The post above this one is about the election to determine who will govern my city of London. I have written that I think it is a mess and getting worse by the week. The city, that is, not the election.

As a sort of tonic, let me give you some of the details of a story about governance in another city, this one in England, which is fast becoming the world leader in bad government.

I will summarize the story here, but if you want more details, you can read the entire original, no paywall, here, in a story published last year in the Daily Mail. There is also a follow-up story here, published at the end of last August.  Can’t make this stuff up, and I did not.

An org calling itself Raise The Colours has sponsored a campaign to put UK flags and flags bearing St George’s cross on lamp posts, homes and roundabouts throughout England. A St. George flag looks like this, in case you have not seen it:

This was the flag of England until the Acts of Union in 1707, when it was replaced by The Union Jack, in which the cross still appears.  Its origins go back to the Middle Ages, and other countries have also incorporated it into their lore, including the old city-state of Genoa. Well, the city council of Birmingham is taking legal action to remove those flags. A quote from the DM story:

Jane Baston, a Green councillor and Birmingham’s cabinet member for equalities, communities and social justice, said: ‘The council is taking a lawful, proportionate and evidence-led approach to unauthorised attachments on the highway.

Cabinet member for equalities, communities and social justice.

Indeed.

Council first said the flags were a danger to traffic and pedestrians, despite being 25 feet above the ground.

In the story from last year, it is noted that the council admitted in an email that it was afraid to take down Palestinian flags that had been put up on lamp posts without police help. From the DM article:

In a leaked email obtained by the Mail, council cabinet member Majid Mahmood said of the Palestine flags hanging from lampposts in February: ‘We are taking these down, but we need the support of the police due to issues that have cropped (up) when we first tried to take them down.’

Here’s a photo from that story:

It gets better. The Birmingham Council went bankrupt last year, and a bin strike (British speak for garbage strike) has been going on for months, leaving garbage strewn about the city. Like this –

The story also contains a link to another story with the title:

Birmingham Council’s executives jetted to Cannes as city was gripped by bin strikes

Yes, Cannes is not that far from Birmingham, but still – those execs are good, eh? Off to the Bin Strike Film Festival. (Sorry, cheap shot, it was actually an ‘investment conference’. In Cannes.)

It is good to be reminded that ‘things could be worse’ I guess.

I am posting this article purposely on September 30, which in Canada is now The Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a holiday. Sortof. In Canada holidays come in various grades, the clearest and most prestigious being the statutory holidays (we call them ‘stats’) declared by the federal government. On a stat, pretty much everyone gets the day off, most businesses and all schools are closed by law, and most folks with the day off get paid. Christmas, Canada Day, Thanksgiving, and – surprisingly to this former Catholic – Good Friday, are all stats.

There are lesser holidays, like the one we call Civic Holiday here in Ontario, which happens on the first Monday in August. I always think of it as the ‘we need a holiday in August’ holiday. A creation of the province, most things are open on Civic Holiday, although not banks, of course – never banks or government offices. Those close for any excuse.

September 30 is a unique creature in the pantheon of Canadian holidays. The parliamentary bill that made it a (sortof) stat was given royal assent on June 3, 2021, during the Boy King’s time as PM. My ‘sortof’ arises from the following sentence, which I took from good ol’ Wikipedia:

The legislation made September 30th a statury holiday for federal government employees and private-sector employees to whom the Canada Labour Code applies.

The actual bill creating this holiday, C-5, is in Parliament’s records titled:

An Act to amend the Bills of Exchange Act, the Interpretation Act and the Canada Labour Code (National Day for Truth and Reconciliation)

It is a long, complex mess. It amended a bunch of other Acts of Parliament so as to give Sept 30^th this unusual in-between holiday status. So the thing is, very little is closed on this day. In particular, all the schools are in session. I can’t tell if City Hall is open, there is no statement on the London.ca website about this, but my bet is that it is.

Why make it a ‘stat’ but not one on which, like Thanksgiving, most businesses must be closed and most employees must be given the day off, by law? Why this in-between status?

I have a theory about this. (Of course, I always do.)

This holiday at its root has little to do with indigenous people. It exists for the purpose of letting white people demonstrate their virtue to other white people. Having most things open, particularly the schools, gives a certain kind of person ample opportunity to be seen by others doing all the right things on this holiday, like wearing an orange shirt.

Orange shirt day was an idea propounded by a group of indigenous folks out in BC with no government backing, its purpose being to  ‘to honour residential school survivors’. They set it for Sept 30, so the Parliamentarians in Bill C-5 put this new holiday on that same day. As a Catholic school survivor myself, all I can say is – you go, Parliament.

I wrote a post previously about my former Faculty of Social Science holding various events on Sept 30 related to all this. Clearly, there wouldn’t be much point in doing all that if there was no one on campus to see it and say – ‘right on’.

Another interesting aspect of the ‘survivor’ angle to this holiday is the light in which it portrays people whose ethnic heritage is actually indigenous. In doing a bit of research for this post, I ended up on a government website all about this day, and the first thing you see at the top of the page is this:

Content Warning!

There’s no actual ‘warning’, just those two words, but you can click on a link marked as:

‘Mental Health Supports Available’

I don’t know what those ‘supports’ would look like, I did not click on the link.

Another government webpage, with the label:

National Day for Truth and Reconciliation: Working towards reconciliation by understanding the past

…is rather more explicit about all this. Just below that title one finds this:

Harmful content

We understand that archives can be painful for Indigenous people. Reading old records about genocide, assimilation and oppression, with biased and hurtful language, can cause distress and harm.

To read more or find support, see the notice about harmful content in LAC’s collection.

LAC stands for Library Archives Canada, and we see here again white folks demonstrating – to other white folks – their understanding of the trauma of indigenous people, who are, in the view of the white folks who put all this together, very fragile people. They need warnings and support, and those white folks are – virtuously – providing them.

