I had no idea the KKK was so involved in Canada. I also confess to being ignorant of a lot of the Canadian history, politics & geography mentioned here.
That was quite a read! A very deep dive into Western Canadian political history,debunking its modern repudiation, in order to understand Elon Musk’s inherited political inclinations.
We still have a form of kkk in canada they are aryan nation I came across them?in alberta when at the time was dating a black guy they threatened me and my familt
Dougald, I was a history major at Western in the late ‘70’s and when considering the politics of western Canada nobody ever mentioned the KKK… or its ties to both the progressives and Conservatives. So, thank you for completing the picture!
Suddenly the closeness of Pollievre and Singh makes sense to me.
I vote now on the basis of who is likely to take the climate crisis the most seriously. Sadly it doesn’t leave many options.
If people paid attention to the record of the CCF and the NDP in office, and not just their rhetoric, it paints a very different picture.
A study by CUPE economist Toby Sanger showed that NDP governments were more conservative, spent less and taxed less than Liberals and PCs, because from 1990 onward they ran austerity governments in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and BC. They cut corporate and personal income taxes for the wealthy, froze budgets and it resulted in the worst child poverty in Canada, especially for Indigenous people.
NDP provincial governments have been incredibly regressive, and still are, and throughout their existence (and that of the CCF) they have partnered with conservatives against liberals.
The lure of neoliberalism in the 1980s to 1990s and beyond is well-documented, and few were immune to its charms, including provincial NDP governments. Public-Private-Partnerships were all the rage for a while. I defer to your expertise and thank you for sharing it.
I took issue with one specific statement: "Suddenly the closeness of Pollievre and Singh makes sense to me." This smacks of what many have called "Truanon" – the deep conspiratorial vein that runs through the Liberal Party and their supporters, that actually emerged pre-Trudeau, when Paul Martin tore up his healthcare agreement and decided to roll the dice, (not even mandating all LPC MP be in the House for the confidence vote). Martin himself has admitted that he wanted an election. Somehow his confession doesn't matter to Truanon. They have hardwired alt-reality into their brains, evidence be damned: Layton stabbed Martin in the back and betrayed the country by "teaming up" with the Conservatives.
This Earth-2 nonsense continued throughout Harper's at the time record minority. The NDP were "teaming up" with the Cons – even though the Parliamentary record is clear that no confidence vote was backed by the NDP – it was the Liberals doing that.
Which brings us to now. "Suddenly the closeness of Pollievre and Singh makes sense to me." Reality check: these two men couldn't be more opposite. Singh took a pay cut for public service, to help people. Poilievre is a life-long grifter who's never made a pay cheque outside of politics, who's in it for himself. There is no closeness.
The parliamentary record is clear: Trudeau and Poilievre vote together far more often killing NDP private member bills that would address greedflation and price gouging.
So it only "makes sense" to Doug that something that never happened happened, because he's in an alt-reality cult. Truanon is like a mutant zombie brain infection, being dragged into the post-Trudeau era. Could we not kill it with fire?
You are making these comments on an article that details how the very first leader of the Federal NDP - Tommy Douglas, as well as CCF Leader M J Coldwell, both worked with the KKK and Conservatives to get elected.
The clearest way the NDP and the Conservatives work together is in convincing Canadians that there is anything remotely left or progressive about the NDP. Far-right conservatives - John Birchers, Social Credit, KKK and other paranoiacs accuse the NDP of being left.
J.S. Woodsworth, the first leader of the CCF, promoted eugenics, sterilization and residential schools. His family ran all the Methodist Residential Schools in Western Canada.
That's because these "social gospellers" were all white, British extremist evangelical Christians, who used their religious authority to gaslight people, sweep horrors under the rug in the name of their supposedly noble cause, when their CCF/ NDP policies led to Indigenous people and children being rounded up, taken from their families, right up to the present day.
This paternalistic view is based on a Christian notion that people are broken and need to be saved, and rather than providing people with money or land or resources for the purpose of self-sufficiency, the solution is instead to give money to people who will oversee them.
