SPRING NOTES FROM THE DEMOCRATIC DESKTOP OF CITIZEN X, BUCKHORN, ON. Some of Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s continuing rural, small town, exurban, and other supporters may have found it reassuring that the location from which he gave his April 30, 2021 virtual news conference did not look at all like even the suburbs of today’s City of Toronto.

Back in an earlier day visitors from beyond the metropolis (aka “Big Smoke” or even just “The Smoke”) similarly expressed surprise that, as we sat out on a summer evening, there were racoons running along the fence tops in my old streetcar suburban small Toronto backyard, before I moved to the kinder and gentler Kawartha wilderness.

At first I was somewhat confused myself about just where the premier was speaking from in the Ontario spring of 2021. Was he actually in isolation at his cottage, I wondered, as I watched the already blooming springtime foliage stir in the breeze.

Then my wife set me straight : “He’s just in the backyard of his mother’s place.” (Clearly a classic ravine lot, in the old Toronto west-end suburb of Etobicoke. And the location was later confirmed by a well-groomed lady on CTV News, from her own smartly decorated den at home.)

Quite carefully for the occasion, you might guess, the premier was wearing a black jacket or windbreaker, with an Ontario trillium crest on one side and “Premier Doug Ford” on the other. I tried to make fun of this, but my wife claimed that US state governors often appear in public wearing similar jackets.

My hasty Google image research bore this out for jackets with crests. But I could find no other example of such a thing as “Premier Doug Ford” on the other side of the jacket. (Which of course does not mean that my wife is wrong, even about the name tag.)

The premier’s main April 30 argument was that our “porous borders” in Canada are the main driving force behind the third wave of the global pandemic his government has been having so much trouble managing. And this is of course the fault of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal federal government, and not the Conservative provincial government of Premier Doug Ford.

In particular, the premier and others urge, some potential carriers of the dreaded COVID-19 variants so globally potent right now are avoiding Canadian anti-pandemic measures at airports, by flying to Buffalo, NY and then walking across the border to Fort Erie, ON.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was on TV from Ottawa around the same time, arguing that pandemic concerns about Canada’s well-secured borders were misplaced. Workplaces and other public spaces are where the virus is being spread most rapidly, and so forth. (Meanwhile, vaccines do now seem to be coming into Canada on some scale, as the federal government has promised. And even in the remarkably decentralized Canadian confederation even the most populous province doesn’t just get to tell the federal government what to do, especially when it’s just playing the ancient game of blame the Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council Building in Ottawa for your own Queen’s Park mistakes.)

I don’t want to wade too far right now into what increasingly seems the vast subject of Why is Doug Ford Premier of Ontario Anyway? But something about his April 30, 2021 virtual news conference, from his late mother’s ravine-lot backyard in the old Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, raised deep questions about the Ford Nation government in an unusually clear way.

What I’ve said to my wife on the subject several times over the past several days is just that, to start with, what did the growing numbers of eminent observers suddenly now expressing alarm about how Doug Ford does reprehensible things no Ontario premier has ever done before really expect, even from Rob Ford’s possibly wiser older brother?

On the negative (or to me dishonest, inauthentic, and weak) side that I like to disparage (unlike many of my Kawartha neighbours), there is the Premier Ford who said such things at his April 30, 2021 news conference as : “I talked to a taxi driver the other day ; They had 400 cars down by the border, lined up” ; “And that’s no knock on Quebec because I love Premier Legault”(does anyone now remember Mitch Hepburn and Maurice Duplessis in the 1930s?) ; “I wanna thank all the pharmacists” ; and (to end his prepared remarks, and hard to object to in one way but for me false in the end) “Thankyou and God bless the people of Ontario.”

In case anyone thinks Premier Doug Ford is about to walk off a cliff somewhere in response to all the criticism he’s been taking lately, however, I regret having to report that he also still gave good answers to some questions raised by the mainstream media after his prepared remarks.

A few reporters insisted on dragging up fresh gotcha gadgets about the resignation of former finance minister Rod Phillips, for travelling to the islands when we were all supposed to be staying home, back when. Whatever else, I think the premier gave a near-definitive answer here : “He paid for that mistake. He was the finance minister. He isn’t the finance minister now.”

