Tuesday June 23, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday June 23, 2020

Tory Leadership Debates Spotlights Bad French, Social Conservative Issues

The contenders for the federal Conservative leadership traded fewer pointed barbs during the English-language debate in Toronto on Thursday, appealing for more party unity to defeat Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.

April 28, 2020

After the presumed front-runners, Peter MacKay and Erin O’Toole, had several heated exchanges during a bumpy debate in French the night earlier, neither showed the same chippiness on stage Thursday, making only the odd jab.

The two-hour debate also gave the social conservatives in the race, Ontario MP Derek Sloan and Toronto lawyer Leslyn Lewis, plenty of runway to share their perspectives. (I(n the French debate, Ontario MP Derek Sloan and Toronto lawyer Leslyn Lewis were left to watch on the sidelines, especially during the open debate format. Both were hampered by their inability to speak French. MacKay and O’Toole’s abilities are passable but would likely be deemed inadmissible if they were debating in English.)

The candidates criticized the Trudeau government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis and its unsuccessful bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council — something both MacKay and O’Toole called a “vanity project” for the prime minister.

June 3, 2020

But they were also asked to weigh in on another issue that is top of mind for many Canadians: systemic racism.

Here are some of the highlights from the last official debate of the race, which will wrap up in August.

Although MacKay repeatedly challenged O’Toole during Wednesday’s French debate to state whether he is pro-choice or anti-abortion — a throwback to the pressure outgoing Tory Leader Andrew Scheer faced during the fall election campaign — there were no such fireworks Thursday. 

Likewise, the two men did not debate each other’s record on LGBTQ issues, including support for same-sex marriage and transgender rights.

May 25, 2019

At one point, Sloan said MacKay and O’Toole would agree with him that it’s “not right Canada doesn’t have any laws when it comes to abortion.” Sloan asserted that Canada’s position is “out of whack with most of the developed world.” Neither man responded to that charge.

Although MacKay and O’Toole have said they oppose conversion therapy, neither objected when Sloan said the Liberals are “radically far to the left” for seeking to ban the practice.

Sloan, who has accused the Liberal government of “effectively putting into law child abuse” with its proposed legislation to ban conversion therapy, said he would repeal such a law as prime minister. Both he and Lewis have also pledged to repeal the transgender rights law enacted by the Liberals in 2016. That law added new rights protections to prevent discrimination based on a person’s gender identity or expression.

October 25, 2016

MacKay and O’Toole may have had strategic imperatives for not challenging Sloan or Lewis on social issues. The next leader of the Conservatives will be chosen according to a ranked ballot, where members list candidates by order of preference. The support of the last place candidate in each round will be redistributed to the second choices of their supporters.

In the 2017 Tory leadership race, support from social conservatives was seen as crucial in helping Scheer best front-runner Maxime Bernier.

Derek Sloan predicted Donald Trump will be re-elected for a second term: “Under this next government, which will be a Conservative government, I know our relationship with the United States will be restored. And I’ll go so far as to say, I am confident that Donald Trump will defy the odds again and be the next administration and when I am leader of the Conservative party, I will give him a call and congratulate him.” (Huffington Post)

 

The monolingual, monotone cast of wannabe Prime Ministers of Canada offer nothing of enlightenment & vision for the difficult times ahead. from r/canadapoliticshumour

 

Saturday June 20, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday June 20, 2020

The end of the buffet as we know it?

December 4, 2013

The COVID-19 pandemic may be the end of the restaurant buffet as we know it. 

With concerns over the spread of the virus heightening concerns around food safety, the fill-your-plate dining concept is facing serious challenges.

Some Alberta restaurant operators believe that long after anxiety around the spread of the virus subsides, customers won’t have an appetite for self-serve eats. 

Some buffets shuttered by the pandemic may be gone forever, said Oscar Lopez, the founder of Pampa Brazilian Steakhouse, a chain of five Alberta restaurants. 

“That’s the $2-million question,” Lopez said. “This is part of a huge industry.