Believe it or not, all of what I wrote above was prompted only by my intention to post here a single link to someone else’s blog post. It just happened that the post I am about to point you all towards came to my attention just before Sept 30, so I thought I would try to link it to what is going on in Canada (in the US, not so much) around this date.

A year-round aspect of this official government sanctioned approach to the situtation of indigenous people in Canada is the reading of ‘Land Acknowledgements’ on a regular – some might say incessant – basis in Canada.  Truly, it is not just reading them. The last time I went into the local lab to have some blood drawn for some diagnostic tests my doc ordered, I noticed that the lab had a large land acknowledgement printed up on its wall. Permanently. This was not just some poster.

Of all the misguided blathering about the history of indigenous people in North America, it is these land acknowledgements that are the most absurd and mendacious, and about which it was my original intention to write. I have on more than one occasion determined to write an article for this blog about them, but before I ever got around to doing so, I came across a post on the topic on a blog called Noahpinion, written by an economist named Noah Smith.

Smith has been writing this blog for a very long time, and I go to it fairly often. I often disagree with Smith, as he is more approving of government sticking its nose into things than I could ever be, but he is no fool, and the post he wrote is here:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-you-are-not-on-indigenous-land-2b2

As you can see, the article is titled ‘No you are not on indigenous land’, and I recommend it to my readers as a very clear and logical take-down of the concept of any land acknowledgement ever, anywhere, by anybody, on behalf of anybody. I could not write it better than he did, I’m sure, so I invite you to click on the link if you are interested.

Which is not to say I agree with everything Smith writes in this long post. When he goes on about the great plan the Squamish nation has for a development in downtown Vancouver, my reaction is – ‘oh my god, that would be a crime against humanity’.

Here’s a rendition of what it will look like, according to Smith:

What’s the Senakw word for ‘monstrous’?

I had written a post this week specifically about PM Carney asking the Canadian provincial premiers to put US booze back on the shelves. He asked this at a point when the rumour mill said a Canada/US trade deal was close.

The Canadian chattering classes fairly exploded with questions and opinions about this – –

Why did Carney ask this ahead of the deal?

The premiers should ignore the request from Carney.

The premiers should go along with Carney, be part of Team Canada.

People should refuse to drink US booze even if it does show up back on the shelves.

No one should tell me what to drink.

And so on….

I had some thoughts on some of these questions and opinions which I thought worthy of posting.

Well, as we know, the ‘almost done’ trade deal has collapsed, and the two countries are now engaged in an MMA-style tariff match. So, I have filed that article away rather than posting it. Kinda irrelevant, now that it is clear no premier will be doing any such thing.

However, I have filed it, not killed it.

There is one thing we know – this ain’t over. With DJT in the White House, nothing is ever over, nothing is ever settled. Might be another set of negotiations, or maybe Trump will TACO, or perhaps the US Congress will wake from its deep sleep. So  many possibilities are still, well – possible.

Stay tuned. I’m keeping my powder dry.

I don’t much like writing about Donald Trump. Too much is written already, and anyone who has not yet understood what an utterly unprincipled ass he is, is not going to be swayed by anything anyone writes, including me.

The question of what really allowed him to become US President twice is an important one, to be sure, but everyone has a different view on that matter. I mostly blame the Democratic party. Whatever.

I am here going to write something that is at least partly about DJT, but I am doing it because of an editorial in The Free Press about him, in which I learned something that surprised me greatly. I aim to inform here, and I suspect my readers will be just as surprised about it as was I.

The Free Press editorial of which I speak is titled Trump’s Art of the Self-Deal, is indeed credited to The Editorial Board at TFP, and has the subtitle: ‘There is no modern parallel for the scale and shamelessness with which the president is enriching himself in office’

It is dated July 1. Canada Day. There’s an irony for you.

Some quotes from the editorial, to set up why the editors attached that subtitle to what they wrote.

‘…President Donald Trump’s financial disclosure report showing that he had reaped at least $2.2 billion in gains since returning to the White House, largely due to the cryptocurrency businesses set up by his sons Eric and Donald Jr.’

‘Trump’s financial report shows, for instance, that his accounts executed nearly 4,000 trades during just a three-month period, many involving companies that need to stay in the administration’s good graces. That is practically the definition of conflict of interest.’

‘Whatever the Bidens may or may not have done, it pales in comparison to the influence peddling that has taken place during Trump’s second term. A president who pardons a convicted money launderer who helps him make money in the crypto business is sullying the presidency, as is a president who gives a foreign nation access to advanced chips after one of its top officials buys $2 billion worth of his family’s stablecoins.’

There is plenty more like that in the editorial. It also references a story in the NYT that provides more details on what DJT and his family have been doing to earn cash during his second term.

OK, so now let me get to the informative bit from the article I mentioned. I quote from the editorial:

‘As Trump himself has pointed out, the federal conflict of interest laws that apply to executive branch officials exempt the president and vice president. No one paid much attention to that fact before Trump because no one had to.’

Holy Shit. The laws exempt the Prez and VP? Why, for godsakes?

Well apparently they do, and the NYT article in particular goes to some lengths to document what previous presidents have done to avoid appearances of conflict of interest during their terms of office. Bush Jr sold off his stake in the Texas Rangers MLB team, LBJ’s wife transferred her radio and TV stations to an outside trust, and Jimmy Carter did the same with his peanut farm.

Farms get federal subsidies, TV and radio is federally regulated, and the MLB had (and maybe still has) a federal anti-trust exemption. You get the picture. Those previous presidents apparently wanted to avoid any appearance of conflicts of interest while they were in office.

DJT does not. And, it seems he is breaking no laws.

Bloody hell.

