The coming of Kamala Carney

Social media has embraced Mark Carney for Liberal leader (and Prime Minister of Canada) with a fervor that recalls the boomlet for Kamala Harris last summer. But his victory is by no means assured.

by George J. Dance 

"May you live in interesting times," goes the ancient Chinese curse. Canadian politics has certainly got a lot more interesting this month.

Mark Carney at World Economic Forum, Davos, 2010. 

Photo by WEF. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Ten days ago I made a prediction that Trudeau would exploit the threat of Trump tariffs to stay on as Liberal leader and prime minister. In my opinion Trudeau is far too much the narcissist to voluntarily give up power. As well, I believed leadership candidate Mark Carney's claims that he was an "outsider" to the federal government, and thought the Liberal insiders would close ranks to stop him.

However ,while it is still way too early to say, and I am for now sticking with it, that part of my prediction appears to be wrong. It looks like Carney's path to the Prime Minister's office will be much easier than I had thought.

How did I go wrong? For one thing, I thought that Carney and Trudeau would be rivals, if not enemies. It turns out, though, that Carney has been on Team Trudeau for some time, serving as Justin's Special Adviser and Chair of the Liberal Task Force on Economic Growth since last September. I still find it inconceivable that Trudeau voluntarily give up power, but it is possible that he is being forced out, due to his abysmal polling numbers and/or pressure from Carney's colleagues in the United Nations (where Carney is Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance) or the World Economic Forum (where he is an Agenda Contributor and a Foundation Board member). 

Social media has embraced Carney with a fervor  that recalls the boomlet for Kamala Harris last summer. But his coronation is not a sure thing. For one thing, he has not even been officially approved as a candidate yet - no one has. Until the party announces an official list, there is no way of knowing even who will be on the ballot. 

The other announced candidates so far are all Members of Parliament (MPs): two of Trudeau's cabinet ministers and an assortment of his backbenchers. With Carney the perceived front runner, it is easy to imagine these MPs forming an ABC (anyone but Carney) alliance and depriving him of the win, just like what happened to Michael Ignatieff in his first run for the Liberal leadership. While Ignatieff did eventually win the leadership, his political fortunes never recovered after that loss; as leader, he was unable to unite the party, and he ended up leading the Liberals to a third-place finish in the next election. 

There is also the complication that, while the Liberals are charging the candidates $350,000 each to run, they are making party membership free. Until January 23, anyone can sign up and vote on the next Prime Minister; if I remember correctly, you don't even have to be a citizen. That seems like a play for a high number of votes, but it also looks like a call for every crank and right-wing troll to join the party. In such a milieu, who knows who will eventually emerge as the winner?   

There is even an outside chance that the race does not end with a clear winner, and has to be rescheduled. If so, that brings me back to my original scenario, with Justin Trudeau leading the party in one final campaign. 

We will just have to wait and see. I for one intend to keep a close eye on the Liberal race. 

We indeed live in interesting times.

Pathological socialism

Since I've been too busy to find something new for the blog today, here's a blast from the past; an article that I wrote in the fall of 2020, but mislaid, on the push to silence lockdown sceptics.

The New Statesman wants lockdown sceptics silenced

by George J. Dance

As the coronavirus continues to rage through Europe, lockdowns are failing to control it in one country after another, including the United Kingdom (UK). In the UK, lockdown lovers may be getting desperate, which explains the newest craze among the left, seeking to have "lockdown sceptics" (or, as I would call them, "Covid libertarians") 'deplatformed' or silenced (or at least marginalized). To do that, they have to malign and misrepresent the movement. 

The New Statesman (NS) magazine, a flagship magazine for the British left (similar to the New Republic in the U.S.), has been doing its fair share of maligning and misrepresenting. Last week I dealt with one such NS article, by lockdown cheerleader and Conservative MP Neil O'Brien, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. 

Throughoug the pandemic, NS has been attacking Covid libertarians with the strawman of "Covid denial"; here is a representative sample from a June article: "Most governments now reject Covid-19 denialism. Nonetheless, it has inspired far-right groups, and sparked protests against lockdowns, from Michigan to Melbourne."  The magazine repeated that strawman as late as January 6, when a "writer, broadcaster and activist," Paul Mason, was still  equating "Covid ... denialism and lockdown scepticism". Mason appears to understand neither lockdown scepticism nor the reasoning behind it: 

Their arguments often rest on scientific arguments and viewpoints that have now been discredited, such as that of the physician Karol Sikora, who in June predicted there would be “no second wave”, and modelling published last March claiming that as much as 50 per cent of the UK population had already been infected. 

Well, no. Maybe someone's arguments rest on that, but not Dr. Sikora's: his argument has always been that (as he titled an October Spectator article), "Covid-19 kills – but so does lockdown"  (a non-"denialist" claim that Mason does not address, but merely dismisses as "adopting ignorance in defence of [one's] own material interest" - as lf Sikora's only concern about his cancer patients missing hospital treatment is his lack of fees from same). Nor do those claims have anything to do with my argument, which I may as well give here:  

1. Lockdowns violate human rights; it is a matter of fact that people have been deprived of liberty, property, and even life against their will as a result of them. 
2. Governments, like everyone else, must respect human rights wherever possible. 
3. Governments violated human rights through lockdowns by pleading an emergency: that if they did not violate those rights, "millions of people would die." 
4. Granted that saving the lives of "millions of people" would excuse violating some rights: no governments have ever proved that their lockdowns have saved the lives of millions of people (or, for that matter, of any people). 

I have seen only two arguments for the cheerleaders' claim that lockdowns saved lives. One, ironically, was "modelling published last March" that claimed the UK would suffer 220,000 deaths without a lockdown, but just 20,000 with one. (Three lockdowns later, the death toll for the UK is pushing 100,000.) The other is the fact that Covid cases and deaths declined in the spring, which may have been due to (a) the voluntary social distancing that began everywhere before lockdowns (two weeks before, in the UK's case); and (b) the hypothesis that the virus is seasonal (which implies both that it would decline in the spring anyway, and that there would be a "second wave" in the fall).

Three lockdowns later, the UK is left with 100,000 deaths and counting (higher than any non-lockdown nation in Europe); but Mason is sure those deaths were all the lockdown sceptics' fault. Thanks to them, the first lockdown in March worked "too slowly;" the second one, in November, was "far too late"; and the third, after Christmas, came only after "disastrous delay and dither". No wonder he wants to shut the skeptics up: if their opinions are what is causing all these lockdowns to fail, then they must be silenced before any UK lockdowns can actually start saving all those lives. 