December 13, 2013

“We’ve been thinking about it a lot.” 

After months of public health messaging about virus prevention, customers may have become permanently put off by sneeze guards and shared spoons, Lopez said. 

He wonders how long the world-famous buffets of the Las Vegas strip will remain closed, or if now-docked cruise ships will ever serve their food in the same way again. 

Even when Alberta health restrictions prohibiting buffets are lifted, his chain of restaurants may never operate them again. 

June 11, 2014

“An emotional scar has been left on people,” he said. “I’m skeptical. I don’t know. 

“When Alberta Health Services allows us to reopen our salad bar operation, I’m not quite sure that we will. I think that will have to do a lot with what the public’s reaction is, what their memory of this whole situation is.

“We may just keep doing what we’re doing.”

Pampa is known for its rodizio-style service. Customers sample from shared plates and meat skewers served by waiters circulating from table to table. The salad bar is also a huge draw, Lopez said.

Coronavirus cartoons

Since reopening, the restaurant is now plating its food individually in the kitchen. Tables are carefully spaced two metres apart. The salad bar is closed indefinitely. 

Lopez considered having an attendant for the buffets but said he was advised by health inspectors that it would be too difficult to keep customers a safe distance apart from each other. 

“Almost overnight we had to reinvent ourselves and sort of reteach our team on our new style of service, so we’re kind of learning as we go.” 

Most customers have been accommodating, he said, but some reservations have been cancelled.

“It looks empty. It looks sad. We have lost a lot of the ambience in the restaurant.” (CBC)

Letter to the Editor, Wednesday June 24, 2020

June 20 cartoon missing racialized customers

I want to thank The Spectator for giving us a great example of systemic racism: A cartoon with seven people at the buffet table and not one racialized person. I guess only white people in Hamilton go to buffet restaurants. Despite the fact that systemic barriers exist everywhere, people continue to be blind to them.

Jorge Lasso, Hamilton

Saturday June 12, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday June 12, 2020

‘Their time has come’: Calls increase for removal of statues linked to colonial legacy

As statues and monuments of leaders from bygone eras are being toppled in response to growing calls to end systemic racism and discrimination, the sentiment is also growing here in Canada.

Sir John A. Macdonald available at Redbubble.com

Just this week, protesters in Belgium vandalized a statue of King Leopold II, whose rule of Congo led to the death of 10 million people. At Oxford University, there are calls to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes, an architect of the apartheid. And in Bristol, England, a statue of slave trader Edward Colston was dragged through the streets and dumped into the harbour.

Meanwhile in the United States, several statues honouring Confederate generals and slave owners have also been taken down in response to the anti-Black racism protests spurred by the killing of George Floyd.

Canada is not immune to this, either. A Change.org petition calling for the removal of a Sir John A. Macdonald statue in Montreal has received more than 10,000 signatures as of Wednesday evening.

Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, was an architect of the residential school system and led starvation tactics against Indigenous people in the Prairies.

“He was very proactive in starvation of Indigenous people, so why would we want a statue of him?” said Nakuset, executive director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal.

David MacDonald, a political science professor at the University of Guelph, told CTV News Channel that he believes these statues should be taken down.

“(Macdonald) certainly was the architect of several genocides in Canada, therefore I think it’s time that we continue to address his legacies and there shouldn’t be bridges and schools and all sorts of things named after someone who so blatantly went out to destroy Indigenous nations in this country,” he said.

Montreal Mayor Valerie Plants told reporters on Wednesday that there are no immediate plans to take down the statue, but she is looking at ways to address systemic racism in the community.

“There is also an opportunity to create a dialogue between what was the past and what was right then or what was acceptable then, where at one point we’re like, as a society, ‘enough,’” she said.

November 9, 2018

A similar statue of Macdonald was taken down in Victoria, B.C., in 2018. Its artist said he is ashamed to admit that he didn’t know about residential schools until after he crafted the statue and now believes these monuments should also be taken down.

