JWR and the Indian problem

Jody Wilson-Raybould proved something the other day.

On the face of it, you'd think JWR has been successfully assimilated. She's ticked all the right boxes on the way up the ladder in the settlers' world.

Good solid professional education in the settlers' education system?

Check.

Stellar career in the law profession?

Check.

Success in settler politics?

Check.

Elevated to the highest ranks of the settler government?

Check...

So you'd think that she had successfully internalized settler values... but you'd be wrong!

For all those checked boxes, JWR obviously has failed to fully internalize settler values. When it came to the crunch, she insisted on putting honour and integrity above careerism and the interests of the corporate greedbags, even when relentlessly hounded by the most powerful men in the land!


More settlers should wake up to the fact that she is exactly the kind of leader we all desperately need.

Fluffy's fried

Watched the Jody Wilson-Raybould hearing from Ottawa for a spell this evening. I think PM Fluffy's days are numbered. JWR exudes a confidence and sincerity that Justin has long lost, especially the sincerity part. Justin's hypocrisy has been exposed for all the land to see. The PM who is all about keeping politics out of the judicial system when he's doing gopher work for Donald Trump (in the Huawei case) has no qualms at all about arm-twisting his Justice minister in the SNC-Lavalin affair.

I think Trudeau should resign. The Liberal Party should have a leadership convention, which JWR could readily win, and then they'd have a chance in October. Otherwise, they're screwed.

And we'd be screwed too, because do you really think things have a snowball's chance in hell of improving under a PM Scheer?

Nope!

Ideally, we'd have a party to the left of the Liberals with a little more appeal than what we see there, but I'm not hopeful.

As for those DPA laws, how is it conceivably a "reason" to have them just because the US and UK have them? Oh, because we need to be "competitive." In the US especially, big corporations routinely get the DPA treatment time and again. It's clearly not a deterrent to corporate malfeasance.

I would suggest it's not intended to be. What it is, is a corporate get-out-of-jail-free card. Not for the company or the shareholders, but for the executives caught dealing dirty. Canada's DPA was sneaked into law in the back pages of last year's budget omnibus bill explicitly for the benefit of SNC. If we were really that concerned about the "rule of law," that should never have happened.

Interesting to look back and see what former SNC Chair Gwyn Morgan had to say when the poop was starting to hit the fan for the company back in 2013. Gwyn had absolutely no idea! I'm guessing he'd be all for the DPA. Gwyn's not a guy who believes in government regulation. We should just cross our fingers and hope the greedbags who cut ethical corners, take integrity shortcuts, and skirt the law somehow develop an honest corporate culture.


Really?

Justin, Jagmeet, and Jody; fixing Canada's politics in three easy steps

Step One: Jagmeet's had a year and a half to create some buzz around the party he took over from Angry Tom. Nothing has happened. Clearly the party needs fresh leadership, a fact that will become even more clear if he fails to win Burnaby South.

Step Two: Draft the most popular politician in Canada, former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, to be the next NDP leader.

Step Three: Elect Jody as PM in October. The vast majority of the populace is beyond fed-up with Justin's over-the-top virtue signalling and the content-free grandstanding of his faux feminist rhetoric. Yes Justin, we need more feminist bitumen pipelines to meet our climate change obligations... now please go away, and take that photo-op junkie Freeland with you!

Justin Trudeau and the limits of virtue-signalling

Since being elected in 2015, Justin Trudeau has led a government committed to signalling, non-stop, its support for the loftiest ideals right across the spectrum of governance. They have been busy posing as the patrons of human rights, native rights, refugee rights, children's rights, LGBTQ rights, women's reproductive rights... nowhere on the planet is there a higher concentration of virtuous politicians than in Ottawa.

Some of this virtue-signalling raises eyebrows in certain circles. It's great to want to support the democratic rights of the Venezuelan people, for example, but when we're doing this in concert with the extreme right-wing governments of  Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, and Honduras, countries where our human rights wish list would receive exceedingly short shrift, you have to wonder what's really going on. Are we really advocating for human and democratic rights in Venezuela, or are we, wittingly or unwittingly, pushing forward a regime change agenda cooked up in Washington? There's been a growing suspicion that all this frenetic virtue-signalling is designed to cloak a somewhat darker reality behind the scenes.

The Wilson-Raybould affair reveals that there's been stormy times in the back corridors of this Sunny Days government. Seems the PM, who is all about "the rule of law" when it comes to political pressure in the Huawei case, isn't afraid to apply a little political pressure when it comes to saving the bacon of Canadian conglomerate SNC-Lavalin. According to revelations first exposed by the Globe and Mail last week, the PMO leaned heavily on Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to ensure a happy ending for that company's bribery and corruption scandal.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould was of course a feather in the cap of the Sunny Ways reconciliation initiative. Not only was she smart and competent, she was Native to boot!... look at us, we're so virtuous we put a Native woman in one of the most important cabinet posts! Not only is this a virtual bases-loaded homer in the virtue-signalling game, it serves to draw the eye away from the fact that this entire "reconciliation" gambit is more about optics than substance. Potable water, habitable housing, and equitable education funding are way too complicated, but hey, check out how forward looking we are!

Alas, Ms. Wilson-Raybould is turning out to be way more than a hang-around-the-fort power groupie. She has actual principles! Today, as she took the extraordinary step of resigning from Trudeau's cabinet altogether, the Union of BC Indian Chiefs has publicly lambasted the Trudeau government over its "racist and sexist" treatment of her.


So much for reconciliation.

Old stock Canadians shocked as guy in turban becomes Minister of Defence

The Pothead unveiled his cabinet today, and the tut-tutting in your finer old stock neighbourhoods could be heard even here on the wrong side of the tracks.

A native woman as Minister of Justice and Attorney General? Get outta here! After the decade of palpable disrespect Canada's native people endured under Harper, I'm guessing this is Trudeau's way of signalling a new attitude in Ottawa.

And get a load of our new Minister of Defence:



No, this ain't Harvit Sajjan's Halloween kit; it's his "I did three tours in Afghanistan" kit. Yes, we've certainly had CF guys as Minister of Defence before, but not a guy with serious time at the pointy end. This is a man whose military career was spent firing off bullets, not memos.

Overall, the think tank here at Falling Downs gives the Pothead's first cabinet a thumbs up. Let's hope they can turn this ship around...