Which leads into Mason's own evidence. According to him: "The statistics are clear: the first lockdown worked, despite its late imposition, because schools and colleges were closed" (and not because a seasonal virus like a flu or a coronavirus declines in the spring). "The second lockdown in November, during which schools and colleges remained open, managed only to stabilise the death rate" (and not because a seasonal virus like a flu or a coronavirus does not decline in November). While the "outcome of the third lockdown depends on compliance, which the lockdown sceptics are helping to undermine." See how that works? Shut up the skeptics, close the schools again, and the lockdown may work by next spring.  

Which brings us to the real objects of Mason's spleen: the "prominent lockdown sceptics such as Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Laurence Fox, Julia Hartley-Brewer and Peter Hitchens: celebrity right-wing opinion formers with no scientific credentials." (Mason's own scientific credentials are "New Statesman contributing writer, author and film-maker.") That Gang of Five are not only wrong, but de facto traitors; they are not merely "denying reality," but "are spreading the equivalent of enemy propaganda in wartime." This alleged treason happens because, like "millions of die-hard conservative-minded people," they "still believe they live in a world of individuals and that society has no right to mandate their behaviour in an extreme crisis."

That last conjunct makes little sense. It is not British "society" mandating its citizens' behavior, but the UK government. "Society" cannot mandate anything, because it is not a person or even a god. Society is the human-constructed part of the environment (of which the 'economy' or the 'market' is an iportant part). Environments do not mandate; organisms adapt to their environment or die, but that is not because environments go around punishing organisms for their "noncompliance." 

To a socialist, though, government is "society" - or, at least the members of it who get to mandate how "society" functions. For the past century socialists have tried to 'plan' and 'manage' their national economies to eliminate poverty and scarcity, blaming every failure on 'traitors' of their own. And the result has been so great (it has never worked, but would have every time except for the 'traitors'), that they are now emboldened to try planning the rest of society: if they plan all the minutiae of everyone's lives, from seeing friends to simple outdoor exercise, they will be able to eliminate disease and death itself just as successfully. (One could call this "pathological socialism.")  

Mason candidly admits that "we’ve been here before with climate change". Since the failure of communism, socialists have been trying to build a new case for a new socialism around the climate change threat arguing, as Mason does, that "Mitigating climate change means ... the state taking control of the market." The lockdown debate, as he says, "is rooted in the same ideological soil. If Covid is real, free-market capitalism of the kind the elite sold to British people for 40 years cannot work." Denying those conclusions - that either climate change or the coronavirus prove the case for socialism - is what, for him, actually makes non-socialists and lockdown skeptics "deniers." Even questioning the ability of the state to perform such miracles (if only capitalism were destroyed and all its defenders silenced) is, for someone like him, equivalent to "denying reality." 

Look where pathological socialism has brought us already. As Mason tells it: "We are paying people not to work" thanks to the economic shutdowns that came with the lockdowns taking away their jobs. "We are lending money to bankrupt companies" thanks to those shutdowns driving companies into bankruptcy. "We are forbidding landlords to evict people" thanks to making it impossible for people and businesses to meet their rents. "We are scrapping the exams that divide children into winners and losers at an early age" by working to create a whole generation with no winners. "We are printing money so that the government can borrow it" because, having taken a chainsaw to so much of their societies, western governments have no other way to pay for all of this.  

To secure all these gains, the traitors must be silenced. "I was glad to see YouTube temporarily pull the plug on TalkRadio. I would be even gladder to see Ofcom review the station’s licence to broadcast and Twitter and Facebook label the claims of columnists as questionable or false where appropriate." 

"But above all," Mason concludes, "I want to see politicians and public figures proactively and strongly refute Covid denialism." Here may be another point of agreement. If by "refute" he means try to intellectually engage with (as opposed to misrepresenting, slandering, deplatforming, or outlawing), I would welcome that as well. Unfortunately, I am losing the hope of ever seeing it happen. Unfortunately, I am afraid that by "refute" he means "silence". He wants his opponents silenced. 

Justin Trudeau's next act

by George J. Dance

The title of this article may not be the best, but unfortunately the one I would have preferred is one I had already used this week: "Trudeau to resign in future - what now?" Trudeau says he will resign in the future; but what about now? Most of what I have seen in the days since that earlier story has been focused on the future, pondering life without Trudeau or speculating on his successor. But none of that has happened, and (it being the future) no one knows for sure what will happen. I believe it is more important to begin with a focus on the present, on what we can know now.

As of today, Justin Trudeau has not resigned. He is still Prime Minister. For now, he still enjoys all the powers of his office. Those powers are extensive; due to our constitutional convention of responsible government that has never been enshrined in law, a PM enjoys all the powers of his office and all those of the Crown. What checks a PM's power, in the Westminster parliamentary system, is his dependence on the confidence of Parliament.

For now, though, Trudeau will be ruling without Parliament, for at least 2-1/2 months (as prorogations can be extended). During that time the opposition parties will be deplatformed, while the "Liberal" caucus (including his own cabinet) will become increasingly distracted by their party's leadership race. Trudeau still has all of a PM's powers, but never before so unchecked, never so much like the "basic dictatorship" model that Trudeau has always admired. 

As for the future, we just cannot know. Trudeau may be gone by March 24, or he may not. At least one Canadian Prime Minister has announced his resignation (after losing an election, in his case), been persuaded to lead his party in one more campaign, and gone on to win a majority government and remain in power for another five years. That was Pierre Trudeau, Justin's father, in 1979-1980. Is that significant? Well, I have a theory that Justin Trudeau is by talent and training an actor, and that as Liberal leader and Prime Minister he has been playing his father – so yes, I do think that example has significance for him. 

So where does that leave Justin Trudeau, now? As noted, he is still Prime Minister, now governing without Parliament. That means he has great, almost unchecked power. In addition, as Voltaire and Stan Lee would agree, with great power comes great responsibility. Trudeau's major responsibility, the one most on Canadians' minds right now, is dealing with the Trump administration taking power this month and its threatened 25% tariffs on all imports from Canada (which would throw Canada into a crippling recession).

Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau have no respect for each other, and neither one of them bothers to hide that. Trump, for instance, has spent more than a month repeating a tasteless joke he made about taking over Canada and making it an American state with Trudeau as Governor (though he later decided to replace Trudeau with Wayne Gretzky). Trudeau, for his part, has pontificated that Trump's election "shouldn't" have happened. It is easy to see their relationship degenerating further. 

There is no reason for Trump to play nice with Trudeau: he is a lame duck president, who can say and do whatever he thinks, and his country has the power to get him whatever he wants in any case. But neither does Trudeau have a reason to play nice with Trump. On the contrary, he has every reason to escalate conflict,  

• First of all, as Trudeau himself has noted, Canadians define themselves as "non-Americans" - and in addition, a majority of Canadian voters (those who traditionally vote Liberal, NDP, or Green) identify as actively anti-American. Those leftist voters are Trudeau's natural base, and standing up to the American Goliath would be his best way of rallying them to him. 
• Second, that will keep Trudeau at the center of attention. Like him or hate him, Donald Trump has an undeniable flair for publicity. Whatever Trump says or does ends up as the day's top news and the more that involves Canada-U.S. relations, the more it turns Trudeau into Canada's top news. 
• Third, it only makes sense for Trudeau to pick a fight with the only person less popular in Canada than he is. No one has more haters in Canada than Donald Trump. (And not just in Canada.) Legacy media in both Canada and the U.S.A. are riddled with Trump-haters, and a fight with Trump will rally both Canadian and American media to his cause as well. (Yes, American journalists cannot vote, but they can determine what many Canadian voters hear or read.) 
• Fourth, this would marginalize Pierre Poilievre and the other opposition parties. Poilievre will indeed be in a difficult position. No one will want to hear what he has to say about the carbon tax (or for that matter what Singh or May have to say about corporate greed or climate change) – that's old news).  Media will only want to know their opinion of the Trudeau-Trump fight. But what can Poilievre say? He can't support Trudeau, obviously. He can't support Trump and the U.S.A., either, or he alienates those habitually leftist, anti-American voters whom he needs (and currently has) to win a majority. He can't refuse to comment, or he'll be seen as ducking a most important issue. 

Appealing to Canadians' patriotism, fighting with someone more hated than he is, rallying media and Canadian voters to him, marginalizing his real opposition; what is there for Trudeau not to like about this strategy? I have to conclude that this is the strategy he will choose. 

But what will it give him? After all, he promised to resign in March. And there is a campaign going on right now to pick his successor. 

One can look at the latter. So far the Liberal leadership campaign has attracted just two contenders (a backbench MP and a former MP) whom I have never heard of previously. No doubt there will be others, but the party's unprecedented $300,000 entry fee will limit their number. (When Justin Trudeau won the leadership, the fee was just $75,000.) Is that what a chance at being Prime Minister (for possibly as little as a week) is really worth?  

I expect Mark Carney (who thinks the Liberals can win the election just by changing leaders) to enter the race. That's the Kamala Harris strategy that failed the U.S. Democrats in the last U.S. election; and I doubt it will work for Kamala Carney, either. But enough Liberals do think that all they have to do is change leaders to make Carney a contender. What, though, if Carney is the only contender? Does the party simply anoint him (making the Kamala comparison even more obvious)? Or do they cancel or postpone the race?   

Here is where an unseen opportunity for Justin Trudeau lies. By this point he'll be a Canadian hero (in the eyes of many). If the leadership race is cancelled or postponed, he remains as leader. In addition, with Canadian-American relations in crisis, he can tell the Governor General to extend prorogation as long as he wants. 

But what if the race goes on, and Mark Carney is the only candidate? Then the best opportunity for Trudeau would be to jump into the leadership race himself. There is precedent for that -- John Diefenbaker ran in the 1968 Conservative leadership race after he had been deposed. If Trudeau did run in the leadership race, does anyone doubt that he would win it?

If that happens, then Trudeau's way will be clear: he recalls Parliament, loses a vote of confidence, and calls an election. Then he can simply continue following the same strategy I have outlined, of saving Canada, in its dire moment of crisis, from Donald Trump and American takeover. He will do little personal campaigning, and there will be no national leaders' debates; Trudeau will be too busy saving us for any of that. 

Will it work? Probably not; but it will be Justin Trudeau's best chance to retain power. It can succeed if it successfully pushes all the right buttons. those mentioned previously plus one more. Above all, the campaign's overriding message must be along the lines of: 

This is a moment of national crisis. In these times, we cannot take a chance on an untried Prime Minister with no experience in governing. It is more important than ever that the experienced, proven national leader be the one in command. 

That is a familiar gambit for incumbents. It was the message of Stephen Harper in 2015 and Paul Martin in 2006 (both unsuccessfully, but neither of those years were times of crisis). More importantly, though, it was also that of Pierre Trudeau in 1980, the message which successfully took him from announcing his resignation to winning a majority government in just months. Once again, I expect that Justin Trudeau is fully aware of that history.

The many roles of Justin Trudeau - from X.

Understanding the Trump landslide

Trump in Arizona, June 2024. Photo by 

Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

As with many Canadians (and Americans) these days, my starting point for reading the daily news day is social media site, X. The site owner, Elon Musk, maintains a free speech policy one cannot find anywhere else. The advantage of that to me is that, after an hour or so, I can get both an overview of the news and a short list of stories to follow up for possible mention on my blog. 

Yesterday, though, all I could find was one story that everyone wanted to post about, the 2024 American election result. It was not just that the Republicans won, but the size of their win. Not only did Donald Trump take the presidency; his party also took control of both houses of Congress. That is hyuge (as the new president would say) in the American system, where the Presidency and Congress (the executive and legislative branches) are formally independent. Let me emphasize its hyugeness by repeating it in its own paragraph. 

( A ) In 2024, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House. 

It seems that everyone on earth, or at least everyone on X, wants to talk about nothing else; and everyone has their own theory of why (A) occurred. One theory that I could not find anywhere on X was my own. I would like more people to know of my theory – not just because it was mine, but because it allowed me to predict (A) four years ago. Indeed, I offered my prediction at the time as a test of my theory: (A) happening would not prove my theory correct, but the failure of (A) to happen would have falsified this version of it. 

I wrote up my theory, and made my prediction, back in November 2020, in an article called " US election results are more of the same ." I was commenting on the fact that: 

( B ) in 2020, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House.

