It’s extremely Cool and Good that commercial fisheries have created an environment where pogroms happen in 2020
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Love that we can have open lynch mobs in Canada in twenty fucking twenty. Cool cool cool.
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I look forward to talking heads being surprised at outrage over this obvious act of violent intimidation. Wait, no, I hate that that is going to be the discourse, actually.
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If you want a hint of where the Canadian Discourse is at, here’s the National Post being utterly embarrassing
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On another site where I read about this, I saw this Google Doc getting passed around with ways to help, aimed primarily but not exclusively at Canadians: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u_LF_bCFBbSijzqJgHNh4-MfpYz0hfdv/view
Note: I have not personally vetted any of the information, nor do I have the connections in the Mi’kmaq community to do so.
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The National Post is the worst. A smarmy veneer of education over intellectually bankrupt assertions of conservative talking points. At least the Sun knows what it is.
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Give it a week and Rex Murphy will find a pretentious and bloviating way to call the Mi’kmaq “uppity” and still, SOMEHOW, have a byline
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Reminder that the National Post is the flagship paper for the conservative takeover of Canadian media:
The right wing batshittery is only starting in this country, unfortunately.
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God. I’ve been out of the country long enough to have allowed myself to forget Rex Murphy somehow still has an audience.
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My building has TVs in the elevator, and I keep seeing ads for the local People’s Party candidate. Our region doesn’t even have an election pending soon, and I thought (hoped) that racist-ass party had dissolved after their decisive defeat in the last election.
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In lighthearted CanPoli news, Jagmeet Singh is doing an Among Us stream today at 7 PM EST with a bunch of Canadian and American leftist politicians:
Should be a fun time.
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“F’s” in chat for JT and Kenney, plz
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Let’s hope Keystone XL is dead for good this time.
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It’s just a shame that Kenney decided to stake Alberta’a economic future on these massive petro capital projects, and now they’re going bust. I feel bad for my friends there who will suffer further austerity due to a self own of money management.
And absolutely, that’s not to say that Keystone should have gone ahead. It was an environmental disaster, a gross violation of indigenous sovereignty, and just an all around bad business deal. It just sucks that it was desperately needed public funds that now get allocated to settle massive debts caused by this crater of a project. It’ll hurt federally for sure, but it’s going to devastate Alberta.
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Just wanna revive this thread to validate anyone that is feeling cynical about Trudeau’s appointment of Mary Simon as Governor General. If Inuk and Indigenous folks more broadly are into it, I’m super happy for them and support them. I will always hold space for folks celebrating seeing themselves reflected in whatever part of society.
As a settler, though, it’s important to keep our eyes on the prize, and there’s no doubt a substantial amount of irony involved in appointing an Indigenous individual to the highest embodiment of Crown sovereignty. Without treating anyone as a monolith or presuming to speak for anyone, it’s fair to say Indigenous commentators are cognizant of this irony. Inevitably, mainstream settler commentators will either hop on the Trudeau-as-ultimate-progressive bandwagon or will be sufficiently worried about being called out as unreasonable for critiquing past the symbolic gestures by moderates that this becomes a topic beyond reproach on platforms like the CBC.
But critique past those gestures we must. Recall that on several occasions Trudeau has first flaunted his diverse appointments before ousting women of colour from caucus and/or Cabinet when their substantive perspectives or positions have challenged him–namely, Celina Caesar-Chavannes and Jody Wilson-Raybould. This appointment is perfect for Trudeau, because unlike CCC as MP or JWR as AG, the GG has effectively no role to push back in contemporary Canadian politics. If Mary Simon tries to wield the power of the GG in any way beyond rubber-stamping the PM’s decisions she’ll be vilified as anti-democratic.
With a fall election still looming, remind your friends and family that representation only means something if it is–wait for it–representative of substantive and meaningful change.
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I have no strong opinion on Mary Simon, and I hope she does all the good she can in the position, but it’s definitely hard to look at Canada and think her appointment is anything but a token gesture by a government who hopes that the media, and settlers, will take it and not ask for more.
In late 2019, the RCMP was prepared to use snipers on Wet’suwet’en protests against the Trans Mountain Pipeline. Arrests continued pretty much until the pandemic, despite national outcry, and the governments of Canada continued to financially support it during Covid-19 lockdowns. There is old growth logging happening on the island, protesters are being arrested too.
One can’t help but look at this and the heatwave the other week, which led to a wildfire in Lytton (a town with a large Indigenous population) and the death of perhaps a billion shellfish and other coastal creatures, and draw the lines between climate change and Canada’s disregard for the environment (even outside of this so-called nation, such as in California) - and Indigenous people (the graves uncovered at the Kamloops Residential “School”, the destruction and prevention of tent cities - approximately 1/3rd of homeless people in Vancouver are Indigenous).
And all of that was just British Columbia, where I live and which is run by the NDP. None of this touches on fisheries in the East or the hot mess that is Alberta or the dreadful handling of Covid-19. This country does not give a fuck about Indigenous people, or the land we took from them.
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Looks like we’ll be remaking this thread in a month for the 44th Parliament. 
This is one of those elections hitting me at a time where it is hard to care, and in a time where it is hard to justify. I have niblings starting kindergarten in a couple of weeks, with Covid-19 cases in much of the country only growing and most children unvaccinated. And nobody I know is overly happy with the candidates their preferred party has this year - my conservative in-laws don’t like O’Toole, my friends and I are pretty disillusioned with the NDP given the issues I mentioned last month (^), and even the liberals I know aren’t as keen on Trudeau as they were the past few elections. A weird time for an election.
But please share any local candidates, or smaller parties, worth knowing about and supporting!
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This is 100% about the Liberals trying to consolidate a majority government at a time of heightened popularity, never mind that their most popular policies during the pandemic were ones pushed on them by the NDP. The truly pointless aspect of this whole thing is that the Liberals could have easily put this off to a spring or summer 2022 election and still likely hold a majority given the polling and the complete Tory meltdown.
But Trudeau wants an election, and that’s what’s going to happen. Don’t let the pandemic scare you into not voting. Almost every Canadian is eligible to vote by mail, and it’s pretty easy to get registered for a postal ballot:
Spread the word, let’s show the Liberals what the left can do.
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Yeah the Liberals seemed quite confident in O’Toole’s pre-campaign polling, but recent numbers and the Nova Scotia election suggest this isn’t going to me a cake walk. So, as usual, the Libs are campaigning to the left of where they actually govern, announcing plans for paid sick leave ~18 months into the pandemic eye-roll.
Too early to say but another Liberal minority seems even more likely now than a couple weeks ago, emphasizing just how much of a colossal waste of money and covid exposure this whole thing is.
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The election results will likely not be finalized until Wednesday, but it looks like the 44th Parliament will mostly be the same as the 43rd. A few seats flipped CON-LIB, but it looks like that happened evenly enough that the numbers will be the same. NDP looks like it may gain three or four seats, but the Greens lost a seat. No PPC candidates won, thankfully if unsurprisingly.
Any interesting changes around the country worth highlighting? Even if the number of seats didn’t change much, there are still some wins and losses of note. Blake Desjarlais is projected to win a seat in Edmonton, which I believe would make him our first Two-Spirit MP.
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