Eternal waterboys take on Yellow Peril

Read in my Globe today that Canada is giving Nokia Corporation $40,000,000 to research 5G technology. I find it pathetic in the extreme that we can't support Canadian tech companies with that money.

Every now and then we manage, in spite of ourselves, to grow a world class enterprise, but they never last long. Usually they're absorbed by foreign rivals. Sometimes they're just mismanaged into irrelevance, like Nortel. Sometimes their founders get rich and lose interest, like Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. Funding think-tanks and hobnobbing with intellectuals is way more fun than tech, isn't it?

So we hobble along while Finland prospers. Finland; a country with a population not quite the size of Toronto's. Finland, where kids don't start school till they're seven... but beat us consistently in educational outcomes.

What's their secret? Here in Canada we're constantly told that our diversity is our strength. Do the Finns have more diversity?

No. So it's obviously something else...


The context for this story is of course the brouhaha over Huawei. Since Canadians are incapable, in spite of our diversity, of developing leading edge technologies, we must be dependant on foreigners. Huawei, being a Chinese company, might use their 5G technology to spy on us. That would be bad. Using technology from Finland or Sweden or the US would be OK, because they'd never spy on us.

This is an absurd line of reasoning. Anyone who wants to spy on us will, regardless of where we source our 5G technology. There's a thinly veiled racism behind this logic which is quite at odds with our "diversity is our strength" motto.

Sinophobia. Yup, we've apologized for the head tax, but the Yellow Peril is still a thing.

Good-bye Huawei, hello Nokia!

Trudeau more dangerous than Trump - professor

Professor Hamid Dabashi doesn't hold back in this take-down of PM Fluffy. Trudeau's pseudo-progressive fakery is possibly more damaging than the buffoonery of Trump, he says. You'd almost think he's been reading this blog!

Every other day another apology... but what changes? What gets done?

Precious little, that's what.

Trudeau is the perfect pol for the modern era. All optics, no substance. What with our Feminist Foreign Policy, our newfound commitment to Native Rights and Oil Pipelines, and our obsequious toadying to Uncle Sam, we are one Nation from Sea to Sunny Sea, labouring under an utterly massive case of cognitive dissonance.

Called out on the arrest of the Huawei CFO by Canadian officials, Trudeau responds with a load of hokum on how this nation has an independent judiciary, blahblahblah, and oh yes, he did happen to know about it three days before it happened, but what the heck, just because it's independent doesn't mean it ain't leaky!...

This is the response of the leader of a supposedly independent country which just made an arrest on behalf of the US, because a Chinese company isn't obeying America's orders that they refrain from doing business with Iran.

How is it America's business to dictate to China who they do business with?


As an aside, Trudeau is lying when he says no decision has been made about whether Huawei will be part of Canada's next generation internet.

The decision HAS been made, and no, Huawei will NOT be a part of it. That decision about Canada's future was made in Washington, not Ottawa.