Checking back, I also discovered that: 

( C ) In 2016, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House;

( D ) In ​​2008, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House;  

( E ) In 2000, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House; and 

( F ) In 1992, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate and the House. 

To sum up: For the entire millennium so far, every incumbent president has been replaced by a challenger from the other party, in a repudiation of the incumbent's party. This repudiation has been total, with the challenger's party taking control of Congress as well as the White House. 

Those are facts. Are they just a coincidence or is there a theory that explains them? The theory that I have come up with goes like this: 

The first part follows from Ludwig von Mises' theory of interventionism. Mises taught that, while intervention was meant to be a compromise between minimal and total government, it would always tend toward the total. Each government intervention would have new, unintended consequences, new problems which had to be solved by yet more intervention. In that way, government would grow. But (and this is my own idea at this point), as government increased, so would the problems it created. It would tend to become a bigger, more commanding government trying to perform ever more functions; but it would also increasingly tend to fail at performing any of those functions well. It would increasingly tend to fail at even its core functions of courts, police, and national defense. Given enough time, it would become both a totalitarian state and a failed state. 

Long before that point is reached, the government would be failing to satisfy the needs of an increasing number of voters. Ironically, the more it tried to do, the more people it would fail to satisfy: as a government grows through interventionism, so does the number of dissatisfied voters. Those voters would give up on the party system to some degree. Some reject the system only slightly, becoming nominally independent but still retaining some loyalty to their old party. Others reject it completely and become non-voters. In between are the true independents, dissatisfied voters who reject and will vote to throw out either party. As their numbers grow, true independents increasingly determine the outcome of elections; and as they tend to vote against incumbent government, those incumbents will be totally repudiated at regular intervals. 

While the interval is regular, it is not independent of human agency. It can and has changed.  Currently it is four years (A-C), but before that it was eight (C-F). Since that change coincided with the first election of Donald Trump, it is fair to speculate that his first election is the main reason for the speed-up. Since his election, both parties have become increasingly negative. Negative campaigning has existed since the beginning of American democracy, but since Trump's election both parties have taken negativity to a whole new level. 

In the past the negativity of political campaigns began and ended with political campaigns. members of both parties were able to coexist socially outside political life. Today, though, politics and its negativity, never ends. Partisans of both parties have come to see the other party as intrinsically evil, good only to be destroyed. The challenger party does little more than point to the failures of the incumbent regime. The incumbent party increasingly dismisses the challengers' criticisms as "playing politics" and does nothing to correct them. As a result, the all-important true independents – who can confirm the flaws for themselves, as well as their failure to be corrected – are increasingly unsatisfied, increasingly likely to defect to the challengers at the earliest opportunity. They have become motivated by anti-incumbency. 

This election has confirmed that four-year interval. However, since Trump remains a player it does not tell us whether the interval stays at four years or reverts to eight following his retirement. Based on the data, there is no way to predict that, for now. All that can be predicted is that in four years' time both parties will once again march into battle as if marching to Armageddon; and in that election the Democrats will win. However, how long that Democratic president will stay in office cannot be answered at this time. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

'Anti-Hate' group gets more $$ from Trudeau gov't

by George J. Dance 

The so-called "Canadian Anti-Hate Network" (CAHN) is back in the news – or would be, if Canadian media ever reported objectively on the group. In any case, this summer the CAHN received two new grants, totaling more than $600,000, from the federal Liberal government. In June, it received more than $400,000 from the Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism Program of Heritage Canada:

Informing, Connecting, and Encouraging Anti-Hate Activities in Canada | Canadian Anti-Hate Network: 

June 18, 2024 - The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has received a $440,000 grant to help good neighbours find each other and organize against hate.... We are launching a new project, titled Informing, Connecting, and Encouraging Anti-Hate Activities In Canada, which has been made possible thanks to the support of Canadian Heritage and a grant from the Community Support, Multiculturalism, and Anti-Racism Initiatives Program.  The CSMARI program provides funding for projects that increase capacity within communities to address racism and discrimination....

We will launch a communications campaign involving some traditional advertising and by working with content creators on newer social media platforms.... We will also hold townhalls to connect community members and organizations to exchange knowledge and organize against hate together.This project is funded for two years, ending on November 30, 2025, for a total of $440,000. We are looking for additional funding to add an additional team member and expand the communications campaign to blanket Canada....

Read more: https://www.antihate.ca/informing_connecting_and_encouraging_anti_hate_activities_in_canada

In July, CAHN  received a further $200,000 from Public Safety Canada: 

Canadian Anti-Hate Network Receives Funding From Public Safety Canada's Community Resilience Fund | Canadian Anti-Hate Network:

July 10, 2024 - "The Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) will be hiring an established researcher to develop a framework to carry out studies on the far-right landscape in Canada.... The Creating an Ethical Framework for Research on Far-Right Organizing in Canada project is possible thanks to $200,000 in funding over two years under Public Safety Canada's Community Resilience Fund (CRF). Led by Public Safety's Canada Center for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence, the CRF provides financial support to organizations working to improve Canada's understanding and capacity to prevent and counter violent extremism."

Read more: https://www.antihate.ca/canadian_anti_hate_network_receives_funding_from_public_safety_canada_s_community_resilience_fund

Who are these people? According to the official description on their website, CAHN is just a group opposed to "hate" in general: 

Who We Are | Canadian Anti-Hate Network:

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network is an independent, nonprofit organization made up of Canada’s leading experts and researchers on hate groups and hate crimes. Our Advisory Committee includes academics like Dr. Barbara Perry, court-recognized experts on hate crimes, lawyers with decades of experience with hate groups, people who stood up to the neo-Nazi Heritage Front in the 1990s, and leaders in communities that are being targeted by hate.

We have relationships with colleagues and organizations doing similar work internationally, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, and experts in deradicalisation.

Our mandate is to monitor, research, and counter hate groups by providing education and information on hate groups to the public, media, researchers, courts, law enforcement, and community groups.

https://www.antihate.ca/about

What's not to like? Aren't we all opposed to "hate" no matter the source? However, other articles on the website (including the following job posting) indicate that CAHN's actual mandate is somewhat different from that: 

Hiring: Researcher With Human Subject Research Ethics Background | Canadian Anti-Hate Network:

July 10, 2024 - About the Organization 

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network is an independent, non-partisan non-profit organization with a mandate to counter, monitor, and expose far-right and white supremacist movements, groups, and individuals with every legal, ethical, and reasonable tool at our disposal.  