“We still need to confront our racism towards Indigenous people and if we have to tear down a few sculptures, great,” said John Dann.

Similar petitions in Toronto are calling for the city to rename Dundas Street, which is named after Henry Dundas, who delayed the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, and for Ryerson University to take down its statue of the school’s founder Egerton Ryerson,who also helped develop the residential schools. (CTV News)

 

Statues from r/canadapoliticshumour

 

Friday June 12, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday June 12, 2020

Migrant workers in Canada face unsafe working, living conditions: report

Migrant workers in Canada are facing unsafe living and working conditions amid a series of COVID-19 outbreaks on Ontario farms, according to an advocacy group.

May 7, 2020

Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC) on Monday released a report summarizing complaints made to its tip line between March 15 and May 15 by workers from Mexico and the Caribbean about racism, threats, surveillance, poor access to food, and dirty cramped bunkhouses, with 40 people in a dorm reportedly sharing one shower in one case.

“We are in the midst of a human rights catastrophe,” MWAC executive director Syed Hussan said on Monday.

The report comes after a series of recent outbreaks on Ontario farms that have seen hundreds of migrant workers reportedly test positive for COVID-19. Two migrant workers, identified as Bonifacio Eugenio Romero and Rogelio Muñoz Santos, both from Mexico, have died from the virus. At least two other migrant workers are in intensive care, MWAC said.

May 9, 2019

“The employer was not interested in our well-being, only in the work we do for him,” a farm worker from Mexico, identified as Edgar, said through a translator at an MWAC video news conference on Tuesday.

Employment and Workforce Development Minister Carla Qualtrough’s office on Monday said in a statement that there is “more to do” to protect migrant workers in Canada.

“The reported cases of inappropriate behaviours and unsafe working conditions are completely unacceptable,” the statement said, noting the government has already pledged $50 million to farmers to help with the costs of housing and paying workers for 30 hours a week during the mandatory two-week quarantine upon their arrival in the country.

But MWAC said it has received complaints from workers who reported not receiving their full quarantine pay. Others reported not receiving enough food during that two-week period.

“Sixteen workers reported receiving only one loaf of bread and a carton of eggs to feed them all for two days,” MWAC said. “One group of nine workers called us about being placed in a house where dogs had been living, that smelled of dog urine and had not been cleaned prior to the workers’ arrival. (Financial Post) 



 

Friday June 19, 2020

June 19, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday June 19, 2020

Why Canada fails time and again on the world stage

September 21, 2016

Our politicians are possibly the weakest link in the chain. They are never elected on the merits of their foreign policy ideas, and as a result never prioritize when in office. When they do think about it, they often confuse invitations to Davos and vacations in Tuscany as evidence they are worldly. They prioritize slogans (“Canada is back!”) and costumed photo-ops over the grueling legwork and devil’s bargains that real diplomatic strategy requires.

Our political leaders can be dilettantes because the Canadian public simply doesn’t care. Foreign policy is never on the top 10 list of voter priorities. They demand almost nothing from Ottawa other than access to Disney World. And they grossly overvalue soft power, mistaking Canada’s global popularity with power and influence.

And, of course, the public has the luxury of not caring because Canada is happily isolated, protected by oceans on three points of the compass, and by a mostly reliable behemoth on the fourth.

All of this was true under the previous government, and the government before them, going back decades. It has been pointed out endlessly. Hands have even been wrung. But nothing changes. Because ultimately none of us genuinely cares enough to do anything about it.

Losing the Security Council seat is not a catastrophe. It will be greeted with a lot of shrugs, and go largely unnoticed by the public. The Conservatives will howl in outrage, but they howl about even the tiniest things, so it is impossible to tell if they actually care. Tomorrow, we will move on, because the loss just doesn’t hurt.

March 4, 2020

At this point it is obvious that in order for any of this to change, we are going to need to be hurt. Canada is going to have to burn its fingers on the stove, burn them badly, before we finally take foreign affairs seriously.

