LES EMEUTES

So you may have heard of the gilets jaunes (lit. “the yellow vests”) protests/riots in France, mostly because whenever anybody reads about a thing in Foreign Land they immediately recontextualize it to be about their personal issues (blame directed partially at self, of course, I can be honest about this tendency even though I try to avoid it). For example, a lot of conservatives are saying “this is about the carbon tax” (not really) and a lot of lefties are saying “this is about unequal tax burdens” (probably a little more accurate but not really accurate enough). Plus, on top of one’s own biases, it’s always hard to discuss the causes of a riot because there are a lot of rioters involved and they’ll all have their own personal reasons for rioting. But, in the aggregate, we can at least talk about why many of them are rioting.

It is certainly fair to say that the gilet jaunes protests were inspired, at first, by the fuel tax introduced by the French government which was going to begin early in January (which isn’t precisely a carbon tax in the traditional sense, but it’s close enough that it’s not worth nitpicking over the minor differences - it’s a tax meant to discourage fossil fuel use and pay for green infrastructure, and that’s the important thing). But the fuel tax is gone now. The French government rescinded the tax after the third weekend of protests, but the protests are still happening, so regardless of whether the French were unhappy about the fuel tax - which they were - it’s also fair to say that the protests aren’t really about the fuel tax per se. (Gilets jaunes protesters marched with climate activists this past weekend in Toulouse, to boot.)

At this point left-leaning sorts will say “a-ha, the protests are really about the cost of living and the rich not paying their fair share” and this isn’t entirely wrong either: definitely a lot of protestors have complained loudly about how hard it is to make ends meet these days (and France isn’t the most expensive place to live, but like a lot of Europe, it definitely isn’t cheap). But underlying all of that is a lot of anti-elite sentiment, and I hesitate to call it “populism” because there really isn’t a clearly defined (or even a loosely defined) political agenda behind a lot of the protests, beyond people who are really angry about how their lives are going. (Which is valid! But, at the same time, if you want to fix a problem, poorly-defined anger is not the most helpful thing.) There are anti-business Communists and anti-brown Front National members attending these protests and protesting, and those are two political factions who basically have nothing in common beyond disliking Emmanuel Macron, so I think calling it “anti-elitism” is probably the fairest thing.

There’s anger over Macron’s most recent round of tax cuts, which unfairly favoured the rich and made life harder for the poor, but there’s also clearly anger over pro-EU market-friendly policies, which were put in place because France needed to mollify EU concerns about French budgeting and in the hope of reducing France’s unemployment rate. Macron is probably right in his belief that France, and the rest of the EU generally, need a far more formal union than they have in order to operate more like the one large nation they de-facto operate as most of the time, but he’s never going to be able to sell that idea if the pathway to more formal federal European stateship is slashing social benefits for poor Frenchmen (which it probably isn’t anyway).

Basically, just keep watching. Nothing is settled yet, not even what these protests mean.

THE NEWS STORY THAT MADE EVERYBODY IN JOURNALISM DOUBLE-CHECK HOW TO SPELL “HUAWEI”

So you may have heard that Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Chinese tech company Huawei - probably best known to the average Joe/Jane because of their smartphone manufacturing - was detained in Vancouver at the request of American authorities. And there is a huge stink about it! Why is this, and why did all of this happen? Well, first, let’s answer the questions that I have heard or seen asked about this in order of importance.

1. “Why is Canada arresting a Chinese person on behalf of the Americans? Why are we involved?” Because Meng is a person of interest to the Americans and we arrested her as a favour to the United States because they want to try her for crimes. This happens every so often, but usually when it does it’s because Country A is aware that Criminal X is in Country B and they have formal extradition agreements, and usually it’s for your more standard sort of criminal, IE “this is a bank robber who robbed a bank in Des Moines but now he’s in Winnipeg, could you arrest him and hand him over please.” The process here is not the newsworthy bit: rather, it is who is being arrested.