Read more: https://www.antihate.ca/hiring_researcher_with_human_subject_research_ethics_background

In other words, the CAHN actually has two "mandates" - a public one, to monitor and research "hate groups" in general, and an internally-used one to counter the "far right" with any tool at their disposal. This dual mandate makes the CAHN sound similar to the U.S.-based Southern Poverty Law Centre – and, indeed, Wikipedia notes that CAHN "is modelled after and supported by the American Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)." The SPLC is a fundraising site which grifts quite successfully off leftist fears of what Hillary Clinton called the "vast right-wing conspiracy" While the SPLC may well do some good, that good is more than balanced off by the harm caused by two of its tendencies: 

(1) to counter, 'expose' and oppose any and all right-wing groups, regardless of aims and tactics, as "far right"; and 

(2) to completely ignore hateful and violent activity on the left.

The same for the CAHN;  while it may have certainly have done some good, by exposing some bad actors, it is principally known for three actions that reflect these same flaws and biases. 

(1a) The CAHN was the source for the story that the Freedom Convoy was a "far-right" movement that aimed to violently overthrown the Canadian government. This propaganda narrative undoubtedly influenced the Liberal government, preventing it from even talking to the Convoy protestors, thereby prolonging the protests; and ultimately resultomg in the unconstitutional overreach of the Emergencies Act. 

(1b) The CAHN was also the source of the story that a Nova Scotia shock-jock podcaster, Jeremy Mackenzie, was the head of a secret militia group, "Diagolon," that was plotting acts of terrorism. As a result of these allegations, Mackenzie was hit with a blizzard of charges, and spent literal months in prison, for charges that ultimately resulted in not eveb one conviction – what looks like a clear case of lawfare being waged against an innocent Canadian private citizen.    

(2a) On the other hand, CAHN was conspicuous by its absence in condemning the Soros-backed anti-Israel protests that have plagued Canada since October. This failure to condemn even the worst occupations, threats, genocidal chants, and even outright violence, was duly noted and condemned, and may have led to the resignation of CAHN's CEO, Bernie Farber. (Farber remains on CAHN's board, as "Founding Chair Emeritus.") 

There is, though, one major difference between SPLC and CAHN. While the former is simply takes advantage of private dupes who waste their money on it, CAHN also feeds out of the tax trough. They have received at least $500,000 from the federal government in the past, and have also applied (though not been accepted) for permanent funding. That makes them worth keeping an eye on in the future. I doubt that this will be the last time I shall write about them.                                                                       

Say No to NOTA in Libertarian POTUS votes

At one point in this year's Libertarian National Convention, delegates were offered the choice of only one presidential candidate to vote for, versus effectively shutting down the party. That should never happen again.

by George J. Dance

Last weekend I watched some of the Libertarian National Convention on C-SPAN. Political junkie that I am, I was mostly interested in the race for presidential nominee, and was able to tune in during the sixth round of voting, between the last two candidates still on the ballot, Michael Rectenwald (the candidate endorsed by the Mises Caucus [LPMC]) and Chase Oliver (a candidate who had campaigned against the LPMC). During the voting, I got to witness the concession speech of Mike ter Maat, who had been eliminated on the previous ballot, and his attention-grabbing announcement that he was endorsing Oliver and had agreed to be his running mate.

High drama indeed, but what followed was more dramatic still: when the votes were counted, Oliver had pulled into first place, winning over 49%% of the vote; Rectenwald, who had led on every previous ballot, had fallen to second place with 44%; and None of the Above (NOTA) trailed with 44 votes. Thanks to those 44 votes, no candidate had received a majority, and another ballot would be necessary. As Chair Angela McCarcle said, it was a situation seemingly without precedent.     

The events reminded me of my last convention as Ontario Libertarian Party chairman, in 2008. At that convention Sam Apelbaum, who had served as Party Leader for more than a decade, was being challenged by long-time party activist and officer Jean-Serge Brisson. Both had high profiles in the provincial party. Both were also long-time friends of mine, so I scrupulously tried to stay neutral. To make a long story short, the penultimate ballot had a similar result: Brisson was ahead, but short of a majority; Apelbaum was slightly behind; and NOTA made up the rear. Following the customary procedure, I ruled that Apelbaum would be dropped, and there would be one more ballot between Brisson and NOTA.  

The convention exploded; I had most of the room yelling at me to reverse my decision, and to drop the lowest vote-getter (NOTA) instead. The overwhelming consensus was to not to have a ballot with just one candidate, but a final NOTA-less showdown between the leading candidates. Even Brisson agreed with that: he wanted to win, but not that way; he preferred to fight a head-to-head two-man race, and risk losing, rather than win by having his rival removed from the ballot.   

I agreed, too, but I refused to reverse my ruling. Instead, I asked the delegates to overrule it by a two-thirds vote. A two-thirds vote would make it clear that this departure from precedent was the will of the convention (and therefore the will of the party), not simply my own; and would be a decision that would not likely be questioned later (as supporters of both candidates would have voted for it). I even wrote the motion: "To overrule the decision of the chair, suspend the rules, and remove None of the Above from the next ballot." 

That motion was so moved and seconded, and passed overwhelmingly. So the final ballot was a showdown between the two candidates, which Apelbaum narrowly won. That's right: the candidate who would have been eliminated, had we kept NOTA, actually won the vote in a fair contest. So the ruling made a difference to who became leader. More importantly, though, it led to a result that everyone in the room accepted, and no one ever disputed then or later.  

The situation I was watching was uncannily familiar. Once again, Chair McArdle made the same ruling as I did: to drop the candidate running second (Rectenwald). and have a final ballot between the leading candidate (Oliver) and NOTA. Once again, there were copious objections. Some were concerned that, if NOTA won, the party would be unable to run a candidate for POTUS at all. Others demanded that, to save time, Oliver be acclaimed without a vote. But no one suggested the solution we had used in 2008, to drop the lowest vote-getter (NOTA) and have a final runoff ballot between Oliver and Rectenwald. It never even came up. 