Having reported previously on unsettling events regarding private property vs indigenous title claims, it is only fair that I report when something sensible happens, too. This is from a story in the Globe titled ‘Supreme Court won’t hear First Nations’ appeal in New Brunswick private land case’

That almost tells the story, but there are implications, as the article notes. According to the article, a New Brunswick Appeal Court judge said in December that a declaration of Aboriginal title over privately owned lands “would sound the death knell of reconciliation with the interests of non-Aboriginal Canadians.”

That is one crappy sentence from that judge, but the upshot is that he refused to rule that the Wolastoqey First Nation had rights to property in New Brunswick to which non-tribe members currently held private title. The Wolastoqey appealed to have this NB decision reviewed by the Supreme Court of Canada, and it has refused to hear the appeal, meaning the ruling stands. There is no higher court to which the Wolastoqey can appeal.

Not surprisingly, the folks out in BC who are planning to appeal the Cowichan Tribes decision that I (and plenty of others) wrote about previously are very interested. That decision asserted that the First Nation holds Aboriginal title over a parcel of land on the Fraser River, which includes Crown, city and private property.

The SCC’s refusal to reverse or even hear the NB case sets a precedent those appealing the Cowichan decision can use. Or so my non-lawyerly mind understands the matter.

A final quote from the Globe article:

The Cowichan ruling has led to concerns that it puts private property at risk, although the Cowichan Tribes have said they are not seeking to lay claim to private land.

Ok…..what exactly are you Cowichan folks trying to do, then? Cuz I see no other reason to have brought that case.

Here’s the headline from a CBC news story of May 22:

Region of Waterloo can’t remove residents of Kitchener encampment, court rules

The region wants to use the land on which the encampment sits to build a transit hub. I hate transit hubs. I do.

But I am writing this article to tell you about the reason for this ruling. I quote from the CBC:

In his 88-page decision, Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael R. Gibson says the encampment is currently the only place in the region where people experiencing homelessness can legally set up a tent or structure and it acts a refuge of last resort.

“No one should romanticize or be starry-eyed about the encampment. It is a miserable and desperate place,” Gibson said.

“But it represents the only remaining safety valve for the region’s homeless as a refuge of last resort.”

I wonder how the judge knows that last sentence to be true? More basically, what does that last sentence even mean? If those folks had been evicted, you can bet that every one of them would have gone somewhere else. That, of course, is another real problem, the fact that if you do push squatters off a piece of land they just go find another one. So, what makes the encampment on the land Waterloo region wants to use a ‘last resort’?

Here’s another quote from the article:

The region previously tried to clear people from living on the site in 2022. In January 2023, a Kitchener judge ruled the region couldn’t evict people from the site unless they gave them another place to live.

And there is the heart of the matter. It is fundamentally the responsibility of government (which means you and me, kids) to provide these people with a place to live. Why? Not because that is what Jesus would do, although that is sortof what I was taught. No, this all goes back to PET’s damnable Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It includes statements like

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

So. What is security of the person? What does that right actually grant to a Canadian? Well, whatever a judge decides it means, and in this case the judge determined that it means Canadians have a right to have a place to live. Um….provided by who or what, exactly? Well, by default, you and I. If some government is responsible for this, then it’s taxpayers who are on the hook.

Let us have a look at the closest thing to this idea in the US Bill of Rights. It is the 6^th article:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Note that it states what Americans have the right to specifically. Namely, to be free of having their person, house, papers or effects unreasonably searched or seized. There is plenty of ambiguity in that ‘unreasonable’ adjective (although there is some detail provided on that, too), but the important point is that it lays out what government cannot do. It does not require the government to provide any American with anything.

Canada is teeming with ‘property is theft’ folks, and I am going to write a longer piece about private property soon, but here I will just note the following implication of this judge’s ruling. It suggests that if you or I or anyone decide to throw it all in, give up our jobs and stop working so hard, if we set up a tent somewhere – even on someone’s lawn – then we cannot be evicted unless the government can show there is someplace else we could go.

Wait, wait, you say. No one with a decent job and any income would just shuck that off and go live in a tent in a park somewhere.

No, likely not. But everything happens at the margin. There are people who are not doing well in life. They may be trying, but they are unable to generate much income for themselves and maybe for a family. It is sad, but it is true. They are living a life just at the margin of getting by. Those marginal people, realizing that if they pitch a tent somewhere their fellow citizens must then provide them with a spot and maybe more, then maybe they will. And there are always marginal people like that.

No doubt plenty of the folks at this Kitchener encampment have drug or mental problems or both. It is indeed our joint fault that there is nowhere for them to go and get help. But saying the government has to provide them with a spot to live, rather than a chance at help and treatment, just makes matters worse – for them and the rest of us.

A quote from the article about something else the judge said:

He added the region could ask people to move if they provided an alternative legal encampment site or a tenting protocol, similar to the cities of London and Thunder Bay.

What the hell is a tenting protocol, and does my city have one?

I looked. It definitely has a ‘Health and Homelessness Response Community Encampment Plan’. It is long, and it is scary. I should have guessed.

It includes this section:

The following outlines the rights-based approach to supporting encampments:

And here are the things included in that ‘outline’.

Access to safe and clean drinking water

Access to hygiene and sanitation facilities

Resources and support to ensure fire safety

Waste management systems

Social supports and services

Resources to support harm reduction

Resources that support food and food safety

The Plan gives details under each of these, here is part of what is under the last one.

Encampments are often more susceptible to foodborne illnesses due to a lack of storage, cooling appliances, improperly cooked foods, and limited or no access to clean water.

Okay, so….what is to be done about that? Here is the only thing the Plan says:

One of the best ways to prevent the spread of illness is to provide resources that enable the encampment to implement food safety measurements.

Food safety measurements? What does that mean? To provide encampments with meat thermometers? Bacteria testing equipment? I am betting the bozos who wrote this meant ‘measures’, but lacked the knowledge of English to get it right.