You might take this as reason not to underestimate Doug Ford yet again, as has so often been said (and sometimes aptly enough). Meanwhile, on Twitter today University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe has posted a map of recent COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in Canadian provinces and American states. And, Prof Tombe reports :“It’s official, Alberta now has more new daily confirmed cases than any other province or state. Here’s the 7-day average.”

Commenting on this tweet eminent pollster Frank Graves added : “That’s just awful . Alberta is now the worst jurisdiction for COVID in all of Canada and the US. Ontario second worst in Canada, and 6th worse of all provinces and states.” Both conservative premiers Jason Kenney and Doug Ford, that is to say, have challenges ahead. But each still has political talents. Despite many recent calls to the contrary, they are not dead yet and … More to come … and probably soon enough …

SPECIAL FROM RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, APRIL 25, 2021. Pierre Berton published his two-volume history of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 1970s — The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (1970) and The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (1971).

I think there are good and bad things to be said about the remarkable Canadian public career of Pierre Berton (1920–2004). And his work in print and on TV was certainly part of the city of Toronto universe in which I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 2021 I would myself not stress the good things as much as the historian A.B. McKillop in “Books, Brands, and Berton” (The Underhill Review, Fall 2009). But I also think this piece offers a good short sketch of the remarkable career itself.

To me the bad things turn around Pierre Berton’s ultimate failure to concoct what McKillop might call a Canadian brand that could stand up to the harsh new challenges of the 21st century.

Remembering Canada and Louisiana in the first half of the 18th century

To start with, there is the US reviewer of The Great Railway who rather darkly wondered : “What kind of country has a railway for its national dream?” (Even if I can’t quite trace the source for this apt remark at the moment!)

More importantly, Canada today is an increasingly complex place, working hard to deal with increasingly complex forces from outside (and inside). Pierre Berton’s Canadian brand finally proved too simple — not at all complex, cunning, and ironic enough to handle what Marshall McLuhan’s global village (and the USA next door) have now started to become.

The complex point is not a dream about a railway. When Pierre Berton was three years old in the Yukon a 29-year-old Harold Innis at the University of Toronto published A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (a revision of his PhD thesis for the University of Chicago).

The CPR opened Innis’s eyes to the east-west economic geography first mobilized by the first Canadian resource economy of the northern transcontinental fur trade. In 1930 he published his still-in-print classic, The Fur Trade in Canada : An Introduction to Canadian Economic History.

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SPECIAL FROM ASHOK CHARLES, TORONTO/THUNDER BAY. APRIL 10, 2021 : Canada’s current citizenship oath, with its medieval pledge of fealty to a hereditary monarch, does not meet the needs of a prominent 21st century democracy.

In 2019 Canada accepted 340,000 new permanent residents, and is among the countries with the highest levels of immigration. Some 21% of the Canadian population is foreign-born — second only to Australia.

The top 10 countries from which we accept immigrants are India, China, Philippines, Nigeria, United States, Pakistan, Syria, Eritrea, Korea and Iran. Of these, at least half lack one or more of the following: multi-party elections, secularism, egalitarianism, press freedom.

Additionally, Canada is the world’s top re-settler of refugees and admits more people fleeing sectarian and ideological conflict than any other country.

It is fair to say that many of those who immigrate to Canada are coming from societies with conceptions of civil rights, freedoms, and responsibilities which are significantly different than our own.

When immigrants have fulfilled the requirements of citizenship, our citizenship oath represents our only opportunity to elicit a formal commitment in regards to how they will conduct themselves as full-fledged members of Canadian society.

It would be prudent to require a pledge to uphold democracy, egalitarianism, secularism and multiculturalism. Each of these principles is upheld by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and, as such, they are fundamental Canadian values. We benefit when joined by newcomers who honour them.

Revising our citizenship oath to include a commitment to these values would also benefit potential immigrants as they encounter the oath when investigating Canada’s naturalization process and would see a succinct summary of the ideals which underlie Canadian society.

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SPECIAL FROM ROB SPARROW, HIGH PARK, TORONTO. APRIL 1, 2021. Life for the Toronto Blue Jays, like everyone else for that matter, was and continues to be upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. A year ago, Canadian government border restrictions forced them to be baseball’s version of the nomadic warriors playing all of their games south of the border. Yet even in that most odd of years, it did not dissuade the youthful Blue Jays, who galvanized as a team and surprised with a 32-28 record and a spot in baseball’s post-season.

