Questions Of The Day (Politics)

[Wile E. Coyote]

Trudeau has just invoked the Emergencies Act, it's really an updated version of the War Measures Act in 1988, legislation which was only to be used in time of war. However Trudeau says it will only be used in a limited fashion and he doesn't intend to call in the military, or restrict the public from protesting peacefully....hmmmm.

This is of course because Justin has upset a nation of truckers (the folks that kept the supply chain going during COVID) by insisting they must be vaccinated and, when they started protesting in a massive Freedom Convoy and arriving in the cities, insisting on doubling down......

Of course a couple of years back when Indian famers arrived in New Delhi to to protest at farming reforms, opening up agriculture to the private sector, and then they initiated a citywide blockade, Justin was first out of the blocks to condemn the Indian government and support the protesters.

Karma, say the Indian papers....

[Mick Harper]

All the same it's a tricky business. You will remember when the petrol delivery drivers paralysed the fair country of Albion not so long ago. [Little joke for you lorry badge collectors there.] It's usually a practical matter. Modi understood there was nothing he could actually do. Trudeau figured (sort of correctly) that there was nothing he could do until (and it often happens this way) all of a sudden he decided there was and sent in a Mountie with a tow truck. The whole thing was cleared in an afternoon. And this was when a quarter of all Canadian trade was crossing that bridge!

An example of the same dilemma on a smaller scale can be read about in the TV thread (Sixty Days with the Gypsies) when trying to move travellers on. It can't be done until suddenly it is done.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

You have beautifully identified The Liberal Dilemma. Of all the people in society, they have the most to lose. The poor have nothing to lose, the rich have the wherewithall to avoid losing it (or to get out entirely) and the non-liberal middling sort are not interested in the kind of state-financed cultural provender that liberals regard as their birthright and the only thing worth living for.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Politics is indeed terribly difficult. As the PM of Canada, when should you invoke your Emergency powers?

1) At the start of an officially declared pandemic by the World Health Organisation, which at the time many feared could be on the scale of "Spanish flu", you have no working vaccines, you have a million Canadians abroad needing to return home, and you now want to close borders.

2) When truckers come to the cities to protest about your policy of vaccine mandates.

Tricky one isn't it.

[Mick Harper]

You don't cut 'em much slack, do you? If you had been Canadian PM for the last five years what exactly would you have done different? To mark your card, Canada is a democracy so you can't just do whatever happens to be in your busy little brain. I will not mention him next door.

PS I just watched my first documentary on Newfoundland. What a shame Ishmael has gone native.

[Wile E. Coyote]

That's the thing about emergency powers, you need them to reassure folks, but you can't of course use them in anything like an emergency situation as everybody then panics. No, what you need in an emergency is a COBRA meeting, which signifies that you are gathering the tribal elders as a sensible precautionary step to taking things seriously, but no panic is needed.

Where Justin went wrong was most probably he asked some civil servant why he couldn't stop the protests which were damaging his reputation as a provider of tribal unity, and when they pointed out to him the tribal laws, he went all Castro. Of course when the Cubans go Castro, Justin is first to support human rights protesters, but there are two sets of rules, and things are different when your own folks try to bring you down.

If only folks would see sense and actually elect the Coyote party, we would avoid all these double standards as we actually promise six months of water cannon and rubber bullets from the very start whislt we wipe out the opposition, and then Utopia.

Small price to pay....

[Grant]

You realise that Castro was his father? Look it up

[Mick Harper]

I was amused watching the whole world go into Ukrainian meltdown yesterday even though Putin had done nothing at all. All he had done was to threaten to get some Russian troops in the Donbas pocket currently wearing militia uniforms to start wearing Russian uniforms instead. What kind of sanctions is he going to get when he actually does something? He waits and shivers.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Looks like I was wrong, (not for the first time), Putin is launching attacks on the Ukranians outside the Donbas region. Presumably to knock out the Ukarianians' (COG) centre of gravity, and encourage a bloodless surender.

[Mick Harper]

I have to say it surprised me too. And yet, as soon as NATO said it wouldn't be interfering, it is only Hungary '56 or Czechoslovakia '68 all over again. Big countries can and do invade small countries with equanimity if there are no bigger countries around.

I predict the Ukrainian response will be more Czech than Hungarian. You have to have a bit of nation-state history to wish to die for your nation-state. If so Putin will have scored a considerable triumph. If not, he's for the chop. Either way, the West will stand idly by. And so they should. This relentless drumbeat of baddies-must-be-punished is the cause of most of the mischief in the world. Let karma rule!

[Mick Harper]

Putin may know his Soviet history but he's made a giant boo-boo all the same. He formally recognised the sovereign independence of the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. It might only have been for a news bite in the 24 hour news-cycle but these things matter.

The old CPSU didn't give it a thought when they started carving Russia into Soviet Socialist Republics, they were just administrative conveniences. But every one went on to become actual independent countries. By contrast smaller units -- led by Chechnya and Abkhazia -- sought independence but not one made it. The Russians have shed a lot of blood preventing it because they know how many would go if they could. It was a strict rule

If you're an SSR you go with (sort of) our blessing
If you're not, forget about it

Chechnya and Abkhazia will be overjoyed to hear that the new rule, and it's been formally announced by the President and passed unanimously by the Duma, is

[Grant]

Thank goodness for Putin. For the first time in two years we can turn on the TV news and it’s not about Covid. Another hysteria has replaced it.
Sadly we have to listen to another set of “experts” who drone on about Biden being Chamberlain and Putin being Hitler.

[Mick Harper]

But surely that is correct. Chamberlain recognised at Munich that
(a) Germany had legitimate grounds for seeking to adjust the previous territorial settlement, made when Germany was too weak to have any say in it and
(b) the current adjustment was not a suitable casus belli.

My main criticism of Biden's speech was "The United States of America always stands up to bullies." Standing up to bullies is not a sensible policy whether in the playground or in the world. Learning to live with bullies is the correct policy. Though that may include asking this friend of your father's to go round to the bully's house and threaten to kneecap him if he does it again.

Aside from "And the award for being the world's biggest bully goes to..."

[Wile E. Coyote]