If you  are skeptical of the notion that the Waterloo region judge’s ruling is an invitation to go off the grid and live rough, do note that London says if you do that and move to an encampment they will be obliged to provide all those things above for you. Clean water and toilets and waste disposal and oh so many things.

If you decide you want to build a new house on a piece of land in London, you gotta pay for all that. Not at an encampment.

London’s plan is 41 pages. I will likely write more about it in due course, but you get the drift. Canadian judges have been interpreting the Charter to mean governments must provide you with material resources, starting with a place to live. Many Canadian politicians are keen to do that. With your money.

What could possibly go wrong?

I offer here a look at two seemingly unrelated stories about housing. They are in fact related, and sadly so, as I think you might see.

First, the Freeps and CBC London have not written anything about this so far as I recall, but a letter to the editor in today’s Freeps put me on to it, surprisingly. There is a housing co-op in East London called Tolpuddle where many of the units are rented on a Rent Geared to Income basis. A story on CTV news from early March, which you can check out in its entirety here, indicates that it includes at least 15 units which cannot be rented out because of the damage done to them by previous tenants. There are photos and video at the link above. The co-op also says it cannot afford to repair these units, and is asking the City to agree to fund those repairs. A number ‘between 1 and 2 million’ is mentioned.

A salient quote from the CTV story:

According to the Co-op President, city hall’s housing access waitlist determines which tenants are chosen for RGI units, but some of those individuals have not had their mental health or addictions stabilized prior to moving in.

That’s led to some chaotic tenancies that attracted drug use, drug dealing, damage, violence, and trespassing.

The story says the building has 134 units, 94 rented on a RGI basis. The article also says there is a ‘multi-year waitlist’ for RGI units in the city.

There was, however, a ‘story’ on the new modular units on Cheese Factory Road on the CBC site last week. CBC found one resident there who was unhappy about the remote location and the no-visitors rule, as well as the amount living there was costing him. Rather typical CBC reporting, telling us almost nothing about how things are going there. A Freeps story reported that all the units there are occupied, with a waitlist of 100 people.

So, we have a significant ‘shortage’ of low-rent units, it seems, the units that exist get trashed by at least some of the tenants who occupy them, and guess what – there are calls to spend more money on such housing; build more units, and repair the ones that have been trashed.

Well, here is the second, seemingly unrelated-but-not-really story, coming to you all the way from NYC. It is all in the graphic below.

A summary of what is in that graphic – I know the numbers are not easy to read:

From fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2025, that is six years, real, inflation adjusted spending per homeless person in NYC on services for that population went from $28.4k to $65.8k. Not quite tripling, but keep in mind that is per person and adjusted for inflation. Over that same period, the population served by that spending went up 26%, from 3,588 to 4,504.

As I say often, the human universe is a very complex thing. One cannot point at those numbers, stark as they are, and say – spend a lot of money on the homeless and you will get more homeless.

However, it can be said unequivocally that those stark numbers also do not support the idea that spending money on the homeless will reduce the number of homeless.

Absolutely nothing, some have written regarding war, but it strikes me that it is at least sometimes necessary. WWII was in that category, I would say, once Germany and Japan got it started. But it’s hard to tell when that point is reached. Britain and France clearly waited too long back in the 30s, but hindsight is easy.

History is full of wars that seem unnecessary in hindsight – or at least unwise – started by various nations for various claimed reasons. What is shared by all wars is death and destruction. A relatively new aspect of this, on full display in the current war in the Middle East, is that so many of the deaths that accompany the destruction are of civilians. Modern military strategy and hardware makes it easy for the military to stand back and destroy things without losing many of their own personnel. Richer nations are better at this, as the requisite technology is expensive, and the US is one of the best at it. However, what the Ukraine/Russia and current Middle East war have also demonstrated is that drone technology makes ‘stand back and blow shit up’ a more viable strategy for less rich combatants, too. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not.

I suspect this all makes it easier to start a war. The potential to do a lot of damage without having to witness flag-draped coffins coming home makes war an easier choice for national leaders, particularly in a democracy. I think that was a key factor in the willingness of the Bush II Administration to start the ‘shock and awe’ Gulf War II.

That conflict went on for a very long time, and of course the flag-draped coffins did start coming home eventually, although not in anything like the numbers generated by the Vietnam or Korean wars.

Memories of all that came back to me when the US and Israel began their attacks on Iran some weeks ago. I felt no sadness at the news of the death of a Supreme Leader who had so recently overseen the killing of some tens of thousands of his own people for the sin of massing to protest his government. But I still felt a big dose of – WTF?

We’ve heard many things from members of the US administration at different points. The calls to the Iranian people to ‘rise up’ against their leaders seemed to me a fantasy. First, what reason was there to believe they could now effectively do that when they were cut down in the streets for trying simply to protest only weeks ago? Second, what reason is there to think they want to in the face of attacks from outsiders that are – inevitably – killing their friends and relatives?

History Lesson 1: Poor white dirt farmers did the overwhelming majority of the dying for the Confederacy during the US Civil War. They hated slavery more than most Northerners, not out of moral compunctions, but because that institution robbed them of a means of feeding their families. None the less, they fought and died for the Confederacy with considerable bravery because the goddam Yankees had invaded their homes. People do that.

Niall Ferguson, a born-again Trumpist, wrote an article in The Free Press on Feb 28, asserting confidently that this would not be a long war. To quote him directly – ‘One thing I can confidently promise about the US-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic: it will not last long’.

History Lesson 2: That was precisely the belief on all sides at the start of WWI. It is something like Military Principle No. 1 that ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’. (Helmuth von Moltke, 1871, I believe). Ferguson is supposed to be a historian, and here we are now with the Straits of Hormuz all but closed and the world price of oil dancing around $US100/barrel.