The potential for a breakout was there, but the consensus was that it wouldn’t happen until 2021 or beyond. To wit, the young Jays became the first team to ever qualify for the postseason without a single player with 10 years of major league experience. By reaching the playoffs — albeit an expanded 16-team version where they were quickly dispatched in two games by the Tampa Bay Rays — they arrived ahead of schedule.

“I think (we) should get more credit for what we did last year, not having a home and the guys believing from the beginning that we had a chance to play in the playoffs, and they did,” stated manager Charlie Montoyo, when asked if his team gets the respect it deserves. “The season gave us a tremendous window into their resilience, their determination, their perseverance and their toughness,” CEO Mark Shapiro said.

It is with that accomplishment in their rear-view window that they look forward to the 2021 season with much anticipation, although once again with restrictions that will keep them out of Canada. The impact of COVID-19 and emerging variants of concern remains one collective unknown, and is tied to the Blue Jays’ lingering uncertainty over where they will play out their 2021 home schedule. Prevented from hosting games at Rogers Centre due to continued border restrictions, this year the club will begin the season in Florida, and play at least their first few homestands at Dunedin’s newly upgraded TD Ballpark.

Beyond the May 24 timeframe the team has not made any definitive plans. A couple more homestands in Dunedin is one possibility, but the club wants no part of the area’s searing heat and daily thunderstorms during the summer. A return to Buffalo is on the table, although that would also require relocating the Triple-A Bisons. The club’s enduring hope is that vaccinations accelerate enough to contain a third wave driven by the variants of concern, and allow for a return to Toronto, even if to play in an empty stadium.

Whether it’s Dunedin for two months, Buffalo for the summer, or even hope against hope, Toronto in the fall, after last years’ experience they will be more than ready for it. Like many things in this uncertainty of COVID-19, only time will tell.

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FROM THE DESKTOP OF CITIZEN X, BUCKHORN, ON. Evan Dyer on the CBC News site had an interesting column this past Saturday, called “Is the pandemic killing the idea of the Commonwealth? … It was COVID-19 — not Harry and Meghan — that revealed the lack of any real connection between former colonies.”

According to Wikipedia : “The Commonwealth of Nations, generally known simply as the Commonwealth, is a political association of 54 member states, almost all of which are former territories of the British Empire.”

Or as summarized by the Government of Canada : “The modern Commonwealth is a values-based association of 54 countries, most with historic links to the United Kingdom and home to over 2 billion citizens.”

Evan Dyer also helpfully notes : “Although it includes 54 countries, only a core group of 16 ‘Commonwealth realms’ still recognize Queen Elizabeth II as their head of state: Canada, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu — and, of course, the UK itself.”

The main thrust of Evan Dyer’s argument (apt enough as far as it goes) is that the UK itself has now lost interest in the mere Commonwealth of Nations, into which its fallen empire on which the sun once never dared to set has almost completely dissolved in 2021.

As he puts it : “The Commonwealth is a multilateral institution of 54 nations. But it’s no longer the institution through which Britain conducts its most important business — nor does London feel particularly beholden to Commonwealth nations when it comes to vaccines.”

Early on in his piece, however, Mr. Dyer tells another story about what may be a side of the Commonwealth today that does look to the future, and still has some constructive role to play in the global village.

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FROM THE COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. SAT 20 MAR 2021 : Our most immediate news is that our colleague and friend (and intermittent self-declared editor-in-chief), Randall White (PhD), has finally handed in the almost next-to-last chapter of his long-meditated current work in progress, tentatively entitled Children of the Global Village : Democracy in Canada Since 1497.

(Or perhaps it should be, some at the publisher say, Democracy in Canada Since 1497 : Children of the Environment and the Global Village. Dr. White agrees : “Who knows? Still early days.”)

The at-last-completed new draft chapter in any case is called “The Return of the Natural Governing Party, 1992–2006.” It also appears at CLICK HERE. (And for more on the larger work in progress see The Long Journey to a Canadian Republic.)