2. “Okay, so why do the Americans want to arrest her and why do we approve of that?” Huawei has been accused of various trade agreements and espionage-y things on behalf of the Chinese government before, but this arrest is for more formal reasons than that: apparently, Huawei has a subsidiary company called Skycom operating out of Hong Kong which has dealt with Iranian telecom companies. Now, Skycom can do that; there are no current UN sanctions against Iran, just the American and European sanctions plus a bunch of other individual nations with lesser sanctions (Canada is one of them), but China doesn’t have sanctions against Iran so with the sanctions lifted Chinese firms can trade with and in Iran. However, the United States has also sanctioned foreign firms that deal with Iran, and this is where you run into the problem: Meng, in discussions with American banks, represented Skycomm as an entity wholly separate from Huawei, and apparently there is a lot of evidence that shows that Skycom is really just Huawei wearing a different set of clothes. That means Meng is in personal violation of American sanctions of Iran (although, so far as I can make out, not yet in violation of Canada’s lesser sanctions - but that’s based only on news reports from Meng’s hearing, so who knows).

3. “Okay, but why are we involved, I mean really now?” Most western nations have been suspicious of Huawei for a long time because there’s a belief among intelligence agencies that Huawei’s phones are being used for widespread data mining. (Is this true you ask? The answer: I am not sure.) But America is currently escalating a trade war with China, which may be a bad idea but hey Donald Trump whatchagonnado, and being merciless on this front is what America wants to do, and more than likely the Canadian government has done the math and decided that pissing off China right now is less costly than pissing off America, particularly considering that the Canadian government suspects the Americans are mostly in the right this time around as well.

SOME TORIES JUST WANT TO WATCH THE WORLD BURN

Bill 66, the Restoring Ontario’s Competitiveness Act, is an omnibus bill that repeals (or creates end-runs around) so many regulatory instruments in Ontario that it is kind of staggering. Doug Ford will rant at length about “red tape,” but what he has done here is essentially de-limit municipal governance in Ontario in any way that substantively matters, and that is extremely dangerous because municipal governance in Ontario is already mostly controlled by real estate developers and business interests who are the ones who can afford to fund municipal campaigns.

Among other things, the bill lets municipal councils ignore the Great Lakes Protection Act (so they don’t have to avoid polluting the single most important natural resource in the entire country), the Greenbelt Act (remember when Doug got caught during the election promising developers he would open up the Greenbelt - which, for non-Ontarians, means the ring of mostly-natural/rural-territory surrounding the Greater Toronto Area - for real estate development and public furor was so intense that he lied and said he didn’t really mean it? He did), the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act (which we passed to protect the source of most of the streams and small rivers in the Greater Toronto Area), the Lake Simcoe Protection Act and a few others including, most importantly, the Clean Water Act, which was passed specifically as a response to the e.coli outbreak in Walkerton which killed seven people and cost the province approximately $155 million. It is not in any way an exaggeration that this bill will allow municipal councils to simply ignore most of the environmental law in the province when they plan new residential or commercial developments.

It also lets municipal councils ignore zoning bylaws, regulations which require public notice and consultation, regulations which ignore expert advice, anything Metrolinx or other provincial transportation agencies want to do, and waste management laws. There is probably more I haven’t gotten to describing yet simply because this bill is so ridiculously wide-ranging.

