THIS DEPRESSING WEEK IN CANADIAN POLITICS

Granted, every week in politics is a depressing week in Canadian politics, because we really do have an amazing ability to elect half-hearted cowards and abject turds into office. But oh my, such a week.

THE NDP: The NDP released their election platform and it is just sort of there. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing here I - your veteran lefty writer - really disagree with per se. Ban unpaid internships? Sure, cool. Ban single-use plastics? Sure, the Liberals are already trying to do that but glad you’re on board, Jagmeet. Dental care, pharmacare, mental healthcare? I like all of those things, even if they’re technically provincial responsibilities so I guess it’s transfer payments, but okay. Price capping cellphone bills and forcing wireless providers to provide plans that the rest of the world wouldn’t snicker at? Sure, fuck Rogers and Bell!

I have two “buts.” First, a lot of their promises are, oddly for the New Democrats, somewhat muted. No plans for free university/college tuition - just a cap on tuition rates so that eventually down the road we can have free tuition. Their childcare plan is just a promise for funding and a promise to make things better in a generic sort of way, which feels very old-school NDP in the “things will be better, we promise” way that has a track record of zero federal election wins. That sort of thing. Granted, the Liberals and Tories do this too, but the NDP will always get more criticism for not being specific because the political landscape is biased against them, and I hate it when the NDP gives other parties ammunition. (Congratulations on being in The Left, where everything is harder because institutional power is inherently opposed to you: now do the fucking homework.)

Second: the funding model is problematic, to say the least. The NDP is promising to spend a whole lot of money, and while I don’t have a problem with the government spending a whole lot of money to get shit done and provide services everybody needs, I do like it when the numbers at least approach reasonableness, because if we are going to be lefties they will call us tax-and-spend lefties, and we should wear that badge with pride and say “well, at least we’re not borrow-and-spend conservatives.” The NDP’s tax plan is a “wealth tax” on people holding assets worth more than $20 million, an unspecified increase in the top marginal rate, an increase in the corporate tax rate by three percent (back to 2010 levels) and increasing the capital gains inclusion rate to 75 percent from its current 50. (Oh, and “closing tax loopholes” but everybody promises to do that.) All of these are perfectly reasonable ideas and combined - look, I tinker with the math and I just don’t see how they generate all of the money the NDP wants to spend. I get that saying “look, everybody’s taxes will have to go up one or two percent” is electoral suicide, but, again: congratulations on being in The Left.

Still, the NDP wins the “least embarrassing political party in Canada of the week” award. Good for them.

THE TORIES: Andrew Scheer went all-in on the dairy farmer vote this week, pandering as hard as possible by, of all things, attacking the Canadian Food Guide. Now it’s important to remember that, with the exception of Maxime Bernier’s I Can’t Believe It’s A Political Party Party, every major political party in the country supports supply management - the system which effectively subsidizes dairy and poultry farmers by limiting imports with aggressive tariffs - so realistically every political party already panders to dairy farmers as it is.

(For the record, although I don’t think supply management is necessarily the best way to protect dairy farmers - France’s method of outright unionization seems to work much better, assuming the goals are to keep supply stable and ensure small family farms remain competitive - I do think the arguments against supply management are mostly overblown whining, the prices would probably not drop much at all if at all if you believe what happened with New Zealand’s removal of supply management presents a precedent, and besides anything that keeps the majority of cheap, chockful-o-antibiotics-and-hormones shitty American milk out of the country is generally to the good. So, yeah, I think the political parties are mostly right to keep supply management in place, and every time I read a hot-take article from the latest young tyro trying to Blow A Lid On The Dairy Lobby I just kind of wince.)

Anyway, given that every political party supports supply management and Scheer can’t really go after Trudeau effectively on the renegotiated trade bill with the USA which increased American dairy imports slightly (both because his position during said negotiations was effectively one of capitulation and because the dairy portions of the agreement are mostly based on the terms that were in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Tories negotiated and didn’t get enacted because Donald Trump killed the deal), instead he goes after the Canada Food Guide, which started its current round of revisions six years ago (under the Tories) but got introduced about a month ago so it’s fresh news, and he attacks it because he claims that the Canada Food Guide is anti-milk. Then he drinks milk from a carton during a speech. Then he talks about how “chocolate milk saved my son’s life.” Really.