The next two articles by Ferguson in The Free Press were titled ‘Could This be the Start of WWIII?’ and then ‘This is How the Iran War goes Global’.

So much for ‘it will not last long’, I guess.

DJT at one point a bit after this war started said it could only end with the ‘Unconditional Surrender’ of Iran. It is doubtful the US President could recite any of the occasions in the USA’s past where it demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ of an enemy.

One was U S Grant in the aforementioned Civil War. Indeed, it was eventually said that was what his initials stood for. He insisted on those terms because he (and Lincoln) had determined that the Southern combatants were traitors, and because he and W T Sherman had by 1864 built a military machine that the South had no hope of matching. The North had simply out-produced and out-manned the South, Grant had Lee in a corner, and Sherman was burning and pillaging his way across the heartland of the South. The war was clearly headed to a Union victory.

Another case was in WWII, when Roosevelt, Churchill and (sadly) Stalin agreed that those would be the only terms on which they would end WWII. Again, once the US had entered the war, those three powers commanded wartime economies that Germany and Japan could never match. WWII was also clearly going to end with an Allied victory, so they could declare how it must end. The same Allies had also put some 8million military boots on the ground in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific.

Now, I read in the WSJ that Trump is ‘seeking a dealmaker’ in Iran while the Iranian government says that no talks with the US are occurring or planned.

Here is a quote from the WSJ story:

The U.S. sent Iran a 15-point plan to end the war, which centers largely around previous Trump administration demands of Tehran. Iran’s military spokesman suggested the U.S. was negotiating with itself to get out of a “strategic defeat.”

Um, you don’t send a ’15-point plan’ to an adversary of which you are demanding ‘unconditional surrender’. And from what I can tell from reading the news about what is happening in the Middle East at this writing, ‘Iran’s military spokesman’ is saying things much closer to the facts than anything DJT has said recently.

I also read that Israel has killed the Iranian naval commander responsible for blocking the Straits of Hormuz. Does anyone think that will re-open the Straits to oil tankers? The Supreme Leader was killed on Day One, and that did not stop the war. Iran is a nation with a gang government, like modern Russia and China and the old Soviet Union. It is run by a clan in which there is always another clan member available to step up. (Being a gang nation, the one who steps up may have had to kill – or ‘purge’ – some of the others, that’s how gangs work.) The Supreme Leader was quickly replaced by one of his sons (a family business kind of thing) and the naval commander will be replaced by another naval officer – perhaps not his son. I don’t think you can kill the entire clan. Perhaps they are going to try.

Just today, after I had already written two drafts of this post, another article appeared in the Free Expression section of the WSJ, by one Matthew Continetti.

It ends with the following:

Even as the White House pursues negotiations to end war with Iran, U.S. ground forces are moving into position near the Persian Gulf. Marines, special forces and paratroopers will give the president options. They can be used to secure Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, open the Strait, guarantee freedom of navigation and fulfill his objective of ending the threat from the Islamic Republic.

The White House says Mr. Trump will “unleash hell” if Iran doesn’t accept a deal. Sometimes hell isn’t enough. The president must see Operation Epic Fury through to a successful conclusion—and finish what he started.

Mr. Continetti’s article leans heavily on the US’s failure to remove Saddam Hussein in Gulf War I in urging the US to ‘finish the job’ in Iran. He mentions the failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan in Gulf War II, but does not seem to see the lessons of those conflicts as relevant to the current situation. Why Mr. Continetti believes that this time it will be possible to finish what Trump started is not at all clear.

It is a terrible thing to start a war. It is a sin of the highest order to start a war, to begin sowing death and destruction, without a clear-eyed assessment of what you want to accomplish, and a carefully constructed plan to achieve it. If the USA went into this with such a plan, it has indeed not survived contact with the enemy. I see no reason to believe Iran will ‘surrender’ in any common meaning of that word, and the Middle East will be a bigger ongoing mess than it was before the bombing started.

I hate to write it, but this looks to me like another ignorance-based major military fuck-up by the USA. The list of those is already much too long.  I do hope that I am wrong, but that is at this point only a hope.

Not something I write about a lot here….or maybe I do. But this memory goes back six years – exactly six years.

Sunday, March 15, 2020 was my granddaughter’s birthday, just as was Sunday, March 15, 2026. The Ides of March. On the following Monday in 2020, my buddy and I went out for our usual Monday night dinner and drinks and bullshit. We had been doing this for years, but unbeknown to us, the world was about to get very weird.

We stopped first at our favourite pub, to find it closed. The publican, recognizing us at the door as two of his regulars, let us in, and said ‘we’ve been told we have to close down tomorrow, so we were closing early tonight’.

Covid.

Remember? The next day was to be St Paddy’s, party party party, just as it was a Tuesday this year. Being a good guy, said publican got his kitchen to make us some schnitzels (the deep fryer was still on, he said) and poured us a couple of beers. He did not charge us for anything but the beers but said ‘Tip my staff well, they won’t be earning anything for a while’. We did.

He also said, ‘This is good, close everything down for a few weeks, the virus will subside, and we can all get back to life’.

Ha.

Having left our tips, we headed off to another of our regular haunts, which was still open (it survived the lockdowns, but has since closed), had a couple there, and then headed to the good ol’ Richmond Tavern, of which I have written here. No music that night, it was Monday after all, but we had one (might have been more, the memory is foggy at this point) there, and then headed home to see what tomorrow would bring. No St Paddy’s day celebrations would occur, the supposed reason for closing down on that night.

And on it went…..

And on…..

Little did we know, eh?

I remember many months later, probably more than a year later, being back in the Richmond under one of the serial Byzantine sets of regulations imposed on us in those days, and the bartender yelling at us ‘If you sit down you can remove your mask, but once you stand up, you damn well better put it back on!’

No sipping while standing.