Speaking of wide-ranging, the bill also effectively makes overtime pay for shift workers less likely by allowing employers to define workweeks over the average of a month (so if you work 60 hours one week, which would mean overtime pay, and 20 hours the next week, your employer can say “well really that’s two 40-hour weeks, no overtime pay for you”), and removes the requirement for employers to seek permission from the Director of Employment Standards to force their workers to work more than 48 hours a week (a requirement, by the way, which barely ever prevented any employer from doing so, since the Director usually agrees to such requests). It lets home-based daycare house more kids, which - again - is a regulation Ontario passed because home-based daycares were overcrowding, and kids died in unlicensed daycares as a result, because you need a certain minimum number of people in order to watch over a certain number of children. It stops requiring employers to post the Employment Standards Act poster in the workplace, because what you really need to do in order to make business competitive again is make sure workers are less likely to know their rights. It reduces regulatory safety burdens on dairy farmers, slaughterhouses, and manufacturing assembly lines. It exempts municipalities, hospitals, universities and other public services from using unionized contractors for infrastructure projects. It repeals the Toxics Reduction Act, which reduces pollution by disallowing use of certain toxic industrial chemicals. (Jennifer Keesmaat, the former Toronto city planner, noted on Twitter this week that when he was a city councillor in Toronto, Doug once tried to get council to “look the other way” for a buddy whose business had been illegally dumping toxic chemicals.) It repeals the Wireless Service Agreements Act, which required that phone contracts be written in plain English rather than legalese, and which was clearly preventing the people of Ontario from buying phones.

This bill even repeals the Pawnbroker’s Act, which exists solely to regulate pawnbrokers and prevent them from easily purchasing stolen goods. Why would you want to do that? Was preventing pawnbrokers from melting down precious metals they had received so as to destroy evidence of stolen property somehow preventing Ontario from being great again? Who thought this was a problem?

The answer, of course, is that Doug thought this was a problem. And that should concern you, because Doug Ford is scum, and if he thinks something is a problem, he means “it’s a problem for me.” This doesn’t always mean classic corruption, because sometimes Doug thinks the problem is those damn lefties looking down at him. (Hence the province firing Waterfront Toronto board members this week after the Auditor-General released a report that was, frankly, sloppy in its critique of the board. Doug has always resented them, ever since they helped shoot down his idiotic idea that what the Port Lands really needed was a giant Ferris wheel.) But it always really is about Doug.

THE AYODHYA DISPUTE INTENSIFIES, BUT FIRST YOU PROBABLY NEED TO KNOW WHAT THAT IS

This is probably my favorite news story of the week just because of the legal background, which is a little shitty of me because this is really serious with dire implications for ethnic and inter-religious strife, but… well, let me explain.

Okay, there’s a site in northern India called Ayodhya, which is the source of one of many, many disputes between Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims. There was a Islamic mosque at Ayodhya until 1992, when it was destroyed during that year’s round of Hindu/Muslim riots; Hindus took exception to the mosque because Ayodhya is the traditional birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Ram. So in 2010, a judge ruled that Ayodhya was in fact the birthplace of Lord Ram (so there is an actual court ruling which definitively states “yes, a god was born here,” which is really what I love about this story) but also that the Ayodhya mosque did not displace anything, as Hindu nationalists claimed, because it was built atop aged ruins rather than destroying a Hindu temple, and apportioned the holy grounds to be 2/3rds Hindu territory and 1/3rd Muslim territory.

This really didn’t make either side happy because both had simply wanted the site for themselves - but, if we’re being honest, the Hindus were madder because they’re the majority in India and Hindu nationalists get really upset about the idea of sharing anything with Muslims, partially because of the history of India, which for the last four hundred years or so has been “Muslims conquer Hindus, then Hindus conquer Muslims, then repeat until the British show up and help both sides until they decide to just take over everything anyway,” and partially because on a practical level Muslims are the only religious minority in India large enough for their demands to have political force. (Like: there are Jews in India, about twenty thousand or so, but nobody really worries about the Jews in India because twenty thousand isn’t a lot of people in a country with a billion people in it.)

So this week there was a huge rally in Delhi by Hindu nationalists who want to build their temple over the entire site, and the protest was spiked because Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP), who are the current government in India, have decided to make it an issue because they’re a Hindu party and they’re not doing well in the polls (in another shocking case of “electing a right-wing nationalist with no serious interest in governing a large and complex country for anybody other than his base didn’t work out so well”) so why not stoke up some religious extremism to try to get re-elected?

