SO, YEAH, GENERAL MOTORS

In case you have spent the last week living under a rock, General Motors closed five plants in North America - including their biggest Canadian plant in Oshawa - and all hell broke loose because it’s another kick to the teeth of North American manufacturing. Canadian Conservatives immediately started blaming the carbon tax, which made them look stupid because the United States doesn’t have any carbon taxes in the jurisdictions where GM is closing the other plants. Plus, somebody did the math and figured out the price per car of the carbon tax came to under $100 per car, which is… not a lot. Plus GM claims they’re restructuring their entire manufacturing model to start concentrating on hybrids, electric vehicles and self-driving cars, so Doug Ford killing Ontario’s cap and trade system which included tax incentives precisely to encourage this sort of manufacturing - look, I’m not saying keeping it around would have changed GM’s mind, probably it wouldn’t have done, but… killing it didn’t help.

Everybody spent the week asking “how did this happen, what happens next” and since you aren’t reading a newsletter by a lifetime manufacturing industry analyst but instead the guy who reads that guy occasionally, I will try to answer that question as follows: “nobody is sure, but assume, as a rule, things will get worse for autoworkers.”

Oshawa losing 2,500 jobs - jobs which were a pathway to middle-class-dom for generations of Ontarians for decades - is awful. But it is not exactly unprecedented, because prior to about 2010 Ontario had been losing auto jobs by the bucket for almost two decades. Starting in the mid-90s and continuing through 2010 (when we did our best to stabilize the auto industry by offering bailouts), Ontario lost about 500,000 auto jobs, which is particularly insane when you think how the province had 1.5 million less people in it than it does now by the end of that slide. The reason we lost those jobs isn’t any great secret: it’s the one-two punch of offshoring auto jobs to other countries where they can pay autoworkers much, much less money, and automation making it still profitable for automakers to continue building cars in Ontario - but employing far fewer people while they do so. All that really happened is that Ontario got hit with the hammer of job loss about fifteen years after the great American automaking centres did, for the same reasons, and the only reason for the comparative delay was our lower dollar making auto exports more competitive in the American market.

This latest round of plant closings is specific. GM is only closing one of its two auto plants in Ontario because their series of plant closings reflects that they’re shutting down production on most of their sedans and lighter cars - which is what pretty much all of the American Big Three automakers are doing as well, because the Big Three are all kind of shit at building smaller and mid-sized cars as compared to the European, Japanese and Korean automakers who rule that particular roost. (If you want a mid-sized sedan, are you going with a Chevy Impala or are you buying a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry? And of course you can mostly buy the non-American cars as hybrids.) The Big Three have all made clear that, for the foreseeable future, they’re going to concentrate on crossovers, SUVs and trucks, which is what they’re better at making and what are what sell best for them (particularly in the USA, where people fucking love trucks). On top of that, closing down Ontario and midwestern USA plants lets them continue the practice of refocusing their supply chain in the American southwest and in Mexico, which offers better value to them. Any other factors - like the tariffs on foreign steel Donald Trump established, which made their sedans even less profitable than they already were - only exacerbated what was purely a series of cold business decisions that they were going to end making eventually.

Are there going to be more plant closings? In the short term… maybe. Most of the remaining Big Three plants in Ontario manufacture crossovers, SUVs and trucks, with one exception: the Chrysler plant in Brampton, which builds the Chrysler 300, the Dodge Charger and the Dodge Challenger - which are, respectively, a mediocre-selling niche large car, a decent-selling niche large car and an even niche-ier muscle car. Given that product range, and given that former Chrysler president Tom Lasorda went on CTV to complain that the government wasn’t doing enough to support automakers, I’d say it’s fair to at least be worried about the Brampton plant (even though the union agreed to a shutdown earlier this year in order to let Chrysler retool the plant) and its 3800 jobs.