Why not? At the time, I assumed it was because of a party bylaw dictating that NOTA would always be on the ballot. I even tweeted to that effect. However, I have learned not to assume things; so I decided to look up the relevant text in the LP's 2020 Bylaws and Convention Rules (as amended in 2022). What I found surprised me. There were only three mentions of NOTA, one in the Bylaws and two in the Convention Rules. The one in Article 10, Section 7, of the Bylaws said: 

7. Votes cast for "None of the Above" in voting on the Party's nominees for President and Vice President, the Party officers, and at-large members of the National Committee, shall be considered valid. Should a majority of the votes be cast for "None of the Above" in the Presidential or Vice-Presidential balloting, no candidate shall be nominated for that office. Should "None of the Above" be selected for any Party office, that position shall be declared vacant and none of the losing candidates for that position may be selected to fill the vacancy for that term of office.

The above section explains what happens should NOTA win a majority. It also declares that votes for NOTA shall always "be considered valid". Which does not mean that NOTA must appear on the ballot; it means that if NOTA receives votes, even as a write-in, those must be counted. Since the party counts all votes cast, including write-ins, that should not be an issue. 

The Convention Rules contain two mentions of NOTA. The first is irrelevant, but it is best to quote it for completeness.  

RULE 7: NOMINATION OF PRESIDENTIAL AND VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

A delegate who collects the required number of nominating tokens so designated may speak up to 5 minutes in favor of voting for None Of The Above.

The second mention of NOTA in the rules, on the other hand, is directly relevant.

RULE 8: ELECTION OF OFFICERS AND NATIONAL COMMITTEE

2a. Each delegate may cast a ballot with a vote for either none-of-the-above or one vote per candidate for any number of candidates. Every ballot with a vote for none-of-the-above or one or more candidates is counted as one ballot cast. A vote for none-of-the-above shall be ignored if the ballot also includes a vote for any other candidate.  

Here at last is a requirement that NOTA appear on every ballot. Notice, though, that it applies only to the election of Officers and National Committee members. The nominees are neither Officers nor members of the National Committee (which is why they are treated separately in the Bylaws). The distinction is not merely semantic. If NOTA wins a majority vote for an Officer or National Committee position, that results in a vacancy; and the National Committee has the power to fill such vacancies later. In contrast, if NOTA wins a vote for either POTUS or VPOTUS, then "no candidate shall be nominated for that office," period.    

Imagine, then, if NOTA had won on the seventh ballot. It would mean the national party could not run a POTUS candidate in 2024. State parties could nominate slates of electors pledged to a candidate, in effect making an endorsement; but the national LP would have to sit this year out. They would not be able to pay for any more ballot access petitioning, for example. In some states where the POTUS candidate did not appear on the ballot, lower-level candidates would also lose their ballot access. As well, the LP would lose almost all of its present ballot access for 2028 and have to start again at zero. In effect, a majority vote for NOTA on that ballot could well have shut down the LP. Delegates were being offered the choice of only one candidate they could vote for, versus effectively shutting down the party. 

So why did more than a third of the convention delegates vote for NOTA on that ballot? Some may have been simply voting against Oliver; after all, by making the deal with ter Maat, he broke his word to his own promised running mate. (Mike ter Maat, too, has been accused of breaking his word, though I have no details on that.) Others might have done so to protest the idea of a one-candidate election. I would speculate, though, that by far the majority of NOTA voters were LPMC members who would have voted for Rectenwald had they not been denied that option. They probably would still have lost (Oliver was only a few votes from a majority), but at least they would have lost in a fair fight rather than by their candidate being yanked off the ballot.  

So, again, why was NOTA left on the ballot and Rectenwald removed? The answer appears to be simply that the option we used in 2008 – eliminating NOTA and leaving the two candidates to fight it out – never occurred to McCardle. Nor did anyone else communicate the idea. Given the context, with McArdle being continually bombarded with parliamentary points of order and privilege and the like, I can see how both could have happened. With the balloting already running hours late, everyone was tired, and not interested in dragging it out further.  

In any case, it is water under the bridge; that should never have happened, but it did. Oliver is now the nominated candidate, and the bad blood from the circumstances of his nomination has already been spilled. However, if the LP survives this campaign year intact, it will by definition be as polarized as ever, meaning that the same situation may well occur in 2028 and beyond. It happened once, but it should never happen again. I wanted to get the solution on record; while I doubt many people will read this, if I did not write it no one would ever read it.    

In elections for POTUS or VPOTUS nominee, convention delegates can remove NOTA from the ballot by a supermajority. And, to prevent one-candidate ballots and the risk of a nominee not being selected, that power should be acknowledged and exercised. 

Sarwark declares "civil war" in Libertarian Party

by George J. Dance

On the first day of the U.S. Libertarian Party (LP) Convention, former Libertarian National Committe (LNC) chair Nicholas Sarwark is declaring a "civil war" within the LP. Sarwark, director of the Libertarian Policy Institute and LNC chair from 2014 to 2020, was speaking on the Morning Joe TV show on MSNBC-TV, a Denicrat-loving and Libertarian-bashing program perhaps most notorious for its 2016 "Aleppo ambush" of LP candidate Gary Johnson..  

 The segment began with the big news story of Donald Trump's addressing the convention. The announcer (whose name I don't know) breathlessley reported only that Trump would be speaking (the predominant media narrative, a dishonest half-truth that I wrote about yesterday), which she called "the first time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate of a rival party will address the convention of a party that is presumably going to nominate its own candidate." She then introduced Sarwark as the obligatory "expert" to give context. Unfortunately, Sarwark's context turned out to contain more than a little dishonest spin of its own.   

Sarwark began by blaming his 2022 loss on "a group of hostile takeover actors from outside the party" who "seized control of the convention" and "took control of the entire National Committee". False. In fact, the Mises Caucus who won control in 2022 were LP members increasingly alienated from Sarwark and his team then in control (call them the Old Guard), in particular by their foisting on the LP an "actor from outside the party" as Gary Johnson's 2016 running mate: William Weld, a Never Trumper who  ended up "vouching for" Hillary Clinton. They organized and ran against the old guard in 2020, lost, ran again in 2022 and (in conjunction with the long-established LP Radical Caucus) won again in 2022.  

Next Sarwark blamed the new chairman, Angela McCardle, for "having taken the party systematically on a hard right, or even alt-right, turn" - his evidence being that "the first thing they did at that convention was eliminate the platform plank against bigotry" and "remove the pro-choice stance". In fact, neither of those acts were done by Ms. McCardle, but were voted on by a majority of convention delegates. And removing both seems more a matter of common sense than "right" anything. "We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant" sounds good, but what was it doing in the platform? A government should not be concerning itself with whether its citizens are "bigots" or not. And the pro-choice plank was a clear handicap, keeping pro-life libertarians out of the LP and in the Repblican Party. (I am not the only one who has said so - 2020 LP candidate Jo Jorgensen has pointed out that same problem.)    

