anniversary

Thursday July 18, 2019

July 18, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday July 18, 2019

‘Send Her Back’: The Bigoted Rallying Cry of Trump 2020

December 9, 2015

On Wednesday night in North Carolina, Donald Trump agitated rally-goers with inflammatory rhetoric about Representative Ilhan Omar, a naturalized American born in Somalia, until his supporters began chanting “send her back”––as if a legal immigrant who became a U.S. citizen can or should be denied equal treatment under the law and extra-constitutionally deported by the president.

Burning a copy of the U.S. Constitution would show no more contempt for it than the crowd’s bigoted, nativist reverie about tyrannically deposing an elected member of Congress. No opinion expressed by the congresswoman, no matter how wrongheaded, could excuse the un-American mob.

The crowd’s authoritarian outburst and the purposefully divisive, irresponsible presidential rhetoric that prompted it portends an ugly Trump campaign for reelection. Like “lock her up,” the chant that Trump rally-goers directed at Hillary Clinton in 2016, “send her back” is poised to travel the country with the president.

January 13, 2018

Already, the civic poison of the chant has been televised and celebrated on social media by Trump supporters. Naturalized immigrants must have heard it and felt anxious. Racists must have heard it and felt glad. Children must have heard it, too, and felt uncomfortable, knowing in their gut that the chant is wrong. Some kids are surely being malignly influenced by its repudiation of the American creed.

Republicans know that more of the same is coming. Wednesday’s rally put them on notice: Trump intends to run a reelection campaign that stokes the ugliest impulses of his base, no matter how much damage it does to the civic fabric of America and no matter how much hatred it stirs up against immigrant populations. The overwhelming majority of the GOP and its electorate are sticking by Trump anyway, even though they could be working for a contested primary election.

That is shameful.

How many times between now and Election Day 2020 will Trump whip up a crowd of his supporters into a new frenzy of bigoted, unconstitutional nativism? Four more years of this would be devastating for America. (The Atlantic) 

MacKay’s Sci-Fi Gallery

February 26, 2008
April 30, 2009
July 20, 2009
May 9, 2012
February 21, 2013
March 19, 2013
January 31, 2014
May 7, 2014
November 13, 2014
January 16, 2015
August 19, 2016
May 31, 2018
November 14, 2018
November 18, 2017
July 18, 2019
July 17, 2019
September 22, 2012

 

Wednesday July 17, 2019

July 17, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday July 17, 2019

Tomorrow’s Ambitious Goal

Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party is struggling to make inroads in Ontario, the battleground province that’s likely to decide October’s federal election. He might have Ontario Premier Doug Ford to thank for that.

June 8, 2019

Multiple polls suggest Ford and his Progressive Conservative government are deeply unpopular, just one year after ousting Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals from office.

While those polls undoubtedly aren’t being welcomed by provincial Progressive Conservatives — and may have been the motive behind Monday’s about-face on cuts 

 to municipal funding — they don’t necessarily represent a pressing problem for Ford. He still has another three years to go before the next provincial election.

But the Ford government’s dismal poll numbers could present a big problem for Scheer, who needs Ontario if he’s to win the federal vote that’s now less than five months away.

November 20, 2018

The Conservatives continue to hold a six-point lead over the Liberals nationwide in the CBC’s Canada Poll Tracker, an aggregation of all publicly available polling data. The Conservatives have led ever since the SNC-Lavalin affair sent Liberal support tumbling.

The party has seen some significant gains in certain parts of the country. Compared to where the Poll Tracker pegged Conservative support in January and early February (before the SNC-Lavalin story broke), the party has gained up to five points in Quebec and the Prairies and between five and nine points in Atlantic Canada. (CBC) 

July 20, 2009

Meanwhile, Five decades after sending humans to the Moon, NASA is tasked with repeating the feat—and doing it by 2024, the ambitious deadline set by U.S. President Donald Trump’s team. But it is unclear how the space agency will surmount some formidable technical, political and financial challenges to pull off a lunar landing in just four and a half years.

“If the pieces come together in the right way they can pull it off,” says Ryan Watkins, a lunar scientist with the Planetary Science Institute who is based in St Louis, Missouri. “But they have to come together.”

NASA’s leaders have yet to make key decisions about how the Moon effort, called Artemis after Apollo’s twin sister, will proceed. The agency does not have a rocket ready to fly humans into deep space, and it has not developed a lunar lander since the Apollo programme ended in 1972. Then there is Congress, which controls NASA’s budget and seems increasingly uninterested in paying for the Moon mission. (Scientific American) 

 

Thursday June 6, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday June 6, 2019

When the tide turned: Canadians hold massive D-Day event at Juno Beach

World leaders, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, gathered on France’s Normandy coast today to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the remarkable military and political achievement known as D-Day.