But medium to long term? Nothing about this looks good for Canadian workers. Even if America lifts the steel tariffs in future (which is likely), offshoring and automation aren’t going away as omnipresent forces working against manufacturing in Canada, or indeed anywhere else in the first world. Even Germany, which for decades has been the ur-example of “how to make manufacturing work in the first world” because they produced quality work and transitioned to automation while not harming workers, is now slowly losing manufacturing jobs. I’ve written before about how the goal for Ontario’s future as a manufacturing jurisdiction has to be “become Germany,” but even that apparently isn’t enough.

Gloomy, eh?

SO VICE WAS IN COURT (ELLEN PAGE WAS NOT INVOLVED)

Fans of Gaycation, Ellen Page’s delightful Vice-produced series, do not yet have to worry. But this week’s decision in R. v. Vice Media is unfortunately probably not news, because it mostly just reinforces the status quo in Canada with respect to press freedoms when the cops come calling. (A lot of journalists and onlookers called it a “disturbing precedent” but it isn’t a precedent, really, just an elaboration on a previous bad ruling.)

What happened is this: Vice published some articles about a dickhead named Farah Mohamed Shirdon, a Canadian national who left Canada to join ISIS (and who is probably dead at this point, not that it matters that much). Part of the research for the article involved the journalist exchanging text messages with Shirdon. The RCMP obtained a production order to force Vice to turn over the text messages and related material because they wanted to investigate Shirdon’s personal networks and/or Shirdon himself if he was still alive. Vice refused on the grounds of journalistic freedom, because “you don’t burn a source” is essentially rule #2 of journalism after “verify everything within reason” and the legal battle was on. The Supreme Court - because that’s where this eventually ended up - ruled against Vice.

They did so because there’s an existing legal test as to what to do in situations such as these, which was outlined in a 1991 Supreme Court case called CBC v. Lessard. (Yes, we’ve had a standard allowing law enforcement to essentially violate journalistic freedoms for nearly three decades in this country. Things you didn’t know.) The test is a nine-factor test which is, legally speaking, sort of clunky, so the Supreme Court modified and simplified it in this case. The new test is now a four-parter: (1) whether the cops should have granted notice to the media party if they didn’t do so (which, with respect to search warrants, they usually do not); (2) statutory preconditions for getting a warrant must be met; (3) the judge has to balance state interests in the information sought versus the media’s right to privacy in gathering news, and (4) whether conditions should be in place on the warrant to protect the media’s ability to report news.

All of this sounds great in theory, especially the third factor of the test, but in practice judges tend to agree with law enforcement on search issues most of the time, which should not be the most shocking revelation in the world because they’re all part of the same justice system. Plus, Canada is already a country where the media is mostly pretty cowed most of the time because rich public figures will threaten libel suits at the drop of a hat, and even if they don’t win they can cash-harass media outlets into the ground - so in practice, this is an affirmation by the Court of the status quo, and the status quo was weak sauce. Vice isn’t wrong when they call this “a dark day for press freedom” but, honestly, the decision doesn’t make a bad decision worse; it was just an opportunity to properly limit law enforcement’s rights to impede journalistic freedoms, and it wasn’t taken (or even slightly considered, given that the SCC’s decision was unanimous).

THE TORIES INTRODUCE THEIR GREEN POLICY (KINDA SORTA)

Rod Philips, an expensive suit worn over a collection of condescending gestures, introduced the Ontario Tories’ environmental action plan this week, which is important especially because it serves as a sneak preview of what Tories across the country and federally consider appropriate climate action. Here is the problem: it is bad comedy.

Team Doug Ford has undertaken to do less carbon emissions reduction than the Tories do by spending less money and regulating less. They can produce a 54-page-document that attempts to say as much as possible while in fact promising as little as humanly possible - it’s your classic “how many times can we fit the word ‘very’ into this ninth-grade Tale of Two Cities essay” syndrome.