Neoliberalism is just the old fiscal conservatism on steroids. Douglas, and the CCF/NDP were always fiscal conservatives. 1970s neoliberalism
Douglas won in 1944 attacking the SK Liberal government for the debt it was running up - in the middle of the Depression and the Second World War.
Douglas always made a big deal about not running a deficit, while no one mentions that there was an oil boom in the prairies and that the federal government ran programs to forgive farm and provincial debt.
That doesn't even begin to touch on the horrific consequences of the CCF's proposal to transfer child and family services to the provinces in the 1950s, which led to tens of thousands of First Nations children being taken from their families, right up until the present moment, by provincial NDP governments.
Roy Romanow started on harsh austerity in 1990, and so did the Doer Selinger NDP. They both froze welfare payments while cutting corporate taxes and dropping regulations to nothing to encourage natural resource exploitation, from which First Nations were excluded.
The result was the worst child poverty in Canada, for year after year.
In 2008, when a Keynesian Prof told Jack Layton that in order to prevent a massive recession, it would require a huge government stimulus, Layton told him if he had such quack ideas, that he should go start his own political party. Tom Mulcair was a Thatcherite who also called for cuts and free trade in 2015.
The treatment of First Nations communities in BC, Saskatchewan and Manitoba by NDP governments is nothing short of abysmal.
It was an NDP government that sent the RCMP into Wetsuweten. It's NDP Governments in Manitoba who supported filling our jails with Indigenous people at twice the national incarceration rate, with similar horrible treatment in Saskatchewan.
The Manitoba NDP supported the Harper crime omnibus bill with mandatory minimums, that meant imprisoning record numbers of Indigenous youth.
From 2006 to 2016, the Manitoba NDP government doubled the number of children being seized from their families, to the point that it reached the highest child apprehension rate of any jurisdiction in the world. Over 11,000 children in a province of 1.3-million. A newborn a day was still being seized, and on top of that, governments in BC and Manitoba also diverted 100% of the federal children's allowances intended for those children into provincial coffers.
They took 11,000 children and took over $330-million from them, in Manitoba alone, and they were abandoned. Half of the homeless people on the streets of Winnipeg were in CFS: Indigenous children taken by provincial authorities, then dumped on the street, where they are living, right now.
One of the people who was directly responsible for this, Jennifer Howard, was the Manitoba Minister of Finance, who is also Jagmeet Singh's Chief of Staff and the NDP's national campaign director.
To which I could add, in Manitoba, the current NDP decided to keep the PC's budget, with $500-million in property tax cuts, $300-million in gas tax cuts while health care workers who went on strike in October didn't even get a living wage for a settlement.
As a Federal opposition party, the NDP has no power whatsoever to present money bills, but they continually present grand proclamations that are just that - proclamations, with no force or effect.
Even Layton voting non-confidence in 2005 is revisionist history. Rick Salutin, no Liberal, and other non-partisan writers made the point.
The NDP were looking for a pretense to take down the government, which had just signed the Kelowna Accord. There was about to be an International Climate Conference.
To all of this, I will add this article from the Volcano.
"The BC Liberals have tended to be more aggressive than the NDP in cutting funding for public services and in their boldness of tax cuts for corporations. But in repressing Indigenous peoples’ resistance against incursions of resources extraction corporations, it has been the BC NDP that has excelled.
The reason the BC NDP tends to be more fierce than the Liberals in their attacks on Indigenous people is that they can get away with it. The civil society groups that would oppose BC Liberal government assaults on Indigenous sovereignty tend to be silent, or slow to respond and quick to apologize for attacks waged or overseen by the BC NDP. Why? Because the NDP is intertwined with the leadership of civil society organizations. The NDP uses these organizations as “farm teams” to train and recruit their future organizers and politicians. Many activists and leaders of trade unions, civil liberties groups, environmental organizations, housing advocacy, feminist, and anti-racist service groups have gone on to become NDP big shots. Others who are still leaders of these civil society groups have personal histories and relationships with these NDP politicians.
