political shenanigans

Bill C-2 is bad and Mark Carney should feel bad

NOTE: This is about politics. Canadian politics! If you're not interested in politics, skip to the next post or just scroll to the end for a photo of a kitten.

I think Steve Boots was right, Mark Carney is basically a Conservative prime minister in Liberal clothing. Boots’ video (linked below) details some of the horrible changes proposed by Bill C-2, the “Strong Borders Act” that would give the government far too much power with far too little–or no–oversight. It’s not often that I am motivated to write my MP, but I did today. My riding, which has been an NDP stronghold for decades, saw the vote split between the three major parties in the April 29 federal election, and long-time NDP MP Peter Julian was out. Based on his photo, our new Liberal MP is some high school kid. I wrote this to him today:

Hello Mr. Sawatzky,

Congratulations on winning your seat in the recent federal election.

As a constituent in your riding, I must strongly object to Bill C-2, the so-called “Strong Borders Act” which is draconian piece of legislation that vastly overreaches in giving the federal government expanded powers in law enforcement and immigration with little or no oversight. I believe there are portions of the bill that are unconstitutional.

It is depressing to see a new government come in and make this its first act, which seems mainly aimed at appeasing Donald Trump. This is not leadership, it is capitulation at the expense of Canadians’ privacy and of refugees simply seeking a better, safer life in Canada. We should not be emulating the United States. Prime Minister Carney’s government will not last long if this is the sort of legislation you champion.

I realize you are a Liberal MP and will likely to toe party line, but I urge you to vote against Bill C-2. It must be scrapped. Future governments will only make worse the abuses of power it enables. This is not the Canada anyone should want.

Here’s Boots’ video:

And here’s where you can find your local MP and their email address: https://www.ourcommons.ca/Members/en/search

Finally, here is a kitten:

A few thoughts on the recent Canadian federal election (April 28, 2025)

The election was held on Monday, April 28, 2025.

UPDATE. May 5, 2025: A freshly-elected Alberta MP in a very safe Conservative riding has surrendered his seat so Poilievre can run. Barring some extreme karmic shenanigans, Pierre Verb-the-Noun should win and get back in Parliament.
  • Hooray for short Canadian elections! Five weeks and done.
  • I am relieved the Conservatives lost.
  • I am chastened by their share of the popular vote, which increased, along with their seat count.
  • I am amused by a poll that showed they could have potentially won it all without a leader. But only without a leader.
  • I am deeply satisfied by Pierre Poilievre losing his own seat. He had been elected seven times previously in the Carleton riding.
  • I am saddened but not surprised by the collapse of the NDP, going from 24 seats to just seven. Singh, who also lost his seat, gave a warm and gracious concession speech and announced he would resign. The party, IMNSHO, needs to go back to being fully socialist, to give people a clear alternative to the Liberals, who are in some ways moving further from the left.
  • The Greens desperately need something to be more than a blip. Elizabeth May ain’t going to run forever.
  • Maxine Bernier came in fourth in his riding. I think the PPC is PP-Done. The bad news is the Conservatives seem happy (?) to absorb the extreme right-wing he represented.
  • The Liberals fell three seats short of a majority (getting 169), but should probably be fairly safe with help from the gutted NDP, who will not be in a hurry to have a new election.
  • The whole election is kind of a shock from what was expected before the re-election of Trump. It is not an exaggeration that Trump’s demented grandpa antics aimed at Canada helped revive the Liberals (along with Trudeau resigning), giving them a mandate they may very well have lost had the polling showing the Conservatives with a 20+ point lead held. This is good for Canada in that Poilievre would have been a terrible PM.
  • My own riding switched from NDP to Liberal. I can live with that.

Now we wait to see how Poilievre gets back into Parliament without a seat. Some newly-elected MP will need to resign “for the greater good” but I suspect the party will start developing fracture lines even if this happens. Remember, it’s the result of merging the Canadian Alliance (nee Reform) and the old Progressive Conservative parties. It’s no coincidence they dropped the “progressive” part, as the party has pushed much harder to the right thanks to the CA/Reform wing, which drive the merger. Poilievre is also taking the worst cues from the U.S. Republican Party, by constantly spouting lies, misstating and misrepresenting everything and being just an angry, unlikeable sod, and I think some in the party realize that and know the gains made in this election may have been in spite of their leader, not because of him (though with any “populist” leader, he will always have his base of cult-like loyalists).

Interesting times ahead.

Things I didn’t really plan on in 2025

  • Visiting and bookmarking this website: https://madeinca.ca/
  • Discovering Steve Boots, a funny, amiable socialist and teacher who does Canadian political analysis on YouTube.
  • Entertaining the possibility that we might actually dodge electing a Conservative government in this year’s federal election

This has been an unplanned somewhat political post, thanks to tariffs and other actions and comments from some increasingly senile old white guy who wears a lot of orange makeup because he is a clown, and we are all part of the circus now.