Anyway, the Indian Supreme Court has its next hearing on the appeal of the case mentioned earlier - yes, the appeal process of that case from 2010 is still going, and most of the original individual petitioners in the case are dead now - in January, which will be a few months before Modi and the BJP go into the next general election against Rahul Gandhi’s Indian National Congress, and Modi has never really shown any tendencies towards restraint so it could get bad before it gets better.

QUICK HITS

British Columbia announces vehicle emissions ban: As of 2040, only zero-emission vehicles will be permitted to be sold in BC. Obviously this isn’t the same as “be permitted to operate in the province” but banning the sale of gas vehicles (and in practice, banning them in 2040 means that they’ll mostly disappear from the BC marketplace as early as five years sooner, because businesses are going to want to get their market share of the new electric vehicle segment as early as possible). All this is part of BC’s ambitious carbon reduction strategy, which is politically viable in large part because of all those devastating wildfires - so good for them. The people of BC, not the fires.

Australia phasing out plastic bag use: Australia’s been gradually banning plastic shopping bags on a state-by-state level, and New South Wales (where Sydney is) is the only state that doesn’t have upcoming plans to ban them. However, with Tasmania and South Australia (where Adelaide is) already having banned them, and Victoria (where Melbourne is - sorry, but for non-Aussies it’s usually easier to go by big cities rather than state names) planning to ban them next year, the two largest retailers in Australia (Woolworths and Coles - Australia is really big on having stores named after chains that disappeared in other countries for some reason) decided over the summer to get ahead of the eight-ball and started charging shoppers for plastic bags.

Although there was the usual spate of “this stupid asshole decided to attack a cashier because he couldn’t have a free plastic bag” news stories, the overall response has been fine, because most people can adjust quite easily to not having plastic bags, and as a result the entire country’s plastic bag use has dropped by eighty percent in about three months, resulting in 1.5 billion plastic bags not being used. The point of all this: we don’t need plastic bags most of the time, and since they devastate marine life and end up leaving toxins in fish we eat, anything that cuts their use down is better for everybody.

Ron Taverner appointed to be next OPP commissioner: Most commissioners of the Ontario Provincial Police are recruited from inside the service because it’s a very specific policing culture that requires skills that can differ a lot from managing more localized police services. On rare occasions a non-OPP-veteran is appointed as Commissioner, but usually that’s somebody with a ton of extremely relevant experience like Julian Fantino (who had been Chief of Police in London, York Region and Toronto before his appointment).

Ron Taverner has no OPP experience and has never managed a police service, and in fact the appointment guidelines had to be changed for his appointment to be permitted. Why was he appointed, then, given his relative lack of qualifications and fairly advanced age (he’s 70)? Well, the fact that he is a longtime family friend of the Fords, and that his police division in Northern Etobicoke was the one that let Rob Ford off with many, many “warnings” about domestic assault and drunk driving probably has something to do with it. (We know all of this because of the disclosure from the Ford investigations undertaken by the Toronto Police under Bill Blair.) There is also a photo circulating around the internet of Doug and Taverner partying with girls much, much younger than them, because these people are just kind of gross.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION:

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

Widows (2018, Steve McQueen, theatre) - 4.5/5

Paddington (2014, Paul King, Google Play) - 4/5

Dumplin’ (2018, Anne Fletcher, Netflix) - 3.5/5

More notes on all of these available at my Letterboxd, as always.

Also, I finally got to play Root, the new design from Leder Games, this week, and it’s an exceptionally well-designed board game, although I don’t know how much the average gamer will appreciate the deeply asymmetrical play of it. “Two players have armies, then the third player is conducting a popular uprising against them, and the fourth player is just one dude wandering around stealing things and having adventures” is the easiest summary of the base game, and that’s before you get into the expansion, where you have a religious cult and a profit-driven merchant gang involved as well. Also, all of these factions are actually cute cartoon animals! I really love this game.

That’s it from me this week. Remember to like and subscribe and share… well if you get this via email you don’t have to do those things! Except the sharing bit, which I would appreciate.