Sarwark also mentioned a new party emphasis on border security. Like the dropping of the abortion plank, this looked to me like an ettempt to accommodate the Ron Paul libertarians. But Sarwark has his own conspiracy theory about it: 

At the time, we said: This is a MAGA operation - this is an attempt to co-opt and neuter the Libertarian Party, because Donald Trump is afraid of a strong Libertarian candidate.

Which sounds like pure rationalization; Sarwark's Old Guard fell from favor and was eventually replaced, and that could not have been due to their own shortcomings; so it must have been due to some evil force. And, not least because he is pitching this to MSNBC, that evil force just had to be MAGA. Ordinarily, Sarwark's MAGA-mongering would sound as unhinged as Joe Biden's -- but remember the story that led to all this (if you don't, Sarwark will remind you): 

Donald Trump is now going to speak and, essentially, have a rally, to a captive audience, of libertarians, is just the end of the movie, is just where we were going to go. 

So there we have it; the same disinformation about the convention that I have already debunked is now being used to justify Sarwark's crazy theory: that the Mises Caucus takeover in 2022 was just a conspiracy by "MAGA" to "shove Donald Trump down our throats" as a convention speaker this year.  

They want to kneecap the party, and knock us out of the race, and basically force us to have a Trump rally. And I think that this weekend you'll see, the civil war will end, and we will be victorious, and the Libertarian Party will go back to being, a real political party, and Donald Trump will get the reception that he so richly deserves. 

A civil war involving MAGA? That was enough to alarm Rev. Al Sharpton, who quickly interjected: 

There's a functional question that comes to mind when I hear of the civil war in the Libertarian Party, and that is that third parties like the Libertarian Party usually because the two so-called major parties don't represent all of what they want represented, Isn't it by bringing Trump in, and in many ways trying to combine the parties, doesn't it eliminate even the need for a Libertarian Party? I mean, how does the Libertarian Party, later, justify its being if it is overtaken and perceived to become a merger with the Republican nominee?  

One could point out the silliness of that idea by pointing out (again) that Kennedy will have equal speaking rights to Trump at the convention. Does this mean the LP is going to be overtaken and merged with his campaign as well as with Trump's? But, in fairness, Rev. Sharpton does not know that Kennedy will also be speaking; all he knows is what MSNBC and Sarwark have shose to tell him (which is not the whole story). He has swallowed what he was told hook, line, and sinker, and Sarwark can only praise him for that: 

You have hit it right on the head, Al. It is going to be an existential fight, because if the Libertarian Party is successfully given to MAGA, and sacrificed on the altar of a Donald Trump re-elect, then it will cease to exist as an independent party that is neither left nor right, but something different. 

This is full-bore crazy. The party will not be "overtaken" and will not "cease to exist" by having Trump and Kennedy speak, any more than it was "overtaken" and "ceased to exist," when it ran Bill Weld as a VPOTUS candidate and thereby "merged" with the Clinton campaign. And unlike Weld's "merger," this one will not be happening anywhere near election day. The party will get its 15 minutes of fame, a shot in the arm to its finances, and a place in the history books, and then move on to support its own nominated candidate. That is all. 

What does threaten the LP's continued existemce, on the other hand, is this "civil war" Sarwark and his Old Guard allies have been waging against it. When that group controlled the party's national Committee (the LNC), all the other factions - the Mises Caucus, Radical Caucuses, and smaller groups - may have been dissatisfied, but they stayed in, and continued working to support the party and its election efforts. But now when they have lost an internal election, they seem only interested in picking a fight in the middle of the LP's presidential nominating convention, a time when maximum media attention is on the party and it could hurt them most.  

When they lose this gambit (and I expect they will, accomplishing nothing but disruption), it will not be the end of them. Who knows what they will try next? All one can predict, with confidence, is that their actions will do nothing but hurt and cripple the party, if not make it "cease to exist" completely. For its own sake, I hope that the party does come together, at the convention, to reach some semblance of unity of purpose, and reject the disrupters utterly. It is time tell them, in the words of Guns 'n' Roses, that "[we] don't need your civil war." 

Trump addressing Libertarian convention doesn't sit well with former chairperson | MSNBC | May 24, 2024:

Cato CEO says Libertarian Party isn't libertarian

The President and CEO of the Cato Institute has declared the Libertarian Party "outside the bounds of libertarianism," in a Washington Post  op-ed that contains disinformation. 

by George J. Dance 

A day before the Libertarian Party (L) National Convention opens in Washington DC, Cato president and CEO Peter Goettler has launched a blistering attack on the LP. In an article in the Wathington Post, Goettler has declared that the LP is "hardly libertarian anymore" According to Goettler, the Libertarian  "party leadership has been taken over by a faction that places it well outside the bounds of libertarianism altogether". Serious charges indeed, which really should be looked into.  

For Goettler, the "bonds of libertarianism" – his criteria of what all professed "libertarians believe in" (or else) – are, or at least include: 

• individual freedom, 
• equality under the law, 
• pluralism, 
• toleration, 
• free speech, 
• freedom of religion, 
• government by consent of the governed, 
• the rule of law, 
• private property, 
• free markets and 
• limited constitutional government.

Some items on that list can be questioned. For instance, the LP membership has always included anarcho-capitalists – who are not true believers in "limited constitutional government" – which would mean that the Libertarian Party has always been "outside the bounds of libertarianism" for Goettler. But let us not put words into his mouth. The proper thing would be to let him outline which LP policy positions he objects to, and let him explain just how they run afoul of his list. 

Perhaps he will do so in a follow-up article; he does not do that here. Instead, he uses his criteria to criticize the policies of former (Republican) president Donald Trump: 

Trump ... allowed government spending and debt to continue to spiral upward, increasing the national debt by $8.4 trillion. Federal outlays soared from $4 trillion his first year (2017) to $6.8 trillion in his last year. He persists in railing against immigration and free trade, supports further expansion of presidential power and seeks to crack down on political enemies. The Libertarian Party itself said it best in a 2018 statement: “Whatever libertarian impulses Trump the candidate seemed to have … his actual performance as president stands in stark contrast."