To compensate, I give you this acrobatic cat:

7-11’s Big Gulf

An interweb pal suggested the perfectly stupid name 7-11’s Big Gulf as a substitute for the real life and even more stupid renaming (for Americans) of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

Because I am easily amused, I created this as it might look in the web version of Apple Maps:

Thank you and good night.

Politics 2025

In summary:

[image of Pennywise the clown here]

But more seriously, my hopes are modest:

  • In Canada, I hope the federal Liberals elect a competent, interesting and articulate new leader and go on to win another minority or maybe even majority government. For a long time the Conservatives have had a big lead in the polls, but it seems suddenly shaky after Trudeau announced he is stepping down. Pollievre would be a terrible prime minster, as he’s completely consumed by ideology and politics–and is out of step with most Canadians on many core issues and values. I’m not a huge Liberal fan or anything, but they would be far, far better than anything we’d get under Pollievre’s leadership.
  • In the U.S. it’s simpler still: That Trump and his acolytes don’t destroy democracy. It’s too early to call it yet, but early signs are not looking good.

And that’s all I have to say about politics. Now I must take a bath to cleanse my body, if not my soul.

Have a kitten as reward for reading this:

How to hide an oil pipeline

You plant a lot of grass.

I shot this rather pretty green hill as I was walking along North Road today (through a fence, I should add). If I had been able to reach the edge of the hill, I could have taken a photo of the detritus of the Trans Canadian oil pipeline expansion site: a huge and empty wooden spool, a few tarps covering mounds of soil, some small metal structures. The workers are gone now, and I don’t know if the site is going to be reclaimed or just left as is. I suspect the latter.

And while the grass looks pretty, here’s a Google Maps street view from 2017, the last year when the area was completely untouched by the pipeline construction:

It’s rather ironic that a buried pipeline required thousands of trees to be chopped down. And only grass is put back in their place. I suppose the view is nicer now without all the pesky trees blocking it.

The pipeline–a colossally expensive, stupid and unnecessary project that was about to be cancelled before the federal government swooped in to save it–is just about complete now, as the world transitions away from fossil fuels. If I think about the pipeline, it makes me angry. So I try not to think about it much.

That grass sure looks nice, though. You’d never know.

Remembering that the news makes me feel bad

A few days ago I unsubscribed from two well-written, timely and informative newsletters.

Both focused on covering politics and the news, mostly in terms of how politics often is the news. Both were American-centric, but the U.S. does have a rather lot of influence on the world.

Over the past few days, I found myself starting to read the current edition of each newsletter, then stop. A few times I just straight up deleted them, unread. I thought about how I stopped checking the news on a daily basis and how every time I have checked the news since then, it reinforces what a wise decision that was.

These newsletters were making me feel pretty much the same way as ingesting the news on a daily basis had: bad.

If I want to feel bad, I can just step on the scale. It’s quicker, costs me nothing and fifteen minutes later I’ll have either forgotten about it or rationalized it in some way (“Focus on the long term, not daily fluctuations”). The bad feeling does not linger.

Reading bad or unpleasant news–especially political news–lingers. It burrows into my psyche. I don’t like that. Is it a me problem? Possibly.

But I have an easy me solution–just don’t read that stuff! I can still stay informed without soaking in it, as it were.

And so my email inbox grows slightly slimmer. Now if I can just do the same.

Asimov predicts 2020 and probably the next thousand years, too

Daring Fireball linked to a quaintly prehistoric photocopy of an Isaac Asimov piece written for Newsweek circa January 1980. As a frame of reference, this was a little under 11 months before Reagan was elected president.

It is biting, acerbic and works precisely as well in 2020 as it did 40 years ago. One might make a persuasive case for it being even more effective now. A quote:

We have a new buzzword, too, for anyone who admires competence, knowledge, learning and skill, and who wishes to spread it around. People like that are called “elitists.”

The sarcasm, it burns.

And the closer:

I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.

We can *all* be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like “America’s right to know” and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.

In 2020, nearly 74 million Americans voted for four more years of President Donald Trump.

The 2020 BC election in one picture

I don’t write much about politics–and especially not in 2020 when leaders around the world have often not just disappointed but been actively harmful, but this shot from the CBC News site of side-by-side stories captures the results of BC’s election yesterday. With advance poll and mail-in ballots still remaining to be counted, the results won’t be official for a while, but it seems clear the NDP won their biggest majority ever and the BC Liberals will almost certainly be looking for a new leader soon.