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Thursday October 20, 2022

October 20, 2022Hamilton Spectator – Thursday October 20, 2022

Emergencies Act inquiry spells trouble for Trudeau, Poilievre

To say this will be a political and media circus is an understatement. The list of potential witnesses includes key members of cabinet, such as Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and, most notably, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Convoy organizers including Tamara Lich, Pat King and Chris Barber are also expected to be called.

May 13, 2022

The most important part of this hearing may not be the testimony of politicians or convoy supporters, however, but that of the RCMP and intelligence services. How did they assess the threat to public safety? What advice did they give the government, or not? How was that advice treated once received? Was it exaggerated or misinterpreted in any way?

Canadians need clarity on the real state of the threat. If the government overreached for political purposes, then the Liberals will pay the price. Expect the Conservatives to try to find every opportunity to bring the government down before its self-imposed deadline of 2025. The Commission’s report is due by next February — in time for a spring budget and a confidence vote in the House that could plunge Canada into an election.

If the Commission finds that the government was justified in invoking the act, however, the shoe is on the other foot. Expect Liberals to start running attack ads featuring a smiling Poilievre and fellow Conservatives ferrying coffee to protesters. Trudeau could then either engineer his defeat over the budget, or simply dissolve Parliament and go to the polls. And if he doesn’t pull the plug in the spring, there’s always next September, when convoy leaders go to court on a number of criminal charges, and the whole circus starts again.

August 26, 2022

At a time when inflation is rampant, interest rates are rising, and the Liberal government looks increasingly past its best before date, Trudeau doesn’t have many cards to play. The one card he has is that the Conservatives failed to stand for law and order — one of the pillars of their party, no less — at a time of national crisis. And he knows that the convoy does not sit well with “the public” its proponents claimed to represent.

Polling done at the time of the protests found that a majority did not support the convoy protests, including in Alberta where 61 per cent disagreed with the goals of the protest and 67 per cent disagreed with the means. And a Nanos poll taken six months later found that 70 per cent of Canadians still take a negative or somewhat negative view of politicians who openly supported the protests. Another recent Nanos poll found that support for the convoy was one of the “negative” attributes voters held about Poilievre, together with being “too right wing,” divisive, and “similar to Donald Trump.”

Will “Memories of the Freedom Convoy” be the secret sauce that Trudeau uses to win a fourth term in office? Will the Tories founder over ill-advised Tim Hortons runs? Time — and testimony — will tell. (The National Post)

 

Wednesday October 19, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday October 19, 2022

Hamilton’s mayoral candidates

2014 Mayoral Race

There are a lot of differences among the nine people running for mayor of Hamilton. But many of them have things in common — an interest in changing housing, infrastructure, and the culture at city hall. And while some of these ideas may sound familiar to voters, others aren’t even within the mayor’s power to enact, falling under provincial or federal jurisdiction. (CBC)

 

Tuesday October 18, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday October 18, 2022

Drones Embody an Iran-Russia Alliance Built on Hostility to the U.S.

September 22, 2022

The Iranian-made drones that Russia sent on Monday to divebomb Ukraine’s capital delivered the most emphatic proof yet that Tehran has become a rare, increasingly close ally to the Kremlin, offering both weapons and international support that Russia sorely lacks.

There is no deep love between Russia, newly a pariah for attacking another country, and Iran, for decades one of the most strategically isolated nations in the world. But the two authoritarian governments, both chafing under Western sanctions, share a view of the United States as their great enemy and a threat to their grip on power.

“This is a partnership of convenience between two embattled dictatorships,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Both countries are deep in crisis, struggling economically and politically. Iran is attempting to quell street protests that pose the most serious challenge in years to the government, while Russia is trying to manage rising dissension over a faltering war effort and an unpopular draft.

The emergence of a Moscow-Tehran alliance has multiple international implications, potentially dimming prospects for a new agreement to rein in Iran’s nuclear program and raising the pressure on Israel, Iran’s sworn enemy, to take Ukraine’s side in the war.

The Ayatollah, by Graeme MacKay, c1980

The relationship between Russia and Iran has been developing for years. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia deployed his air force to Syria starting in 2015 to prevent the collapse of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime ally of Tehran. Russia and Iran worked in lock step militarily, with Russian warplanes providing cover for Iranian militiamen and Iranian proxy forces fighting on the ground.