They promise a “carbon trust,” which should ostensibly direct public money towards priate investments which will reduce carbon emissions, as compared to the Liberals, who wanted to fine businesses that didn’t just do it themselves, but Tories rewarding their business constituencies is nothing new in Canadian politics. (In fairness, the Liberals have exactly the same problem, but the core difference here is that the Liberals, as a party, sort of care about climate change and the Tories obviously do not.) They want to copy an Australian policy where bidders attempt to obtain government funding to pay for carbon reduction projects, which hasn’t really worked in Australia because the only things that this policy can really help drive are carbon-capture projects, which need to be massive and wide-ranging in order to have any noteworthy impact on atmospheric carbon. (The Tories have proposed spending $50 million on it, which is a drop in the bucket.) And their excuse for all of this, essentially, is that Ontario has done a lot to cut down carbon emissions already, so how much more do we have to do, really?

They justify doing this by saying that Ontario is “only” responsible for 0.4% of carbon emissions worldwide, which doesn’t seem like a high number until you remember that Ontario doesn’t have 0.45 of the world’s population. (We actually have about .002% of global population living here, so really, each Ontarian on average emits about 200 people’s worth of carbon every year, and that’s on a scale where everybody is emitting far, far more carbon than the human race can afford to produce if we want the planet to remain habitable.) In conclusion, the bad useless party remains bad and useless.

AGRARIAN PROTESTS IN INDIA

Important story that isn’t getting widespread traction because it’s in India, but: “tens of thousands” of Indian farmers (estimates range from 20K-50K) have been protesting in Delhi for the past few days, and there have been other similarly large farmers’ protests elsewhere in India over the past year (although this is the first in Delhi, the capital city and second-largest in India after Mumbai). The Indian farming economy is interesting because it’s poor (only about fifteen percent of the economy) but also massively important because almost half of India works in agriculture, so farmers’ interests tend to dictate a lot of the country’s politics, and Indian farmers are massively stressed for two reasons.

Firstly, they’re dealing with massive droughts, and given that a lot of these farmers and farming communities depend on their farms not only for their economic livelihoods but also their day-to-day survival, the droughts are dangerous for them on every level that matters. (The droughts are, of course, made worse by climate change, and the Indian subcontinent is projected to get hit worse by rising temperatures than just about anywhere else on the globe, and certainly worse than anywhere else populated as densely.)

Secondly, the Indian government is the primary purchaser of food in India because the Indian government acts as a central buyer who then sets the price for private industry (Indian markets, food manufacturers etc all purchase their raw materials from the government), but the government has been increasingly tardy of late in reimbursing farmers for their crops. Between delayed payment and crop failure a lot of farmers have become dependent on short-term loans to get by on a day-to-day basis, which impoverish them even further. So this isn’t just a story about climate change but also about bureaucratic failure at the same time, which seems like a bad mix.

It’s a bad situation and getting worse, but on the bright side at least it’s only happening in - oh, the most populous country in the world that also happens to have nuclear weapons. Right. That’s great.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies seen this week:

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018, Joel and Ethan Coen, Netflix) - 3.5/5

More on that, as usual, at my Letterboxd.

I’ve been playing Artifact on Steam this week, and it feels to me to be an attempt by Valve to find a middle ground between Hearthstone (Blizzard’s relatively light, sorta-free-to-play online CCG) and Magic Online (all the complexity of the real-life card game, but computers instead of actual cards) and I don’t think it succeeds terribly well because it doesn’t have a good free-to-play option, the drafting part of the game is just kind of bad, and individual games take twenty to thirty minutes rather than the five to ten that a game of Hearthstone requires. Without massive changes I don’t see it succeeding, but on the other hand predicting the success of individual games like this one is a bad bet most of the time.

That’s it from me this week. As usual, if you enjoyed (or at least tolerated) this, please tell your friends or even the people you don’t like, and share the subscription link, because every new subscriber I get defrays the cost of writing this by… nothing, come to think. But it would still be nice of you!