Poor guy. He was just trying not to get fined. Or jailed.

I think we should not forget those days. The serendipity of the fact that these dates/days this year coincide with the same dates/days from 2020 has inspired me to post something I wrote up many years ago, but never posted. It’s long, but pertinent, so I will edit it down some and post it soon. Lest we forget……

Stay tuned.

No one talks about irony any more. I suppose so much that occurs in the world is so absurd that pointing out irony seems like mentioning that rain causes puddles.

I bet Ontario premier Doug Ford thinks it has something to do with laundry.

From the Globe on March 16:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says his government is looking into livestreaming bail hearings, despite federal laws that routinely prohibit the publication of many of the details of these proceedings both to protect victims and to ensure the right of an accused to a fair trial.

Another excerpt:

“I am sure Premier Ford knows that the current state of our law would not permit bail proceedings to be broadcast, for multiple reasons. So this is not a realistic proposal that is being made,” Mr. Bytensky said in an interview.

But Mr. Bytensky said he welcomed the idea of providing the public with more information about how bail is administered, which he argues would put to rest the common refrain from politicians such as Mr. Ford that it is granted too liberally.

Yea, well, I think you’re missing Dougie’s point here, Mr. Bytensky. Realistic or not, he wants bail hearings public, not explanations from you or anyone else about how bail is set. Dougie thinks judges do a terrible job at setting bail, allowing too many people out of custody who should not be, and he figures if said judges knew their decisions were publicly witnessable they might stop behaving that way. Dougie just doesn’t trust judges to do the right thing.

I expect I agree with Ford on that, although I am not at all sure livestreaming would change their behaviour with regard to granting and setting bail. Judges, like almost all public servants these days, are mostly committed ideologues. But, at least we would see the consequences of their attitude in real time.

In fact, I would suggest that we not stop at bail hearings, I would like to see a law passed that makes all public proceedings – trials, bail hearings, meetings of Parliament, Cabinet, City Councils, and yes, even all meetings at public universities and hospitals, completely on the record. Livestream them all, and make transcripts of all of them available within one hour of the conclusion of every meeting. Hiring meetings, firing meetings, disciplinary meetings, budget meetings, everything. Nothing should be ‘in camera’. If you work for a government org, everything you do is on the record. No more of this privacy shit.

I will come back to my proposal in a moment, but first let’s get to the irony I advertised above.

In the same issue of the Globe, a story ran with this headline:

Doug Ford says his cellphone records must remain hidden to protect privacy

Last week his government announced that the Premier, cabinet ministers and their offices would no longer be subject to freedom of information requests

This is more sloppy writing by the GM. Here is what his government actually did.

If passed, the legislation, to be introduced in the spring, would quash existing and future requests for any document held in the Premier’s office and the offices of any of his cabinet ministers, such as their e-mails, internal memos and meeting schedules.

This is legislation. Proposed legislation. We have a legislature and a legislative process that must be followed before there can be any change in FOI laws, people. So, what they announced was that they would introduce a new law limiting FOI requests.

Another quote:

Ontario’s freedom of information watchdog condemned the exemptions. In a statement last week, Information and Privacy Commissioner Patricia Kosseim called the proposal “shocking” and “alarming.” Noting that existing rules protect personal and confidential information, she said the change is “about hiding government-related business to evade public accountability.”

And she linked the move to Mr. Ford’s phone-records case: “By changing the law retroactively, the government’s message is plain: if oversight bodies get in the way, just change the rules.”

I see nothing to disagree with in those two paragraphs, but then this is hardly unique to Mr. Ford. No one in public office – and I mean no one, irrespective of party or ideology – wants what they do and say to be public. The Ontario Liberals and NDP will decry this move by Ford, but if they get in office I can promise you they won’t rescind this law if Ford’s government actually passes it.

Ford does not trust judges to do the right thing – I don’t either – but we gotta trust him and his Cabinet to do the right thing.

Bullshit. I don’t. Either of them.

Like I said: ironic.

Hence my radical proposal. I know, people will say people need privacy to make good decisions. Horseshit, people need privacy to make bad decisions.

People will say that no one will serve in government if everything is public all the time. I say that I am not suggesting government employees, elected or appointed, have to have their private activities made public. Ford can have a private phone and an official Premier phone. Hell, I had a private phone number and an office phone number when I worked, what is so hard about that? And if you call Dougie’s public number about anything, your conversation will be public. He’s a goddam public servant, that’s why you called him.

Maybe what we would get from this regime is only people who are willing to be public servants in public.

I know someone who went through the process of becoming a cop. So far as I can tell, they had their life investigated with a flashlight, vise grips and a machete. Fair enough, if you are to be given the right to run around town with a gun and enforce the laws, we need to be as sure as possible nothing in your life suggests you are not fit for that job. If you are one of the people in charge of those people, same deal. No secrets. Actually, I want to give the pols and bureaucrats in charge a much easier deal. We won’t comb through your past, like an applicant to be a cop, but once you are elected or hired, no secrets. If you drink too much, not a problem – unless you show up tanked to a meeting. Then everyone will know you did.

Want to take a meeting with some lobbyists? Go ahead, but it has to be recorded and the transcript posted.

I think this would be great for democratic governance. I also know that it has not a snowball’s chance in hell of happening.

Addendum: People will also say that we cannot possibly have our federal Cabinet on record when they discuss matters pertaining to foreign policy and relations with other countries. I grant that, only because those other countries would not have similar rules in place, and that asymmetry would put Canada at a disadvantage. However, as soon as an exemption was granted for matters related to external affairs, you can bet the pols will find a way to claim that everything is related to external affairs, and so gut the rules at the federal level. No matter, as I wrote, this ain’t ever gonna happen anyway. But it should.