Syria was one example of the effort by both to find ways to sap American strength and prestige wherever they could in the world, and Ukraine provides a similar opportunity on an even larger, more visible scale.

After its 1979 revolution, Iran formulated foreign policy around the slogan “Neither East nor West,” equally wary of the Soviet Union and the United States. Now, the Islamic Republic is choosing sides, analysts said, and images of Iran’s exploding drones accurately hitting their targets advertise it as a regional power to be taken seriously.

In Tehran, the spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry denied on Monday that his country was selling weapons to Russia, even as social media outlets linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which developed the lumbering yet lethal drones, boasted about them.

“There is no doubt that the drones used by Russia’s military are Iranian,” said a post on Sepah Cyberi, a Telegram channel affiliated with the Guards, while the country’s cyberarmy chief, Ali Akbar Raefipour, gloated on Twitter that Iran’s Shahed drone was now “the most talked about weapon in the world.”

Iran does not want to highlight the weapons sales because Ukraine is generally more popular than Russia among ordinary Iranians, and the Islamic Republic casts itself as a defender of underdogs in world affairs, said Mahmoud Shoori, deputy director of the Institute of Iran and Eurasia Studies in Tehran and an expert on Iran-Russia relations.

But at the same time, “Iran also wants to show the world that it has a military superpower as an ally and it has the capacity to sell weapons to such a power,” he said in a telephone interview. “It shows the West’s policies of maximum pressure to isolate Iran have not worked.” (The New York Times) 

From sketch to finish, see the current way Graeme completes an editorial cartoon using an iPencil, the Procreate app, and a couple of cheats on an iPad Pro …

Saturday October 15, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday October 15, 2022

New Hamilton council must grow political will to tackle complex and polarizing issues

Of the myriad issues and challenges facing Hamilton’s new city council, few are as complex and polarizing as homelessness and the drug epidemic that continues to take a horrific toll.

Glorious architecture gallery

Mental health, poverty, addictions, safe and secure housing — all are at play in one big tangled Gordian knot. But if the new council just begins with a sense of urgency and addresses some of the pieces, it will already have achieved what the current council has not.

To begin, we need a broad and official acknowledgment that what is happening now isn’t working. While no one wants to see tent encampments in the lower city or elsewhere, the solution cannot simply be to tear them down and displace the residents. All that does is move the problem from one place to another, making it more difficult to serve this challenged population.

We have empathy for residents who feel less safe and inconvenienced by the presence of encampments, but there is no sweeping this under the rug.

What we need is more stable and secure housing options. The current council hasn’t done nearly enough. A part of the solution could be the HATS initiative which would see homeless people accommodated in purpose-built small shelters, clustered together for optimal service delivery. Tiny shelter communities are working in many other places in Canada and the U.S., including as close as Kitchener.

Some Hamilton councillors have expressed support for HATS, but that support is typically accompanied by a list of locations where they don’t want the settlement to be. Everyone can agree the idea should help, but no one wants to see in their ward. That’s not real support. In other cases local government has actually become actively involved in the project, but here council has been hands off. The private group driving the pilot project is seeking a site, and if they find one on private property, HATS could come to life. But it will be in spite of city council, not because of it.

Similarly, consider the opioid epidemic. Three years ago, city hall recognized the need for more supervised consumption and treatment services sites (CTS) that are proven to save lives by having resources on hand to help overdose victims. The limited services running now are literally saving lives, but the supply of CTS sites is far from adequate.

October 1, 2022

We know the city needs more. Community groups are actively working on plans for more, but they are facing opposition from residents, in particular in the lower city. Their argument goes something like: Inner city wards already house an above average number of services and shelters, so the needed CTS capacity should be in some other part of the city. The problem with that is that the population that needs the service isn’t someplace else, and it doesn’t make much sense to open a CTS site where drug users won’t use it.

It is worth noting here that city staff are not the issue. They are already working with others on the ground with community partners. What’s missing is political will. It is our fervent hope that a new council and mayor will change that. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

From sketch to finish, see the current way Graeme completes an editorial cartoon using an iPencil, the Procreate app, and a couple of cheats on an iPad Pro …