Others have already written about this in more detail, but: the new Canada Food Guide was designed in consultation with lots and lots of people and scientists and agricultural interests, including dairy farmers. And it doesn’t say “don’t drink milk.” It says your primary drink should be water - but that lower-fat milks are one of the healthy alternatives to water, which is perfectly reasonable to say in an increasingly diverse society where lifetime lactose intolerance due to genetics is becoming more common over time. So basically this was a stupid thing Andrew Scheer did, because it was a day of the week.

THE GREENS: Elizabeth May did an interview in Maclean’s and… look, the Green Party’s entire purpose is environmental stewardship, right? So wouldn’t it be great if she gave an interview and actually seemed like she knew what she was talking about?

She complains that the Liberals “claim that we’re going off coal” when the federal government’s Regulations Amending the Reduction of Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Coal-fired Generation are designed to phase out coal-fired power plants by 2030. She complains that the Liberals haven’t used the Canadian Environmental Protection Act sufficiently (it’s literally the basis for the Clean Fuel Standard). She talks confusingly about “large emitters,” first claiming that they produce “the lion’s share” of greenhouses gases (they produce about a third, which as lion’s shares go isn’t the biggest) and then that said large emitters are coal plants and cement factories (some of them are, but not all). But, sure, let’s take all of this as your basic political attack fodder and go on to the real problem, which is oil.

Elizabeth May, in recent weeks, has taken flak for arguing that Canada should be relying on domestic oil for its oil needs while Canada winds down its oil usage. This is just kind of silly on the face of it, because if we’re selling oil overseas or selling it here, either way oil is being sold and used and from a climate perspective that’s bad no matter who’s burning the stuff. Maybe you can argue that May is suggesting that by using the oil domestically we can more easily transition Alberta to a non-oil economy but Alberta will whine like a beaten mule the moment you say “do anything that will benefit the children of tomorrow” and hug oil barrels until their arms fall off so I have my doubts there.

But beyond that, she simply doesn’t… seem to know how much oil Canada produces, refines and uses? Like, Canada is a net oil exporter, but May doesn’t appear to understand that we import crude oil because transporting crude out of Alberta and Hibernia to other places in Canada is logistically difficult, or that we import some refined oil products because operating oil refineries in Canada has grown less commercially viable over time. She handwaves away Alberta’s concern that their oil is being prevented from sold at market by saying “Canada is the market” but A) we produce more oil than we could ever sell domestically B) we produce more oil than we could refine domestically C) if Canada is the market then Alberta’s oil economy is fucked. (Granted, I am fine with the third bit, but I’m not running for office.)

She’s also talking about all of this at the same time as she’s saying we need to transition to 60 percent electric vehicles by 2030, so, in summary, the Green Party’s plan for Canada’s future with respect to oil is that we will apparently build additional refineries - which take five to seven years to build - to refine oil so that Alberta’s oil economy won’t tank while we reduce our oil consumption dramatically over the next decade. It’s just all kind of dense, and if it were any other political party I might be less disappointed in them, but this is the leader of the Green Party we’re talking about here who’s engaging in the stupidest possible kind of populism in favour of oil-friendly solutions that aren’t practical and won’t work.

THE LIBERALS: The unsafe water crisis in Attawapiskat is still ongoing and over the weekend it was revealed that the Liberals’ offer of assistance was reimbursement for purchasing bottled water for elderly patients and infant children, payment to be made in advance. I don’t have any snark or jokes here: the Liberal government’s failure on the First Nations reservation crises is dramatically worse than anything else they’ve done while in office and this is just the latest iteration of that, and it would be nice if any political party would challenge Justin Trudeau on what is most certainly his biggest failure. Well, not the Tories, because it was Harper’s massive failure before it was Trudeau’s. But you know what I mean.

PUERTO RICO RECONQUISTA (SORTA)

As I type this Puerto Rico is on the verge of the first general strike in a First World country, which is sort of amazing, and it is worth writing about.

So anyway, a couple weeks ago Puerto Ricans started protesting to call for the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rossello, because he is a giant prick. How big a prick is he? Well, the reason we know he is a prick is because a couple weeks ago someone leaked an IM chat conversation between Rossello and some of his staff, and Rossello:

1. joked about people who had died in Hurricane Maria
2. bragged about having an army of trolls who spread “fake news”
3. admitted that he had tried to cover up deaths following Maria
4. mocked Catholicism, which was problematic for him because he campaigned as a religious man
5. mocked people living on the outer islands of Puerto Rico for being stuck there after he privatized the ferry companies which previously provided them affordable transport
6. made fun of members of his own party and
7. generally just used a lot of ethnic, homophobic and sexist slurs.