What will that look like? I don’t know. Look around the world and at the various international nightmares being visited upon dozens of nations. Refugees, war, disasters, ethnic conflicts—it could be any or all of these at once. Canada’s turn will inevitably come. And when our real geopolitical crisis finally arrives, it will be ugly and traumatic as we collectively realize how many decades were wasted, and how little diplomatic muscle we have to claw our way back the day our luck runs out.

We were not elected to the United Nations Security Council today. There were two seats open and we were running against Ireland and Norway to fill them.

Before I continue, I need to say a few things to my former colleagues in the Canadian Foreign Service who might be reading this. You are going to roll your eyes at what I have to say. You’ll point out it’s all been said before (which is true). You will claim I don’t have the view from the field (also true). You will add that campaigns like this are infinitely harder than I understand (probably right). And you will accuse me of not appreciating the hard work being done by Canadian diplomats at home and abroad (here you are wrong).

Our loss in New York is not the fault of the Canadian diplomats who have been working for the last five years trying to secure the votes we needed today. The current team is one of the best, and they played the hand they were dealt as well as they could. And it was a lousy hand.

February 8, 2020

Norway and Ireland were always going to get the European bloc of votes. And while we are once again whoring ourselves out to Saudi Arabia with arms sales, we have been unpredictable enough to make them angry. That, combined with a typically pro-Israel foreign policy meant our Middle Eastern support was likely weak. In Africa, our aid spending has not kept pace with Norway or anyone else, and while our mining companies are mostly responsible players, there are enough bad apples to spoil the barrel. Add an angry China to the mix, which has one vote but lots of money to persuade other countries to vote against us, and the electoral math simply did not add up.

This loss is just more proof (throw it on the pile over there), that Canada’s foreign policy establishment is incredibly weak. This country does many things well. But international relations is just not one of them.

To start, we have a tiny academic community that studies foreign policy and educates future diplomats, limited to just a handful of specialized programs. And academia is almost entirely isolated from the practitioners at Global Affairs Canada. Unlike most other western countries, it is very rare for diplomats to move back and forth into universities (or into the private sector either). As a result, our foreign policy rarely benefits from new blood and new ideas.

Our politicians are possibly the weakest link in the chain. They are never elected on the merits of their foreign policy ideas, and as a result never prioritize when in office. When they do think about it, they often confuse invitations to Davos and vacations in Tuscany as evidence they are worldly. They prioritize slogans (“Canada is back!”) and costumed photo-ops over the grueling legwork and devil’s bargains that real diplomatic strategy requires.

Our political leaders can be dilettantes because the Canadian public simply doesn’t care. Foreign policy is never on the top 10 list of voter priorities. They demand almost nothing from Ottawa other than access to Disney World. And they grossly overvalue soft power, mistaking Canada’s global popularity with power and influence.

And, of course, the public has the luxury of not caring because Canada is happily isolated, protected by oceans on three points of the compass, and by a mostly reliable behemoth on the fourth.

October 13, 2010

All of this was true under the previous government, and the government before them, going back decades. It has been pointed out endlessly. Hands have even been wrung. But nothing changes. Because ultimately none of us genuinely cares enough to do anything about it.

Losing the Security Council seat is not a catastrophe. It will be greeted with a lot of shrugs, and go largely unnoticed by the public. The Conservatives will howl in outrage, but they howl about even the tiniest things, so it is impossible to tell if they actually care. Tomorrow, we will move on, because the loss just doesn’t hurt.

At this point it is obvious that in order for any of this to change, we are going to need to be hurt. Canada is going to have to burn its fingers on the stove, burn them badly, before we finally take foreign affairs seriously.

What will that look like? I don’t know. Look around the world and at the various international nightmares being visited upon dozens of nations. Refugees, war, disasters, ethnic conflicts—it could be any or all of these at once. Canada’s turn will inevitably come. And when our real geopolitical crisis finally arrives, it will be ugly and traumatic as we collectively realize how many decades were wasted, and how little diplomatic muscle we have to claw our way back the day our luck runs out. (MacLean’s)