Canada's new PPE supply chain flunks first test

Just eight days ago the CBC was regaling us with a yarn about how Canada was "building our own supply chain for PPE." I thought at the time building "our" supply chain in China was perhaps not the most sensible course of action.

Today it was revealed that the cargo jets sent to pick up the output from "our" supply chain returned to Canada empty.

Hate to say I told ya so, but here you go.

Maybe Dominic Barton thought he had enough shlep with the commies to pull this off, but after we kidnapped Meng Wanzhou and the Chinese kidnapped the two Michaels in retaliation, it was obvious that some hostage trading needed to happen before we considered China as the place for "our" PPE supply chain.

You'd think this would have occurred to the guy who spent years as the global boss of international business consultancy McKinsey and Company.

The trouble with immigrants

I see where Karen Wang has been shelved as the Liberal candidate for Burnaby South after party apparatchiks found out she'd referred to her primary competition, NDP leader-without-a-seat Jagmeet Singh, as an "Indian."

Jagmeet has been the lame-duck NDP leader since he became NDP leader, but thus far nobody has had the politically incorrect effrontery to refer to him as "Indian."

We're talking about Indians from India, of course, not the Canadian variety... you know, the folks we swindled out of this land. Karen had the temerity not only to note that Jagmeet was "Indian," but she suggested to her Chinese constituency that if they all voted along ethnic lines, they could collectively deny him a seat in the House, thereby rendering the lame duck even lamer.

Cue the moral outrage! The Lib party elite desperately want Jagmeet to win in Burnaby, mainly because they want a lame-duck NDP leader to run against in the next federal election. God forbid the NDP come up with someone remotely appealing as the leader they'd have to face!

So Wang's candidacy has been duly rescinded to appease the gods of political correctitude, but also to serve the interests of the party elite.

Here's how the always astute CBC reports the matter;

"Recent online comments by Karen Wang are not aligned with the values of the Liberal Party of Canada," said a statement from the party.

"The Liberal Party has a clear commitment to positive politics and support for Canadian diversity, and the same is always expected of our candidates."

So Karen Wang's sin was to appeal to the ethnic identity of voters in Burnaby South.

That's the trouble with immigrants. Sometimes they remember where they came from. Sometimes they even remember the ethnic rivalries of the places they came from. That's obviously a taboo in our politically correct climate.

Because diversity is our strength...

My own clan were DP immigrants from Germany who got off the boat at Pier 21 in 1956. Of course we remembered where we came from! The fact that the Germans had lost two world wars in rapid succession was never allowed to becloud our belief that we were superior in every way to Poles, Greeks, Italians... just about everyone, come to think of it! That's just the way of the world...

Or at least it used to be.

In the fullness of time, our extended clan eventually adopted, married into, became business partners with, or sponsored as refugees virtually every ethnicity under the sun! 

The world today is in the hands of folks who write books like "Maximum Canada." That's the McKinsey & Co vision of a Canada with a hundred million citizens who all cleave to a generic and politically correct version of nationhood where "diversity is our strength..."

Whatever that means.

Karen Wang is obviously too smart to internalize that bullshit.


Diversity will only become a strength when we can call out, comment on, and at the end of the day, respect our differences.

(Postscript 25.1.2019  My dear parents recently had their DNA tested by one of those ancestry outfits, and apparently their German DNA is swamped by Swedish and East European DNA... so we weren't really all that "German" after all.)

Maximum Canada: Why 35 million Canadians are not enough to keep making the rich richer

Doug Saunders has been pounding the maximum immigration drum for a few years now, and he's got a new book out that promises to up the decibel level a few notches. What better way for his publisher to ensure a friendly reception for the book than to farm out the review to Irvin Studin, who has himself been banging on the same drum for the better part of a decade?

For better or worse, Studin gives the game away with a shout-out to The Century Initiative, "an ambitious new think tank... created explicitly to prepare Canada for our evolution to 100 million."

Created by whom, you ask?

Good question! A cynic might say The Century Project is a side project for big biz/big gov mega-consultants McKinsey & Co, and they'd be more or less correct. As such, they bring a particular world view to bear on their vision for the future. Specifically, they are aghast that current demographic trends will irrevocably impair future growth of Canada's GDP.

The solution? Open the immigration floodgates! Recruit the best and the brightest from around the world in their tens of millions! It's the only way to ensure our continued prosperity, don't ya know!

I'm not so sure. I get that when these folks look out the windows of their multi-million dollar homes they see the lovely diverse and prosperous Canada of their cliches, but that's not the Canada most Canadians live in. Most Canadians struggle with housing affordability, job and income insecurity, child-care availability, and a litany of similar pedestrian concerns that don't trouble the tenured and the connected.

That aside, hasn't the notion of perpetual growth in a finite world lost some of its lustre over the past few decades? We should be focused on ensuring sustainable prosperity for the 35 million who call Canada home today, shouldn't we? And we have a very long way to go in creating that inclusive prosperity for all before we even get around to worrying about its sustainability.

We need to get our house in order before we put out the welcome mat for tens of millions of "new Canadians."

Otherwise, they'll just be propping up an economic model that has long outlived its usefulness.


Look around you.