That’s a whole lot of prickishness right there! So, yeah, Rossello is essentially public enemy #1 in Puerto Rico right now, what with being a total piece of shit, and sure there’s some other scandals as well - he’s under investigation by the FBI for money laundering, for example - but really, people are angry because he’s just such a piece of shit, and after all the crap Puerto Rico has gone through in the past few years it looks like Puerto Ricans have finally reached their breaking point, so there have been protests and riots and clashes with police, and over the past few days Puerto Rican social media went crazy with people proposing - and widely agreeing - with a general strike. IE: nobody goes to work. Period. Everything shuts down.

To be clear, nobody’s organizing this action. There’s nobody for the government to negotiate with. This is just everybody saying “okay, fuck this” and everybody else saying “yeah, right, fuck all of this.” It’s all very bottom-up and communally agreed upon, which is kind of exciting in a democratic sense. (Granted, it’s social media so it’s hard to tell how many people are down for a general strike. But it looks like a lot, and in politics sometimes that’s important enough.)

Anyway, just a couple hours ago Rossello announced that he was stepping down as leader of his party and would not run for re-election in 2021, but there doesn’t seem to be - as of this writing - any indication that Puerto Ricans are going to be satisfied with “okay, the asshole will be gone in two years” when they want him gone now, so I’m very curious to see what happens in the next few days.

THIS WEEK IN CLIMATE: THINGS GET WORSE

If you’ve been living somewhere on this planet (look, maybe you are an astronaut, I don’t know) over the past week you’re probably thinking the worst news is the record planet-wide heatwave, and yes, that is pretty bad. But what is worse is that the United Kingdom’s Met Office (which used to be called the Meteorological Office until the Brits decided “we all just call it this, let’s make that the name”) released their new oceanic temperature readings and the news is so bad.

Short short version: the world’s oceans appear to have warmed about 0.1 degrees Celsius than we thought they had warmed, mostly because for past oceanic temperature readings there’s a lot of data that was never intended for climate change measurement (obviously) but instead for other types of meteorological data collection, so there’s a degree of variability as to how accurate it is and, over time, researchers have been trying to fine-tune the dataset to eliminate bad data and correct data that may have been collected slightly erroneously. (This sort of data work is the sort of thing climate skeptics get really angry about, but they are dunderheads so don’t worry about them.)

Now, to be clear: this doesn’t mean the oceans are point one degrees Cee warmer right now. We know how warm the oceans are right now. But it does mean that the oceans have warmed point one degrees Cee more since 1850, and this is very bad news because it affects the “carbon budget,” which is to say: the amount of CO2 we can burn into the atmosphere before everything starts to get truly fucked. The carbon budget is what gave the IPCC report from last year that now-famous 2030 figure - the “we need to be carbon neutral by 2030 to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius” thing is based on that carbon budget. But here is the problem - that year, 2030, was based on us thinking we had so much room left in the carbon budget. If the ocean warmed point one degrees Cee more than we thought, then that means there’s less room left in the carbon budget (because the oceans can absorb less carbon, because they’ve already absorbed more than we thought, because they were a little colder initially than we thought).

Bottom line: this means that the 1.5C carbon budget gets used up in six to ten years rather than nine to twelve years. The 2030 deadline was based on that nine-to-twelve-years budget (and I wager this is possibly the first time you’ve heard that the deadline might actually have been 2027 rather than 2030 in the worst-case scenario, a fact most people gloss over), so if this dataset is correct the deadline for 1.5C of warming is now somewhere in between 2024 and 2027.

Like I said: it’s so bad.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

The Happytime Murders (2018, Brian Henson, Netflix) - 1/5

Yentl (1983, Barbra Streisand, TMC) - 4/5

Invictus (2009, Clint Eastwood, Blu-Ray) - 3/5

Other than that, not much else this week, although I’ve started reading Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, and it’s pretty good. I enjoyed his writing on The Lost City of Z so this is not a surprise.

Also we watched the season debut of Queer Eye tonight and my rankings for “which Fab Five member would be the best dude to hang out with” are as follows:

1. Bobby
2. Karamo
3. Tan
4. Jonathan
5. the car maybe? it looks like a nice car
6. Antoni

See you in seven.