I got a couple of responses to my post last week about the Canadian government signing an agreement with the Musqueam band in BC. (Folks do write me from time to time.) One was from a resident of the contested area saying she and her neighbours are indeed concerned about what it means for their own property holdings. Here are two quite separate follow-ups to that post.

1. Marc Miller

Marc Miller is the federal minister who negotiated the Musqueam agreement. The Globe ran a story on March 9 titled

Musqueam deal ‘nothing to do with’ private property, says Marc Miller

In the article Miller is quoted by the Globe as saying exactly that. The article also includes this:

The government says the agreement recognizes Musqueam Aboriginal rights “including title within their traditional territory,” which the nation asserts is an area encompassing much of Metro Vancouver.

That sentence, coupled with Bruce Pardy’s explanation of the court ruling that aboriginal and individual, fee simple rights cannot co-exist, would indeed have me worried if I lived where my western correspondent does, and I would not find Mr. Miller’s quote claim reassuring. Nor would this sentence from the Globe story do any better:

Miller says “opportunistic political types” and “a bunch of ignorant people” were weaponizing the ruling, which was about acknowledging rights of one of the “more oppressed Indigenous groups in B.C.”

Call me ignorant, but it might be harder to ‘weaponize the ruling’ if a) it had not been negotiated in secret and then announced only after its signing, and b) Mr. Miller or someone in the federal government took the time to explain what the agreement actually does.

Ok, so I guess I should not expect that, and thus went here to read the agreement for myself. It did get published after it was signed. I guess that’s like a labour contract. You could read it too, but I warn you – it’s long. And abundantly opaque.

This appears in the Agreement’s Preamble:

D. Musqueam has unextinguished Rights and Title within the Musqueam Territory. Musqueam has and continues to exercise Rights and Title within its traditional territory. The existence of Musqueam’s unextinguished Rights and Title within Musqueam Territory is not contingent on recognition by court declaration or any agreement.

Here is what the agreement says about its own purpose:

2.1 The purposes of this Agreement are to:

a) recognize Musqueam’s Rights and Title within Musqueam Territory;

b) demonstrate progress in incrementally implementing Musqueam’s Rights and Title;

c) contribute to the implementation of the UN Declaration;

d) provide a foundation for reconciliation and an ongoing mutually beneficial relationship taking into account Musqueam’s and Canada’s interests;

e) set out Fundamental Principles, General Provisions, and procedures to guide and facilitate the Incremental Implementation Agreements; and

f) to guide Future Discussions and Negotiations of potential future Incremental Implementation Measures

based on a new nation-to-nation, government-to-government approach and in accordance with Canada’s commitment to implement the UN Declaration through measures developed cooperatively with Indigenous peoples, including Musqueam.

I reckon it is a) and b) above that I would be worried about if I lived in the affected area, as per Pardy’s analysis of aboriginal title. But it says nothing specific. Of course not.

A section 5 titled General Provisions includes this:

  5.1 This Agreement does not constitute a treaty or lands claims agreements within the meaning of sections 25 or 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.

  5.2 This Agreement does not create, amend, define, establish, abrogate or derogate from Musqueam’s Rights and Title.

So, I dunno. What is it that has been agreed to here? Possibly not much – yet – but I really cannot tell.

2. McGirt vs. Oklahoma

Another regular reader (they’re out there, really) wrote me to ask if I was familiar with the McGirt vs Oklahoma case in the States. In fact, I had read something about it back in the day, but had forgotten all of the details. So, I went looking to see if this US case was in any way parallel to what is happening in BC.

In fact, it seems quite different. In a 2020 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that the land reserved for the Muscogee Nation by Congress had never been ‘disestablished’, and so the State of Oklahoma had no right to prosecute members of that band for crimes committed there. This was extended to nine other Indian bands by a lower court, applying the McGirt ruling, so that most of the eastern half of Oklahoma is now free of state law enforcement. The original case was brought by one Jimcy McGirt, a registered Seminole, who was charged with sexual abuse. In June 1997, McGirt was found guilty, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus two consecutive 500-year sentences. The Supreme Court ruling meant that his charge and conviction under Oklahoma law was invalid.

In the immediate wake of McGirt, Oklahoma courts began reviewing past criminal cases involving Native Americans, vacating past convictions, and transferring the matters to the federal courts for criminal prosecution. However, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals effectively ended this practice by issuing a controversial ruling that McGirt was not retroactive. Apparently federal law still applies on these lands, as they remain part of the USA. An FBI press release dated Feb of 2021 notes that this has led to a large increase in the case load of the FBI in Oklahoma.

So far as I can tell, the repercussions of this remain unclear but ongoing. For example, in August 2023, the Supreme Court declined to hear a decision from the Tenth Circuit US court which ruled in favor of a tribal member who was ticketed for speeding by the Tulsa police within the portion of Tulsa that was within Muscogee territory. The member challenged the ticket on the basis of McGirt. The ruling from the Tenth Circuit asserted that because of McGirt, the city could not enforce municipal regulations against tribal members on the parts of the city in tribal lands.

So far as I can tell no one in Oklahoma is going to lose their home or property due to this SCOTUS ruling, and no one in BC is saying the Vancouver police cannot charge Musqueam band members with speeding. I guess we will wait to see further developments.

I will start by saying I owe much of the substantive content in this post to Bruce Pardy and his blog, First Principles. Bruce is a Law Professor at Queens U who I have heard speak more than once over the years, and had a few conversations with. When my former employer put forward a new ‘sexual harassment’ policy back in the day, Bruce was good enough to give me his lawyerly opinion of what it meant. (It will end badly, was the essence of his view).

He is one very sharp dude who says what he believes, and says it well.

Some of you may have heard of the recent agreements between our Federal Government and the Musqueam Indian Band. The Globe published a story on it on March 3 which said this:

The text of the rights recognition agreement, which runs 30 pages, was not released in February when the deal was signed. It does not reference private property, an issue of acute public interest since the B.C. Supreme Court ruled in a separate case last August known as the Cowichan decision. It stated that Aboriginal title is a “prior and senior right” to land, over and above the “fee simple” title that private landholders have.