Underneath the corruptions of personal connections is a deeper issue: the NDP – and similar parties in Municipal politics – fills the horizon of imagined possibility for too much of western Canada’s social movements. During the 16 years of BC Liberal rule, the connections between leaderships of progressive groups and their social bases was broken by these leaders’ focus on getting the NDP elected at all costs. Even now, with the NDP in power, the progressive groups and leaders with the loudest voices and most influence remain occupied with keeping them there, qualifying any critique of NDP attacks on the Wet’suwet’en nation with concern that the BC Liberals would be worse.
The effect of the BC NDP marriage with progressive organizations was that the response to the January 7, 2019 RCMP raid on the Gitdumt’en checkpoint on Wet’suwet’en territory was muted. There were huge, energetic, and worldwide grassroots solidarity actions on January 8, immediately following the raid. In Vancouver, a rally attended by more than 1,500 people included speakers from the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, and progressive civic politicians were seen in the crowd. But when more militant actions shook the streets of Vancouver, shutting down the main truck access point to the Port for six hours on January 9, and for an hour three days later, and then blockading the rail line on Venables Street for more than two hours on January 16, not only were mainstream civil society groups absent, but there was an effective media blackout. Neither the CBC, which tends to be more sharply critical of BC Liberal policies and to cheer the NDP, nor the corporate media which tends to cheer business interests, covered these escalating actions.
As long as progressive organizations dedicate themselves to electoral maneuverings, they will be granting the NDP a free pass to attack Indigenous nations that rise up in defence of their sovereign territories. As Indigenous sovereigntists have always said, the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty cannot be subordinated to settler electoral politics. The problem facing the Wet’suwet’en and all Indigenous nations is the whole body of settler colonialism – including the bosses represented by the Liberals and the workers represented by the NDP."
The pipeline through Wet’suwet’en was not subject to federal approval. Because it's entirely within BC, the jurisdiction is provincial.
The RCMP were working for the province and municipalities. Singh and John Horgan both spoke in favour of the pipeline, then blamed it all on the federal government.
There's a lot of truth in what you write here. All Canadian governments have unjustifiable records when it comes to First Nations. Abysmal records when it comes to climate and resource management, not to mention economic, social, transportation and culture prioritization. The country is a mess. No one should blindly support any party but should always push them to do better. Much. much better. That said, every time there's a tiny glimmer of progress amongst all that darkness it's usually the NDP pushing for it.
Hopping back and forth between provincial and federal NDP governments is sort of fair because the NDP themselves do it to (in vain) to sell their fiscal readiness to govern. The realpolitik of it all often means supporting the least bad option to stem some of the bleeding.
I'm not familiar with the Manitoba situation. In BC, Dave Barrett fixed a few things – made crony capitalism a little more difficult to carry off. John Horgan was mostly a custodian, but also a bit of a fixer. Christy Clark was an evil, hateful, deeply damaged person. The CBC lover her of course. The first premier to my knowledge to openly take bribes in the form of a "second salary" (corporate donations laundered through her Liberal party) and took glee in facilitating and profiting from (along with people like Vancouver's current Mayor) the industrial scale physical and psychological abuse of our elders in non-union private care facilities. There are other issues I won't get into. She needed to be stopped by any means necessary.
History demonstrates time and again the provincial jurisdiction simply does not apply to BC in the same way as in Ontario, Quebec or even Alberta. Reforming law enforcement has proven a quagmire. They answer to no one, work for the private sector now make political endorsements.
Horgan did oppose the pipeline and spend a boatload of legal fees challenging it. I am massively disappointed and sometimes disgusted by the choices Horgan and Eby have made. MLAs are kept in untouchable bubbles. There's no critique or debate or ambition. There's silence an control. An impotent, compromised media establishment let's them get away with it. The alternative has always been far worse. There have been some small steps in the right direction.
The Kelowna Accord would have been great start and a small step. Layton certainly thought so too. Did austerity king Paul Martin, fresh from triggering a national healthcare crisis, prioritize it as well as he should have before intentionally rolling the dice on an early election? Not at all.
I have seen no evidence of Singh ever supporting the pipeline. Trudeau's Liberal majority will have to own that one, along with killing electoral reform.
