It is Family Day Weekend here in Ontario, and thus far this long weekend we have cooked a whole turkey dinner, made a lot of turkey soup, cleaned the apartment mostly top-to-bottom and done a whole bunch of other chores, so this week will be a bit briefer than normal, not least because it was a bit of a slow week in most respects.

LIBERAL PARTY CORRUPTION IS THE MOST PREDICTABLE AND BORING TYPE OF CORRUPTION

The thing about Canadian politics is that there is a commonly understood narrative for each of the three parties, because Canada - like practically all countries, don't get me wrong - is collectively a mentally lazy nation that pays as little attention as possible to what is actually happening in the world these days and relies on shorthand to get through discussions about politics. The NDP's narrative is "they're too extreme and crazy lefty to run things," which is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you're determined to believe that, which the majority of Canada more or less does. The Tories' narrative is "not so secretly, they're either bigots or fine with bigots so long as they get lower taxes." And the Liberal Party's narrative is "give them a chance and they'll be corrupt as hell." And this past week certainly hasn't made anybody re-evaluate that last one, has it?

If you missed the past couple of weeks: the big-ass Quebec engineering firm SNC-Lavalin is currently facing criminal charges for fraudulent dealings in Libya during the rule of Muammar Gaddafi. (Aside: if you are looking at that and thinking "I thought his name was spelled differently," that's because in Arabic the closest approximation of the English spelling of his name is "Qaddafi," but most Arabic news sources, when writing about him in English, spell it with a G because that's how the sound of the letter many other Arabs pronounce sort of as a Q or K is pronounced by most Libyan Arabs. Translation is much more an art than a science.) In 2018, the Liberals passed a law that allows companies to request "deferred prosecution agreements," which really amount to "our company will give the government some money in order to make this go away." SNC-Lavalin had requested such an agreement for the Libyan charges, and the Department of Justice - under then-Minister of Justice Jodi Wilson-Raybould - said "no."

Two weeks ago, the Globe and Mail reported that individuals in the Prime Minister's office had pressured Wilson-Raybould to change her mind about giving SNC-Lavalin the deferred prosecution agreement, and she still said no. The Liberals seemed determined to simply steamroll through it, with Justin Trudeau saying "nothing happened" and Wilson-Raybould refusing to comment because of solicitor-client privilege preventing her from discussing the matter. Then this week, Wilson-Raybould resigned both from the Department of Justice and from the Liberal Party caucus, which most likely indicates that she was really angry about something, and Occam's Razor points one to the conclusion that she was pissed about something Justin Trudeau and/or his office did. Which makes the whole affair stink to high heaven, but she is still not talking and neither is anybody else.

From a policy perspective there's a few things that are interesting about this case. Wilson-Raybould is acting as if the Department of Justice is non-partisan and somewhat independent of the goverment, which it isn't - at least not in Canada. The UK equivalent works effectively along those lines, for example, and is much more an independent part of the bureaucracy that happens to be run by a member of the current governing party, who strictly avoids partisan contact with their former party, or is at least supposed to do so. But the DoJ is more independent than, say, the Attorney General of the United States, where (as we have discovered over the past couple of years) there is really nothing concrete stopping the President from firing lawyers until he gets one who does what he says to do.

Oh, and yes of course the entire deferred prosecution agreement law is a bad one and should be scrapped. That goes without saying.

SPEAKING OF THE UNITED STATES AND LAWS AND SUCH

Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency in order to appropriate the funds in order to build his "stupid fucking wall" (to quote former President of Mexico Vincente Fox) is... interesting, not least because in his speech explaining that he was declaring a national emergency, Donald Trump literally admitted that it wasn't actually an emergency and he just felt like doing it. Almost as interesting was Trump essentially admitting that the next sequence of steps would be a lawsuit against the emergency action proceeding through the courts where it would repeatedly lose until appealed to the Supreme Court, where he figures he has a chance because he's appointed two justice who owe him. (His thought process is fairly evident. I don't know, personally, if it is accurate.)