May 5, 2000

There have been two commemoration events along the 10-kilometre stretch of coastline that Canadians fought to liberate — one Canadian, one international.

As many as 5,000 people, including French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, attended the Canadian event. Thursday’s commemoration in France follows another memorial, on Wednesday in the U.K., that was attended by leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May and Justin Trudeau.

Their chests laden with medals, Canadian veterans listened solemnly, overlooking the tall grass and sandy expanse below in Normandy on Thursday.

Naturally, the beach today looks entirely different from the one that greeted the invading allies on June 6, 1944. The three major communities along the coastline have regained in many respects the sleepy resort quality they enjoyed before the Germans came.

Three-quarters of a century ago today, Fred Turnbull was sitting in a landing craft plowing through the grey, choppy surf towards the shell-raked Normandy coast.

November 11, 2009

His landing craft took ashore a section of troops from the Régiment de la Chaudière, a reserve brigade.

His first hint of the invasion’s cost in blood was the sight of the bodies of military divers floating in the surf — killed as they tried to disarm metal obstacles booby-trapped by the Germans.

The rising tide carried the landing craft over the deadly traps, but all six boats — including Turnbull’s barge — were blown up after they had delivered their troops and turned back to sea to get more.

Turnbull and his men had to swim from the barge to the beach. There they waited as the battle raged around them for three hours before a larger landing ship came in and took them off.

“That was the worst part of it, waiting to be rescued,” said Turnbull.

The soldiers cracked jokes about their plight and tried to remain calm while waiting for retrieval. One enterprising sailor liberated a bottle of rum from the wreckage — which no doubt made the time pass more comfortably.

June 6, 2014

Canadian military planners had expected 1,800 casualties on D-Day — killed, wounded and captured. According to federal government records, the day saw 1,074 Canadian casualties during the taking of the beachhead.

D-Day was just the beginning, though. By the end of the Normandy campaign, more than 5,000 troops had been killed out of roughly 18,000 Canadian casualties. (CBC)

A crazy amount of social media shares on this one…


 

Wednesday June 5, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday June 5, 2019

Cabinet must stop enabling Ford’s incompetence

An enabler, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a person or thing that makes something possible.”

August 9, 2018

In light of the Ontario government’s obsession with alcohol, it’s also instructive to turn to literature on the psychology of addiction, which further defines an enabler as someone who “passively permits or unwittingly encourages” destructive behaviour and often “feels powerless to prevent it.”

And that brings us to the 20 men and women who were elected by Ontario voters a year ago this Friday and subsequently named to Premier Doug Ford’s cabinet.

When a series of unlikely circumstances collided to make Ford leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, those who had experienced the Ford brand of governing by chaos rather than consensus at Toronto City Hall were incredulous.

If he can’t be trusted to run a city, how can he run the entire province?

March 13, 2018

Don’t worry, his supporters said, Ford will shake things up a bit but he won’t do anything too reckless because Queen’s Park isn’t anything like city hall and the seasoned politicians who will join him at the cabinet table will temper the worst of his tendencies.

In short, they’ll keep him in check.

But, as we’ve seen, it’s been the other way around.

The City of Toronto, for all the seeming messiness of its council meetings, is full of independent thinkers.

It’s under the party system that Ford’s brand of reckless governing has been able to spread like measles through an unvaccinated community.

September 14, 2018

With the help of his chief of staff, Dean French, Ford has brought all those experienced and capable politicians who were supposed to lift him up, down to his level. A level that surely the likes of Caroline Mulroney and Christine Elliott, who had ambitions to lead the party, could scarcely have imagined.

As attorney general, Mulroney acquiesced to Ford’s rush to hit the nuclear button with the “notwithstanding” clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in his vindictive move to cut Toronto city council in half with the municipal election already underway. And the government has churned out legislation to shield itself from the financial liabilities that go with its desire to tear up contracts.

Ford may want to use powers that are rarely used for good reason, as though they’re free candy for the taking, but the adults in the building are supposed to know better.

While everything may begin with Ford and his unelected advisers, it can’t come to pass without the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet.

One of them, Environment Minister Rod Phillips, once said he was running for the Ontario PCs to be part of a “positive, inclusive” team.

November 17, 2018

How is that going?

Finance Minister Vic Fedeli happily adds and subtracts billions from the provincial deficit depending, it seems, on the day of the week and whether Ford is in a mood to attack the past Liberal government or tout his success as a leader and general good guy.

Under Ford, cabinet ministers jump up like trained seals, clap wildly and support the unsupportable with canned lines that don’t pass even a cursory sniff test.