So are Singh and Poilievre "close," as Doug claims? Maybe in the cosmic scheme of things, but not in the Parliamentary record or in recent policy. Never as close as Poilievre and Trudeau. Not as close as Poilievre and Carney. And in the conspiratorial Truanon sense that Doug puts forth – they're not. We should not excuse or encourage more alt-reality entering the mainstream.
The NDP have had and have issues. But they do poke at the corporatist status quo. There's a reason Bay Street and Big Oil loath them. Good reasons. The alternatives have always been worse. Usually far worse.
If your takeaway from this piece is that the beliefs of the grandfather are shared by their grandchildren, you don’t know how to read, reason or think, and you probably shouldn’t be driving, much less voting.
Fun Fact: while I studied at the University of Winnipeg, I was awarded the Woodsworth scholarship. I studied a lot of Canadian history and find your essay compelling, solid research. Maybe some opinion that wouldn’t stand in academia, but very well informed opinion nonetheless. Tommy Douglas did eventually distance himself from eugenics - being part of the Canadian MP contingent visit to Germany after Hitler and the Nazis took power, played a big part of his move away from eugenics. He correctly predicted that “we’d be at war with Germany within ten years.”
As for the political dynamics of the Canadian prairies; it is still dominated by these ideas and forces. It is entirely frustrating how rooted it is here, dog whistles abound. Astroturfing is still very prominent in prairie politics as well. It always happens here.
And as a mechanism to explain the Musk family’s horrible ideas? Well done.
I had no idea the KKK was so involved in Canada. I also confess to being ignorant of a lot of the Canadian history, politics & geography mentioned here.
I was stunned to find it out. Almost none of this information is readily available without a paywall.
That was quite a read! A very deep dive into Western Canadian political history,debunking its modern repudiation, in order to understand Elon Musk’s inherited political inclinations.
We still have a form of kkk in canada they are aryan nation I came across them?in alberta when at the time was dating a black guy they threatened me and my familt
Yes, there are still groups. Some are from the US and there was a KKK presence in Alberta back in the day.
Dougald, I was a history major at Western in the late ‘70’s and when considering the politics of western Canada nobody ever mentioned the KKK… or its ties to both the progressives and Conservatives. So, thank you for completing the picture!
Suddenly the closeness of Pollievre and Singh makes sense to me.
I vote now on the basis of who is likely to take the climate crisis the most seriously. Sadly it doesn’t leave many options.
I couldn't believe it. The more I read the worse it got.
Closeness of who now? 😂 Might want to put down the bottle, gramps.
If people paid attention to the record of the CCF and the NDP in office, and not just their rhetoric, it paints a very different picture.
A study by CUPE economist Toby Sanger showed that NDP governments were more conservative, spent less and taxed less than Liberals and PCs, because from 1990 onward they ran austerity governments in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and BC. They cut corporate and personal income taxes for the wealthy, froze budgets and it resulted in the worst child poverty in Canada, especially for Indigenous people.
NDP provincial governments have been incredibly regressive, and still are, and throughout their existence (and that of the CCF) they have partnered with conservatives against liberals.
The lure of neoliberalism in the 1980s to 1990s and beyond is well-documented, and few were immune to its charms, including provincial NDP governments. Public-Private-Partnerships were all the rage for a while. I defer to your expertise and thank you for sharing it.
I took issue with one specific statement: "Suddenly the closeness of Pollievre and Singh makes sense to me." This smacks of what many have called "Truanon" – the deep conspiratorial vein that runs through the Liberal Party and their supporters, that actually emerged pre-Trudeau, when Paul Martin tore up his healthcare agreement and decided to roll the dice, (not even mandating all LPC MP be in the House for the confidence vote). Martin himself has admitted that he wanted an election. Somehow his confession doesn't matter to Truanon. They have hardwired alt-reality into their brains, evidence be damned: Layton stabbed Martin in the back and betrayed the country by "teaming up" with the Conservatives.
This Earth-2 nonsense continued throughout Harper's at the time record minority. The NDP were "teaming up" with the Cons – even though the Parliamentary record is clear that no confidence vote was backed by the NDP – it was the Liberals doing that.