Bruce also wrote about the Musqueam in a blog post titled Ottawa pours oil on the fire burning up B.C. property rights: The Canadian government has surrendered Vancouver on March 4.

You can read Pardy’s entire post here, no paywall.

Here are some of the more interesting things he has to say….

The Canadian Constitution does not include property rights. But it does guarantee Aboriginal rights.

I had a look, and yes, Canada’s Constitution includes this clause 35(1):

The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.

Just for fun I searched the Constitution for the word ‘property’. Professor Pardy is right, it appears nowhere. As we all have been taught, property is theft, after all.

What that means is that if the Government of Canada decides that an aboriginal band has rights to your property, giving them to that band does not in any way contradict any rights you might think you have – cuz you don’t have any. As Pardy writes –

Those agreements promise to honour private property interests. But “fee simple” and Aboriginal title are incompatible. According to the Supreme Court of Canada, Aboriginal title is a collective right. It cannot be parcelled out into individual lots. No individual, Indigenous or not, can hold exclusive property rights in a plot of land subject to Aboriginal title. Moreover, a group that holds Aboriginal title cannot surrender the title to anyone but the Crown. When it does so, Aboriginal title is extinguished. If Haida Gwaii is subject to Aboriginal title, then in principle no fee simple interests can exist on Haida Gwaii. Those who own property there must now wait to see what the Haida Gwaii agreement will mean.

Aboriginals do have treaty rights, which leads to the following conundrum.

You may also recall that in 2024 the B.C. and federal government recognized Aboriginal title to Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off B.C.’s northwest coast. Here’s what Pardy has to say about that:

And now the federal government has announced that the Musqueam hold Aboriginal title to Vancouver and its suburbs. In an interesting twist, the area covered by the Musqueam agreements appears to include Richmond, where the B.C. Supreme Court found Cowichan title to exist.

How does that get worked out? Two different bands having title to some of the same land? Could we see a return of band warfare? Of course not, we know those folks never engage in violence. However, people who thought they had fee simple title to their homes in Richmond, BC, well…..incoming!! You’re just caught in the middle.

Bruce gets a tad upset by the end of his post. But I don’t think he is wrong in what he writes below. I was in a discussion this week in my seniors’ learning group about contraceptive policy in the 1950s in Canada and the US. We were discussing what could have been the reasons it was so restrictive. In Canada one could possibly blame the oversize influence of the Catholic Church. I pointed out that the Roman Catholics had rather little influence in the US, so that did not explain similar restrictions in the US. One woman in the group pointed out what was to her an obvious driver of restrictions on the use of contraceptives – ‘colonialism’, she said.

So, Bruce has a point when he writes this about the typical Canadian’s attitude toward the government’s ongoing usurpation of the property rights of its own citizens:

If you are surprised, you haven’t been paying attention. If you are outraged, you must be a settler. If you are a property owner in the Lower Mainland, suck it up for reconciliation. After all, we live on native land. Haven’t you been paying attention to land acknowledgements?

Many Canadians cannot even recognize the attack. Their obsequious devotion to reconciliation gets in the way. They are stuck in a stupor of acquiescence and disbelief. The beaver is too good for Canada’s national symbol. The country deserves the ostrich.

I have to admit this headline in a story in today’s Wall Street Journal made me stop and stare –

Mamdani Warns of Nearly 10% Property-Tax Boost if No Tax on Wealthy

New York City mayor says ‘drastic measures’ might be needed to fund his proposed budget

Yes, this is the newly-elected radical ‘democratic socialist’ mayor of New York City being quoted, and he is saying the ‘drastic measure’ of a 9.5% hike in property taxes will be needed to fund his budget if Governor Hochul does not agree to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy – something only the governor of NY state can do, apparently.

My goodness, drastic measures. Here is what the property tax rates have done here in London, Ontario over the last three years: an increase of 8.7 per cent (2024), 7.3 per cent (2025) and 3.4 per cent (2026).

The increase in this third year was originally set to be over 7 percent, until someone in the Mayor’s office last year looked at a calendar and noticed that there is a municipal election in 2026. Still, with compounding (yes, it applies to tax increases, too) that adds up to twice Mamdani’s measly 9.5.

With property tax hikes over three years like that, do we have city-run grocery stores in London? Nope. Free busses? Not a chance. Free universal child care for all Londoners? I think the province has some kind of $5/day thing, but not free, certainly, and not funded by the city in any case.

What does London have?

Well, we have been told the city blew through the entire season’s snow-clearing budget by last January. Oh, and some 500 businesses and non-profit organizations that used to have their recycling blue-boxes picked up every week just like us homeowners, have been told they are going to lose that service. City won’t take on the cost to do it.

I don’t think London’s illustrious mayor, Josh Morgan, has ever called himself a Democratic Socialist. I’ve called him a few things, but never that.

If Mamdani can pull off all his campaign promises with a one-time 9.5% property tax hike in NYC, he’s a freaking wizard.

I know, I know, you’re thinking – ‘Al, don’t be so naïve. He’s only threatening the 9.5% hike for one year now to distract people. Just like London’s Josh and the Gang, he will be back for further increases in succeeding years, at least until another NYC municipal election looms.’

Perhaps that is so. I am not a huge fan of Margaret Thatcher, UK Prime Minister in the 80s. She was  probably a tonic that the UK needed back then, but was also not the sharpest politician of the 20^th century, by a long shot.

She is credited with at least one well-aimed phrase, however: ‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.’

So, perhaps we should all just sit back and see if Zohran or Josh run out first. Or who gets run out first.

I’ve got a dog in this race, so you know who I’ll be rooting for.