dominate the news cycle if we had a non-incompetent government, but in Doug Ford’s Ontario they all just sort of crowd each other out.

THE HUAWEI MESS GETS MESSIER

So China has, in the past week, detained two Canadians on “national security” concerns which are pretty obviously bullshit, and it’s obviously a response to Canada’s arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive the USA wants to put on trial for violating American sanctions against Iran.

The problem, right now, is… wait for it… Donald Trump. Because the fucking dumbass straight-up tweeted that maybe the USA would release Wanzhou if China made appropriate trade concessions. Regardless of whether the American case against Wanzhou was genuine or not, it’s potentially ruined now, because Trump just suggested that her arrest was politically motivated rather than, you know, actually having to do with actual crimes.

(Aside: the case against Wanzhou probably was genuine; at a minimum, there are too many independent actors in the Canadian justice system for any central interference from the federal government to be both effective and invisible, which is what would be needed. The worst case scenario would probably be the Americans forging evidence to make their case, which is possible but again, not particularly likely - it would take an awful lot of forgery. The benefits are outweighed by the risks, essentially.)

The moral here is that there is really no benefit to working with the USA on anything while Trump is in charge, because he’s too stupid, self-centered and bullying to be reliable in any way that matters.

THAT WHOLE SRI LANKAN GOVERNMENT CRISIS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT, IN BRIEF

So Sri Lanka has had, over the past two months, an actual constititional crisis, and I only found out about it yesterday! I feel embarrassed, but slightly less so because I am willing to bet that, at minimum, 95% of you reading this had no idea about it either.

So here is the thing: Sri Lanka has a sort of weird combination of a Presidential system and a Westminster-style parliamentary system, in that the country elects a President who is the most powerful office in the land, but all of the heads of the ministries which form the executive are members of Parliament (as opposed to a traditional Presidential system, where the executive ministries/departments aren’t members of Parliament but rather separate, non-legislative jobs). It also has a Prime Minister, who although appointed by the President is usually the leader of whichever party in Parliament is the most powerful, and whose job - apart from leading his party - is essentially to be a sort of unofficial vice president who determines how big the cabinet should be (literally, “how many ministries should there be”).

Anyway, back in 2015 Maithripala Sirisena was elected President after running on an anti-corruption platform against the former President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, despite the fact that they’re both part of the same political party (the Sri Lanka Freedom Party - “sorta progressive/left”). Sirisena then appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe, the leader of the United National Party (“liberal conservative” - pro-capitalist but not anti-government, your classic big government Tories, basically) to be Prime Minister in a sort of unified-government stance.

(NOTE: Sometimes people get a little boggled by Indian and Tamil names, but they are honestly pretty simple. They’re just long, that’s all - the syllabic bits are all pretty straightforward, and so long as you remember that a J in the middle of a word sometimes sounds like “szh” you’ll be able to sound out the entire thing and you’ll get it about 90% right. “Ranil Wick-rem-eh-sing-heh.” It’s not that tough!)

Except Sirisena and Wickremesinghe didn’t get along at all (and Sirisena sort of gave up on his anti-corruption pledge) and so, back in October, Sirisena fired Wickremesinghe and replaced him with Rajapaksa - the guy Sirisena replaced! (Although Rajapaksa now has his own political party, the Sri Lanka People’s Front, which is exactly the nationalist government it sounds like - which in Sri Lanka means it’s a party mostly favouring the Sinhalese majority. Rajapaksa does… not have a great history when it comes to the Tamil and Muslim minority communities in Sri Lanka.) But Wickremesinghe refused to budge, saying that Sirisena didn’t have the power to fire the Prime Minister - and Rajapaksa clearly could not command the loyalty of Parliament - so this week Rajapaksa resigned and Sirisena put Wickremesinghe back in the PM’s seat.

Basically, the President decided to play chicken for two months with the Prime Minister and lost badly, which is probably for the best for the time being because the UNP is probably the most stable governance option in the country right now. But man. Stories like this remind me that the fucked-up-ness of politics is truly global.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week, in brief:

Pitch Perfect (2012, Jason Moore, Amazon Prime) - 3/5

The Christmas Chronicles (2018, Clay Kaytis, Netflix) - 2.5/5

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (2018, Persichetti/Ramsey/Rothman, theatre) - 4.5/5

Paddington 2 (2018, Paul King, Amazon Prime) - 4.5/5

Details at my Letterboxd, as per usual.

We’ve also been watching The Final Table on Netflix, which has all of the excitement that good cooking competition shows have with very little of the drama that bad ones have, and which is shot just impeccably. If you like watching people freak out over a particularly flavoured foam or complain that a sauce is too spicy and/or not spicy enough, this is a good show for you!

I’m not sure if I’ll be doing a newsletter next week, since it’s Christmas vacation for us, which is also partly why this week’s is a little shorter than usual. (I might still do one next week. It depends on how quickly I get my baking done.) But regardless, there will definitely be a newsletter week after next. Catch you on the flipside, and so forth.