Which brings us to now. "Suddenly the closeness of Pollievre and Singh makes sense to me." Reality check: these two men couldn't be more opposite. Singh took a pay cut for public service, to help people. Poilievre is a life-long grifter who's never made a pay cheque outside of politics, who's in it for himself. There is no closeness.
The parliamentary record is clear: Trudeau and Poilievre vote together far more often killing NDP private member bills that would address greedflation and price gouging.
So it only "makes sense" to Doug that something that never happened happened, because he's in an alt-reality cult. Truanon is like a mutant zombie brain infection, being dragged into the post-Trudeau era. Could we not kill it with fire?
You are making these comments on an article that details how the very first leader of the Federal NDP - Tommy Douglas, as well as CCF Leader M J Coldwell, both worked with the KKK and Conservatives to get elected.
The clearest way the NDP and the Conservatives work together is in convincing Canadians that there is anything remotely left or progressive about the NDP. Far-right conservatives - John Birchers, Social Credit, KKK and other paranoiacs accuse the NDP of being left.
J.S. Woodsworth, the first leader of the CCF, promoted eugenics, sterilization and residential schools. His family ran all the Methodist Residential Schools in Western Canada.
That's because these "social gospellers" were all white, British extremist evangelical Christians, who used their religious authority to gaslight people, sweep horrors under the rug in the name of their supposedly noble cause, when their CCF/ NDP policies led to Indigenous people and children being rounded up, taken from their families, right up to the present day.
This paternalistic view is based on a Christian notion that people are broken and need to be saved, and rather than providing people with money or land or resources for the purpose of self-sufficiency, the solution is instead to give money to people who will oversee them.
Neoliberalism is just the old fiscal conservatism on steroids. Douglas, and the CCF/NDP were always fiscal conservatives. 1970s neoliberalism
Douglas won in 1944 attacking the SK Liberal government for the debt it was running up - in the middle of the Depression and the Second World War.
Douglas always made a big deal about not running a deficit, while no one mentions that there was an oil boom in the prairies and that the federal government ran programs to forgive farm and provincial debt.
That doesn't even begin to touch on the horrific consequences of the CCF's proposal to transfer child and family services to the provinces in the 1950s, which led to tens of thousands of First Nations children being taken from their families, right up until the present moment, by provincial NDP governments.
Roy Romanow started on harsh austerity in 1990, and so did the Doer Selinger NDP. They both froze welfare payments while cutting corporate taxes and dropping regulations to nothing to encourage natural resource exploitation, from which First Nations were excluded.
The result was the worst child poverty in Canada, for year after year.
In 2008, when a Keynesian Prof told Jack Layton that in order to prevent a massive recession, it would require a huge government stimulus, Layton told him if he had such quack ideas, that he should go start his own political party. Tom Mulcair was a Thatcherite who also called for cuts and free trade in 2015.
The treatment of First Nations communities in BC, Saskatchewan and Manitoba by NDP governments is nothing short of abysmal.
It was an NDP government that sent the RCMP into Wetsuweten. It's NDP Governments in Manitoba who supported filling our jails with Indigenous people at twice the national incarceration rate, with similar horrible treatment in Saskatchewan.
The Manitoba NDP supported the Harper crime omnibus bill with mandatory minimums, that meant imprisoning record numbers of Indigenous youth.
From 2006 to 2016, the Manitoba NDP government doubled the number of children being seized from their families, to the point that it reached the highest child apprehension rate of any jurisdiction in the world. Over 11,000 children in a province of 1.3-million. A newborn a day was still being seized, and on top of that, governments in BC and Manitoba also diverted 100% of the federal children's allowances intended for those children into provincial coffers.
They took 11,000 children and took over $330-million from them, in Manitoba alone, and they were abandoned. Half of the homeless people on the streets of Winnipeg were in CFS: Indigenous children taken by provincial authorities, then dumped on the street, where they are living, right now.
One of the people who was directly responsible for this, Jennifer Howard, was the Manitoba Minister of Finance, who is also Jagmeet Singh's Chief of Staff and the NDP's national campaign director.