Did they all agree to check their brains and backbones at the door to cabinet?

Health Minister Christine Elliott, Education Minister Lisa Thompson, Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark, and Children and Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod all lurch from one half-baked policy to the next depending on which way Ford Nation winds blow.

January 12, 2019

Some of these cabinet ministers may want to tell themselves they’re powerless to stop this and that’s par for the course with enablers. But it’s not true. As Oxford tells us, enablers make things possible.

Some of Ford’s cabinet might also still be imagining a future for themselves where memoirs are written about their time in politics. They should start thinking about how they want the 2018-2022 chapter to read.

While Ontarians are gasping at how Year One under the Ford government has gone, and holding their breath for what’s to come in Year Two, his cabinet ministers can — and should — do more than that.

Those 20 men and women can ask themselves whether they want to continue to be enablers or whether they want to relocate their spines and try for something more. (Hamilton SpectatorEditorial) https://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/9408338-editorial-cabinet-must-stop-enabling-ford-s-incompetence/

 

Happy 20th Anniversary!

Friday July 7 2017

In the early Summer 1997, I was a GO bus commuter living in Toronto and starting out my new job in the city where I was born.

My 1st cartoon published in a mainstream paper was of then Fed. Foreign Minister Lloyd.  Toronto Star, 1995

Hamilton and its daily newspaper was drawing me back, and it all began with a big giant bonfire and a black smoke plume that drifted off in the skies for as far as the eye could see. The festive atmosphere inspired the above cartoon and the resulting angry reader feedback quickly thrust me into the new gig that would bring much much more hate mail. Knowing the lasting effects of the Plastimet fire, and increasing numbers of firefighters dying prematurely in the following years, I don’t think I would’ve been as frivolous in my depiction.  Yet it illustrates a popular sentiment at the time, and something that a photo or story can’t do on its own. It also presents how attitudes and opinions change over time, and in the time I’ve been a cartoonist, there has been plenty of that as I look back at my own work and wince and scratch my head.

1997 Introduction

I had been getting my illustrations printed in the Spec for a couple of years, but it was a brash young editor by the name of Kirk LaPointe who put out the call for a staff editorial cartoonist – a position the Spectator had abandoned when the great cartoonist Blaine had taken to retirement 5 years before. I don’t know what competition I was up against, but I recall doubting I was ever going to be the one who’d get chosen, and was probably the reason I showed up at the interview with Mr. LaPointe wearing shorts.

To the point of being hired at the Spectator my only experience working for another company had been in retail, mostly to grocery stores, wrapping up meat for customers, and destined to become a life long butcher. I joke that the pursuit of becoming a butcher happened in a metaphorical sense by becoming a satirist, carving up public figures on a daily basis.

Yet, even 20 years ago, the thought of a newspaper hiring an editorial cartoonist seemed pretty crazy. There were many many of them around in 1997, compared to now, and almost all had decades of tenure at their respective newspapers when I and a few others of my age came on the scene. Over the past 2 decades many of the greats, like Sue Dewar, Roy Peterson, Norm Muffit, Bob Krieger, Cam Cardow, Anthony Jenkins, Dale Cummings, Mike Graston, and Thomas (TAB) Boldt, to name a few colleagues just in Canada, have either retired, moved on to other jobs, or died.

The joke in 2008 was that all of Canada’s working editorial cartoonists could fit in a pickup truck. In 2017, we could probably fit in a Volkswagen Beetle.

A lot of changes have happened in 20 years. A lot. When I was escorted to my work area in 1997, I was given a table to sit at in a back corner of the editorial page cave. I could use Blaine’s old drafting table, but at the time he had been saying over the previous 5 years since retirement that he was going to drop by sometime to take it home (I think it hung around for another 5 years.) It probably took another month after being hired before I got a phone, and probably 2 more years until I got my first computer to use in the office. In the time between, and you can see the change in my style as evidence, technology in the form of Photoshop, has completely changed the look of my drawings. The Internet and social media has changed the way I deliver my editorial cartoons. This website mackaycartoons.net, has been archiving my cartoons since the year 2000.

And, oh yeah, in 20 years I moved back to Hamilton, got married, bought a house, became a father to 3 girls, built lasting friendships, got syndicated, became a President (Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists), hosted a convention (of the ACEC), got Wikipediaed, a “shop” owner, and published a book. Who knows what the next 20 years hold but I owe much of my present day success to the one and only The Hamilton Spectator.

 

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On July 7th 1997 I became editorial cartoonist at the Hamilton Spectator. In that time, more than 4500 cartoons have been created in the past 20 years. Above is a slide show of 20 cartoons one for each year.

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