This is, straight-up, a massive abuse of presidential power, which is why conservatives a-plenty who were concerned about the use of the national emergency power said things like "what if a Democrat says climate change is a national emergency? What if they say gun violence is a national emergency?" and other such things. Since climate change and gun violence are literally killing people in large numbers right now and southern-border immigrants mostly are not, this is one of those examples of a completely valid counterargument being applied for the wrong reasons.

Anyway, Trump is promising to veto any bill that gets through Congress disallowing his national emergency, which he may or may not be able to get away with because although the Democrats can pass such a bill in the House and probably peel off enough Republicans to pass it in the Senate, they probably can't get quite enough Republicans to overturn a potential veto. (Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, signalled as much by expressing his support for Trump's use of the national emergency power earlier in the week. Whatever you can say about Mitch McConnell - and there is a lot to say about that turtle-faced fuck - he is usually pretty confident about how the numbers are going to shake out, and the veto overturn threshold is a very specific number.) Which means Trump's weird-ass, passive-aggressive rant about the courts is probably pretty accurate.

MBS 2.0 (3.0? NOT SURE ABOUT THE NUMBERS) AND PAKISTAN'S CURRENCY CRISIS

Mohammed Bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, is on an image rehabilitation tour after that pesky "getting caught murdering a journalist" thing last year and his first stop was in Pakistan, where he promised $20 billion USD in Saudi investment within Pakistan and has promised to supply Pakistan's crude oil and petroleum needs for the forseeable future, and this is probably very important.

"But Chris," you say, "Pakistan has enormous oil reserves." Yes, but most of it is shale oil, which is expensive to extract and takes a long time to set up extraction, and Pakistan actually imports most of its oil for day-to-day use across the country. This massive cost for the country, plus horrific tax evasion and a terribly managed economy, means that Pakistan has racked up enormous debts; its deficit in 2017 was almost 5% of its national GDP, which is extremely high, and it doesn't have the excuse of infrastructure and other capital spending to treat most of its debts as long-term investment. (For the sake of comparison, Canada's deficit in 2017 was approximately 1% of its GDP.)

As a result of all this economic turmoil, the Pakistanian rupee is dropping in value rapidly (fifteen percent down in the last seven months) and it's only getting worse because there is enormous demand in the country for American dollars, because American dollars are the world's emergency reserve currency and Pakistanians want dollars because dollars, unlike Pakistanian rupees, are not dropping in value, which makes dollars vastly more valuable. Of course, since Pakistan doesn't earn enough as a country via exports to satisfy its citizens' desire for dollars, you get effectively a competition spiral where Pakistanians, in order to obtain dollars, buy them at a premium - spending more rupees - which means the value of the rupee drops again and you can see where this is going.

This means that MBS' offer of cheap-to-free oil and gas is a life preserver for Pakistan, and it's a very smart move on MBS' part - which is par for the course for him. Really, everybody made such a fuss over his supposed blunders in the Jamal Khashoggi scandal that we all sort of forgot that MBS' only mistake when he decided to have Khashoggi murdered was not realizing that this time, for some reason, the West would decide to care about MBS being a brutal dictator for once.

But, yeah, viewed through the lens of MBS being determined to reinvent Saudi Arabia as the pre-eminent Arabic superpower, it makes perfect sense. Turning Pakistan into a client state will be a long-term project and certainly the Saudis would face stiff competition from China for that prize, but it's a tactically sound decision for MBS to make what is, for him, a relatively small investment of national funds and a few years' worth of free oil in order to lock down Pakistan's aforementioned enormous but untapped oil reserves.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

Whale Rider (2002, Niki Caro, Hoopla) - 4/5

Strictly Ballroom (1992, Baz Luhrmann, Hoopla) - 4/5

Hotel Artemis (2018, Drew Pearce, Google Play rental) - 2/5

We finished Russian Doll and it lived up to expectations, as the second half was arguably better than the first was. No need for a second season, either: it is perfect as is. Super high recommendation.

See you next week!