To which I could add, in Manitoba, the current NDP decided to keep the PC's budget, with $500-million in property tax cuts, $300-million in gas tax cuts while health care workers who went on strike in October didn't even get a living wage for a settlement.
As a Federal opposition party, the NDP has no power whatsoever to present money bills, but they continually present grand proclamations that are just that - proclamations, with no force or effect.
Even Layton voting non-confidence in 2005 is revisionist history. Rick Salutin, no Liberal, and other non-partisan writers made the point.
The NDP were looking for a pretense to take down the government, which had just signed the Kelowna Accord. There was about to be an International Climate Conference.
To all of this, I will add this article from the Volcano.
https://www.thevolcano.org/2019/01/30/provincial-party-politics-and-the-invasion-of-wetsuweten-the-bc-ndps-special-role-in-the-settler-colonial-state/
"The BC Liberals have tended to be more aggressive than the NDP in cutting funding for public services and in their boldness of tax cuts for corporations. But in repressing Indigenous peoples’ resistance against incursions of resources extraction corporations, it has been the BC NDP that has excelled.
The reason the BC NDP tends to be more fierce than the Liberals in their attacks on Indigenous people is that they can get away with it. The civil society groups that would oppose BC Liberal government assaults on Indigenous sovereignty tend to be silent, or slow to respond and quick to apologize for attacks waged or overseen by the BC NDP. Why? Because the NDP is intertwined with the leadership of civil society organizations. The NDP uses these organizations as “farm teams” to train and recruit their future organizers and politicians. Many activists and leaders of trade unions, civil liberties groups, environmental organizations, housing advocacy, feminist, and anti-racist service groups have gone on to become NDP big shots. Others who are still leaders of these civil society groups have personal histories and relationships with these NDP politicians.
Underneath the corruptions of personal connections is a deeper issue: the NDP – and similar parties in Municipal politics – fills the horizon of imagined possibility for too much of western Canada’s social movements. During the 16 years of BC Liberal rule, the connections between leaderships of progressive groups and their social bases was broken by these leaders’ focus on getting the NDP elected at all costs. Even now, with the NDP in power, the progressive groups and leaders with the loudest voices and most influence remain occupied with keeping them there, qualifying any critique of NDP attacks on the Wet’suwet’en nation with concern that the BC Liberals would be worse.
The effect of the BC NDP marriage with progressive organizations was that the response to the January 7, 2019 RCMP raid on the Gitdumt’en checkpoint on Wet’suwet’en territory was muted. There were huge, energetic, and worldwide grassroots solidarity actions on January 8, immediately following the raid. In Vancouver, a rally attended by more than 1,500 people included speakers from the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, and progressive civic politicians were seen in the crowd. But when more militant actions shook the streets of Vancouver, shutting down the main truck access point to the Port for six hours on January 9, and for an hour three days later, and then blockading the rail line on Venables Street for more than two hours on January 16, not only were mainstream civil society groups absent, but there was an effective media blackout. Neither the CBC, which tends to be more sharply critical of BC Liberal policies and to cheer the NDP, nor the corporate media which tends to cheer business interests, covered these escalating actions.
As long as progressive organizations dedicate themselves to electoral maneuverings, they will be granting the NDP a free pass to attack Indigenous nations that rise up in defence of their sovereign territories. As Indigenous sovereigntists have always said, the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty cannot be subordinated to settler electoral politics. The problem facing the Wet’suwet’en and all Indigenous nations is the whole body of settler colonialism – including the bosses represented by the Liberals and the workers represented by the NDP."
The pipeline through Wet’suwet’en was not subject to federal approval. Because it's entirely within BC, the jurisdiction is provincial.
The RCMP were working for the province and municipalities. Singh and John Horgan both spoke in favour of the pipeline, then blamed it all on the federal government.
There's a lot of truth in what you write here. All Canadian governments have unjustifiable records when it comes to First Nations. Abysmal records when it comes to climate and resource management, not to mention economic, social, transportation and culture prioritization. The country is a mess. No one should blindly support any party but should always push them to do better. Much. much better. That said, every time there's a tiny glimmer of progress amongst all that darkness it's usually the NDP pushing for it.