Meanwhile, we thought CBC polling guru Éric Grenier’s recent “Apathy might be what’s keeping Canadians from ditching the monarchy” hit several nails on the head. One secret of the survival of the British monarchy in Canada (and other remaining “Commonwealth Realms”) is that in practice the modern monarch does nothing beyond visiting occasionally. The institution is so unobtrusive that it seriously annoys almost no one as a practical matter. Despite its increasing lack of popular acceptance in what the Constitution Act 1982 calls our “free and democratic society” today, there is thus no driving incentive to get rid of the monarchy — especially if there are said to be many troubling technical complexities.

At the same time, it also seems important to ask another question. If Canadians are all that apathetic on the subject, why has there been such a spate of Canadian commentary in response to Oprah’s recent interview with Meghan and Harry?

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SPECIAL FROM L. FRANK BUNTING, PANCAKE BAY/ALONA BAY, ONTARIO. Some on Twitter have been reacting with bemusement to President Biden’s closing remarks in his first televised address to the American people this past Thursday night : “Thank you for taking the time and listening. I look forward to seeing you.”

It is the very last sentence that especially strikes some Twitter denizens in at least my region of the ornithological universe as a “bizarre closing.”

BUT IS IT REALLY BIZARRE? I’m guessing that even left-wing commentators like Bill Maher might just indulgently laugh this off as a little too Bidenesque. It is not as if President Biden is having a Zoom meeting with half a dozen Delaware friends and neighbours he is expecting to meet again at Easter, in person. And so forth.

On the other hand, it may not be altogether intellectually reprehensible to contemplate the prospect that “I look forward to seeing you,” whatever else, could also have authentic American political weight and heft in our present time.

The excellent Mr.Maher notwithstanding (possibly), it does seem most of those most critical of and/or amused by the “bizarre closing” of President Biden’s first TV address would agree they are right-wing and/or red-state.

My mind was at least opened to a different perspective by a tweet I recently stumbled into from the counterweights editors, in response to the “bizarre closing” point of view :

“Or is this just another example of the difference between Republicans and Democrats in USA today? Why shouldn’t a guy who used to ride the train back from DC every night look forward to casually bumping into the American people? As would sometimes happen with Obama etc!”

That exhausts my interest in this subject. Now I want to turn to “Meghan Markle Has a Quarrel With the Queen, But Why?” and, eg, “Meghan Markle Racism Revelations Are “Shocking, But Not Surprising” to People of Color in UK.”

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FROM THE COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. 2 MARCH 2021, 1 AM ET. UPDATED 14 MARCH 2021. We have no idea what Prime Minister Trudeau’s Liberal governing establishment thinks about Liberal MP Julie Dzerowicz’s private member’s “BILL C-273 … An Act to establish a national strategy for a guaranteed basic income” — which received first reading on Monday, February 22, 2021.

Prime Minister Trudeau has made clear that, while he believes the concept of a guaranteed basic income for Canada is worth discussion and debate right now, his government does not “see a path to move forward on” the concept in any near future. So there is virtually no chance that the particular proposal advanced by Ms Dzerowicz, Liberal member for Toronto Davenport, will be taken up by the actual Liberal (minority) Government of Canada.

Yet the prime minister’s position seems to be that while the concept is interesting, it needs to be further debated and refined to arrive at seriously well thought-out practical proposals, in a world where Canadian governments have already committed unusually large financial resources to the more immediate needs of the citizenry in a time of high stress … and so forth.

This implies that “the government” in the narrowest sense of prime minister and cabinet (or executive council, and now maybe the Prime Ministers Office/PMO too?) is at least not unfriendly towards hearing further debate and discussion on the subject. And it is encouraging that Liberal Members of Parliament are getting involved in the discourse, as political scientists might say.

(At her Bill C-273 Press Conference this past Friday Julie Dzerowicz was joined by basic income advocates Floyd Marinescu of UBI Works and Sheila Regehr at Basic Income Canada Network …and parliamentarians Hon. Wayne Easter, Annie Koutrakis and Senator Kim Pate … Special guests Hugh Segal and Art Eggleton also joined the event.”)

