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Saturday December 3, 2022

December 3, 2022 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday December 3, 2022

How Canada can build on World Cup run ahead of 2026 cycle

June 6, 2015

There were still plenty of valuable lessons for Canada despite the losses, though, and Les Rouges can apply those “learnings” – as coach John Herdman refers to them – when the country co-hosts the 2026 World Cup.

The Canadian men’s national team made history, just not enough of it.

As breathtaking as the team’s performances were in various stages, Canada still suffered defeat in all three games. It’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions based on small sample sizes in tournament settings, let alone in a nation’s first men’s World Cup in 36 years.

Posted in: Canada Tagged: 2022-40, Canada, funding, men, money, olympics, soccer, Sports, Team Canada, trophy, women, World Cup

Wednesday September 22, 2021

September 25, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday September 22, 2021

Trudeau stays in power but Liberals fall short of majority

August 14, 2021

This is Mr Trudeau’s third federal election win, but his critics say the poll was a waste of time.

The Liberals are projected to win 158 seats, short of the 170 seats needed for the majority Mr Trudeau was seeking with his early election call.

The Conservatives have held onto their main opposition status and are expected to win about 122 seats.

“There are still votes to be counted but what we’ve seen tonight is millions of Canadians have chosen a progressive plan,” Mr Trudeau told supporters in Montreal in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

“You elected a government that will fight for you and deliver for you,” he said.

The election, which took place during a fourth pandemic wave in Canada, was the most expensive in the country’s history, costing some C$600m ($470m; £344m).

The projected results suggest a parliament strikingly similar to the one elected just two years ago in 2019.

Federal Election 2021

The snap election call, sending Canadians to the polls for the second time in two years, was widely seen as a bid by Mr Trudeau to secure a majority government and he struggled to explain why a campaign was necessary. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole suggested it was a waste of time and money.

“Canadians sent him back with another minority at a cost of $600m and deeper divisions in our great country”, he told reporters.

Mr Trudeau maintained that the election gave the incoming government a clear mandate in moving forward.

But over the course of the campaign, he struggled to convince voters of the need for an election, which also coincided with rising Covid-19 case loads due to the Delta variant.

Separately he was also heckled by anti-vaccine protesters on the campaign trail, with some shouting they would refuse the Covid jab. (Continued: BBC) 

 

Posted in: Canada Tagged: 2021-33, Canada, election, election2021, Minority, power, prize, ribbon, shelf, trophy

Saturday November 21, 2020

November 28, 2020 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday November 21, 2020

Why Trump’s Operation Warp Speed is credited with helping race for COVID-19 vaccine

Operation Warp Speed, a Trump administration initiative to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines as fast as possible, should be lauded as a successful endeavour in what has otherwise been a poor effort to deal with the coronavirus, experts say.

September 10, 2020

“No doubt, Operation Warp Speed is a huge success,” said Tinglong Dai, associate professor of Operations Management and Business Analytics at Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School in Baltimore.

“You can like or hate the Trump administration, but no doubt, it’s a huge success — unprecedented success.”

Jesse Goodman, the former chief scientist of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, agreed that the U.S. government deserves credit for the high priority placed on Operation Warp Speed.

“This is a bright spot in the pandemic response. I mean, the rest of it has been dismal,” said Goodman, who is also director of Georgetown University’s Center on Medical Product Access, Safety and Stewardship.

Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also lauded Operation Warp Speed for being a “success — certainly in the arena of vaccines, it’s been a success” in his remarks at a recent virtual summit organized by the medical news site Stat.

November 14, 2020

Launched in May, Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is a government initiated private/public $10 billion US program to help provide support to companies in the development, manufacturing and distribution of 300 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, with the aim of having initial doses ready by January 2021. 

Allison Winnike, president of the Texas-based Immunization Partnership, an organization providing advocacy and information about immunization initiatives, said that Moderna benefited tremendously from Operation Warp Speed, in part, by receiving close to $1 billion to support its vaccine development and clinical trials.

As for the role the funding played in the development of Pfizer’s vaccine, that’s a bit fuzzier. Last week, when the company announced it had developed a vaccine that was more than 90 per cent effective, U.S. President Donald Trump said that Pfizer was suggesting “it wasn’t part of Warp Speed, but that turned out to be an unfortunate misrepresentation.” (CBC News) 

 

Posted in: USA Tagged: 2020-39, baby, celebration, Coronavirus, cover-19, cure, Donald Trump, monument, pandemic, toddler, trophy, USA, Vaccine, virus

Friday June 19, 2020

June 19, 2020 by Graeme MacKay

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) 

 

Posted in: Canada, International Tagged: 2020-22, beaver, Canada, diplomacy, International, issues, trophy, U.N. Security Council, U.N. United Nations, world stage

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This website contains satirical commentaries of current events going back several decades. Some readers may not share this sense of humour nor the opinions expressed by the artist. To understand editorial cartoons it is important to understand their effectiveness as a counterweight to power. It is presumed readers approach satire with a broad minded foundation and healthy knowledge of objective facts of the subjects depicted.

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