Hopping back and forth between provincial and federal NDP governments is sort of fair because the NDP themselves do it to (in vain) to sell their fiscal readiness to govern. The realpolitik of it all often means supporting the least bad option to stem some of the bleeding.
I'm not familiar with the Manitoba situation. In BC, Dave Barrett fixed a few things – made crony capitalism a little more difficult to carry off. John Horgan was mostly a custodian, but also a bit of a fixer. Christy Clark was an evil, hateful, deeply damaged person. The CBC lover her of course. The first premier to my knowledge to openly take bribes in the form of a "second salary" (corporate donations laundered through her Liberal party) and took glee in facilitating and profiting from (along with people like Vancouver's current Mayor) the industrial scale physical and psychological abuse of our elders in non-union private care facilities. There are other issues I won't get into. She needed to be stopped by any means necessary.
History demonstrates time and again the provincial jurisdiction simply does not apply to BC in the same way as in Ontario, Quebec or even Alberta. Reforming law enforcement has proven a quagmire. They answer to no one, work for the private sector now make political endorsements.
Horgan did oppose the pipeline and spend a boatload of legal fees challenging it. I am massively disappointed and sometimes disgusted by the choices Horgan and Eby have made. MLAs are kept in untouchable bubbles. There's no critique or debate or ambition. There's silence an control. An impotent, compromised media establishment let's them get away with it. The alternative has always been far worse. There have been some small steps in the right direction.
The Kelowna Accord would have been great start and a small step. Layton certainly thought so too. Did austerity king Paul Martin, fresh from triggering a national healthcare crisis, prioritize it as well as he should have before intentionally rolling the dice on an early election? Not at all.
I have seen no evidence of Singh ever supporting the pipeline. Trudeau's Liberal majority will have to own that one, along with killing electoral reform.
So are Singh and Poilievre "close," as Doug claims? Maybe in the cosmic scheme of things, but not in the Parliamentary record or in recent policy. Never as close as Poilievre and Trudeau. Not as close as Poilievre and Carney. And in the conspiratorial Truanon sense that Doug puts forth – they're not. We should not excuse or encourage more alt-reality entering the mainstream.
The NDP have had and have issues. But they do poke at the corporatist status quo. There's a reason Bay Street and Big Oil loath them. Good reasons. The alternatives have always been worse. Usually far worse.
This was definitely not in my Prairie high school curriculum.
Thank you.. wow.. very interesting and was not known well..
Great article, thanks for posting. Some of the information in this article has
Saskatchewan was well rid of him.
Successful chiropractor. Wow. That’s between snake oil salesman and Ponzi scheme operator in terms of societal value.
Wow, what a treatise! Sets it all up. Took me 1/2 hour to read, but worth it.
I guess if we're saying the beliefs of the grandfather are shared by their grandchildren we'd best be careful to not elect Ms. Freeland.
If your takeaway from this piece is that the beliefs of the grandfather are shared by their grandchildren, you don’t know how to read, reason or think, and you probably shouldn’t be driving, much less voting.
Hmm.. not sure about your economic angle
I am.
Great reply! Lol
Acorn and Tree
Now that makes sense.
In the early 1900’s eugenics was a “ thing” which many people believed in, it was, in fact a movement of its own….fits right in to the KKK history!
Fun Fact: while I studied at the University of Winnipeg, I was awarded the Woodsworth scholarship. I studied a lot of Canadian history and find your essay compelling, solid research. Maybe some opinion that wouldn’t stand in academia, but very well informed opinion nonetheless. Tommy Douglas did eventually distance himself from eugenics - being part of the Canadian MP contingent visit to Germany after Hitler and the Nazis took power, played a big part of his move away from eugenics. He correctly predicted that “we’d be at war with Germany within ten years.”
As for the political dynamics of the Canadian prairies; it is still dominated by these ideas and forces. It is entirely frustrating how rooted it is here, dog whistles abound. Astroturfing is still very prominent in prairie politics as well. It always happens here.
And as a mechanism to explain the Musk family’s horrible ideas? Well done.