All this also has obvious things in common with the NDP MP Leah Gazan’s private member’s motion “M-46 GUARANTEED LIVABLE BASIC INCOME”, moved during the 1st session of the 43rd Parliament, and then reinstated in the current 2nd session. (Ms Gazan is MP for Winnipeg Centre. Her motion was seconded by fellow parliamentarians across the country — more than a dozen NDP, three Greens, and one Liberal.)

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CITIZEN X REPORTING FROM BUFFALO, NY AND FORT ERIE, ON. For me the most striking new thing revealed in the latest evidence from the second Trump impeachment trial in the US Senate was that at least one Canadian flag was on display during the wild invasion of the federal Capitol in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021.

I see from further hasty research that possibly more than one such flag was identified by others when it happened on January 6. (See HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.)

On balance, all this finally strikes me as just another reminder that, while Canada today is happily more left-wing, liberal and progressive than the United States, we are also the place where the Proud Boys were born, and we do have our own anti-democratic right-wing extremists who bear watching.

My biggest surprise at the conclusion of yesterday’s 57-43 vote to convict Trump in the US Senate (still 10 short of the two-thirds needed, but …) was Mitch McConnell’s final speech, resolutely attacking Trump’s actions on January 6, while also claiming in the end that it was not constitutionally possible to vote him guilty. (And that he and the other 42 Republicans who voted not guilty were somehow on the side of the angels.)

I felt that Bill Kristol ultimately got this right when he tweeted : “McConnell’s speech after the vote didn’t have the effect of mitigating his dereliction of duty. It brought it into bolder relief.” At the same time, I also agreed with Michael Steele on MSNBC that Moscow Mitch may have made a “deft political” move. I have no idea whether he will finally work to take the Trump toxins out of the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, President Biden may have noted a February 12 article from the Gallup polling organization : “Americans Support Massive Stimulus Spending.” (Maybe they aren’t all that different from Canadians, or vice versa?)

Back in Canada itself, there are those who say the future of Justin Trudeau and his federal Liberals is now intimately tied to the future of COVID-19 vaccines in the country.

On CBC TV’s Power and Politics last week Liberal strategist David Herle was urging that if the ultimate good news Prime Minister Trudeau is promising on vaccines proves true, the Liberals will win a majority government in an election before the end of this year. If it proves false they will lose even their present minority government.

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SPECIAL FROM RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, JANUARY 30, 2021. The main reaction to the unusual resignation of Governor General Julie Payette so far has focused on how she was vetted, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chose her to fill the office in the summer of 2017.

The Democracy Watch advocacy group has already spoken up for a somewhat broader view of the issue, by calling on the prime minister to “democratize and Canadianize the choice of the next Governor General.”

This is important because the governor general or de facto head of state has significant reserve powers in our kind of parliamentary democracy. And this can be especially relevant for minority governments like the one we have in Ottawa now.

As authorities on the subject note, the governor general is meant to provide some degree of restraint on the prime minister, and evaluate his or her requests “to suspend Parliament or call new elections.”

From confederation in 1867 to the 1930s the Governor General of Canada was effectively appointed by the government of the United Kingdom. And this at least gave the office enough real-world independence from Canadian prime ministers to credibly assert prime ministerial restraint as required.

As the “free and democratic society” finally written down in the Constitution Act, 1982 evolved over the 20th century, this arrangement was quite rightly found wanting. The crafty mid 1920s clash between Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King and Governor General Lord Byng led to the 1931 Statute of Westminster.

The 1931 Statute made clear that the self-governing British dominions overseas were completely autonomous from the government of the United Kingdom. And this led the power to advise the monarch about governor general appointments to pass, as it were, from the prime minister of the United Kingdom to the prime ministers of the dominions.

In an earlier era this was a welcome sign of the growth of Canada’s own independent parliamentary democracy. Today it may seem more like just another step towards the never-ending aggrandizement of the friendly prime ministerial dictatorship in Ottawa.

Democracy Watch’s call on Prime Minister Trudeau to “democratize and Canadianize the choice of the next Governor General” now that Julie Payette has resigned is welcome enough.

But it is finally just another version of the advisory process put in place by Stephen Harper, but then not used by Justin Trudeau when he advised Queen Elizabeth II to appoint Julie Payette Governor General of Canada.

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