As logicians often say on social media, WTF (Why The Fallacy)? If Goettler were arguing only that Donald Trump has done things "ouside the bounds of libertarianism," that would be all well and good: but Trump is not, and never has been or even claimed to be a libertarian (though he claims to like libertarians), much less part of its "leadership". What do facts about his policies and beliefs imply about the LP leadership's beliefs? You may (or may not) be surprised at the answer. 

As those who follow LP news know, this year's convention committee came up with a novel idea to generate some free media; with Biden, Trump, and Kennedy sucking up all the political oxygen, they would invite those three to speak and answer questions at their convention. [Update, May 24 - This morning I read an unconfirmed story that the Trump and Kennedy campaigns independently came up with the idea and took it to the LP]. Biden declined, or at least never replied; Trump and Kennedy accepted; and the free media has followed.  

Hence Mr. Goettler's article. Yet his account of the incident (the invitations) that provoked it is somewhat different, as it omits a couple of details: 

We know by now that Donald Trump likes nothing better than stepping onto a stage, hearing his name chanted by an adoring crowd, and flashing his familiar thumbs-up sign. This week, the former president will do just that under the bright lights at the Libertarian National Convention in D.C.

It will be the first time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate of a rival party will address the convention of a party that is presumably gathering to nominate its own candidate. And this strange turn of events has many libertarians scratching their heads.

As noted, both Biden and Kennedy were also invited, and Kennedy also accepted (and will be speaking). By omitting those facts, and telling his readers only that Trump was invited and will be speaking, Goettler is telling a misleadeing half-truth – he is telling "the truth" but not "the whole truth." His account is misinformation. 

By doing so, Goettler strengthens his argument; he can imply that the LP "leadership" faction invited Trump because the "leadership" faction believes the same things as Trump. So all those nasty, unlibertarian things that Trump is responsible for can now be attributed to the LP as well. Since some at least some Trump policies have clearly been "outside the bounds of libertarianism", that puts the LP "outside the bounds of libertarianism" as well. 

But given that Kennedy will also be speaking, such an implication is clearly absurd: Trump and Kennedy have different, sometimes contradictory, beliefs about policy. It is absurd to think that the LP "leadership" faction, or anyone for that matter, believes the same things as Trump and the same things as Kennedy. (Not to mention simultaneously believing the same things as Biden, who was also invited).

So obviously Goettler had a reason to not tell the whole truth, since to do so would reveal his argument as the absurdity it is. Since that misinformation is crucial to his argument, I have to conclude that it was deliberate. His omission of facts was not merely misleading (misinformation, but deliberately misleading (disinformation). 

To be sure, I was not a fan of the convention committee's idea. As I posted on social media at the time, I thought that inviting Trump to speak was like deliberately getting oneself sprayed by a skunk: it would take a long time to get the stink off. At the time, though, I was imagining the stink coming from the usual sources – the New Republic, Mother Jones, the SPLC, MSNBC, the Niskanen Institute, and the like – not from a libertarian group like the Cato Institute. 

I have always been annoyed at libertarian individuals or groups who try to read other individuals or groups out of the libertarian movement. I am especially annoyed when one of those tries it on the Libertarian Party or its presidential campaign during an election year (as was too often tried by some during the Bob Barr and Gary Johnson campaigns). I do not dispute that those doing that are libertarian themselves, as I believe in giving other avowed libertarians a courtesy that Mr. Goettler obviously does not. But that's just my own view. Libertarians do not require my permission to criticize other libertarians. 

However, those who criticize others should not be immune from criticism themselves. And when one of them relies on misinformation and disinformation, such a criticism is most needed. 

Goettler's article can be read here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/23/trump-libertarian-party-convention/

Why the "lab leak" question is still important

Why we should not "move on" from discussing the Covid pandemic in general, and the lab leak hypothesis in particular. 

Ureem 2805, Wuhan Institute of Virology, 2018. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

by George J. Dance

This February, four years after the first Covid cases were reported in North America, the resulting pandemic appears to be well and truly over. Those four years divide neatly into two halves. The first half was notably goverened by a climate of fear, in which governments imposed numerous totalitarian mandates and restrictions, some blatantly illegal and all without due process of law, but all with overwhelming support from a panicked citizenry. Then, at the beginning of 2023 (as I'd predicted), enough people had finally had enough; public support for Covid mandates and restrictions melted away, and many (not all) of those mandates and restrictions have since been ended. Covid may be killing more people in 2024 than it did in 2020, but by and large people have lost their fear of it; as the cliche has it, they have "moved on" 

The blog has also moved on to a degree; after being virtually all-Covid most of those four years, I have made it more about other, more current issues. But I intend to keep reporting on the virus and the pandemic. The pandemic has passed from current events to history, but in my opinion history is even more important than current events; because it is history that we learn from. If we do not learn from the Covid pandemic, and all the mistakes that were made in it, we are destined (as Santayana put it) to repeat those mistakes. Which is why I intend to keep thinking and writing about the Covid pandemic, no matter how many "moved on" people, including many whose judgement I respect, would prefer that I stop. 

That goes double for the "lab leak" story: the ongoing debate over whether the SARS2 virus originated "zoonotically" or from another animal species, or whether it was delibertately designed by scientists and then escaped from a laboratory. It is not only the "moved on" who object to discussing that; many people still active in debating other aspects of the pandemic have their own objections, including many whom I call "Covid libertarians" (those, like me, who opposed lockdowns and other mandates.  

One prominent example is Michael Senger, a writer whose Covid writings I have excerpted here since 2021. His worry is that saying Covid came from a labe reinforces the idea of SARS2 as a "bioweapon," which makes both the 2020-2022 climate of fear, and the resulting restrictions and mandates seem justified. I agree that; we should make it clear that SARS2 was in no way a "bioweapon". A disease that kills just the very old and the very sick is simply not an effective weapon of war. 

Another Covid libertarian is John Tamny, editor of Real Clear Politics, whose objections I featured here last spring under the headline "Covid origins debate distracts from main issue." His worry is is that the lab leak debate takes the focus off debating Covid mandates and restrictions, which is where it belongs. Fair enough. We should not make the "lab leak" our main concern. But I disagree that we should stop discussing it. For whether SARS2 had a zoonotic or laboratory origin is an important question that needs an answer. One crucial lesson we must learn for the future depends precisely on how we answer that question; we will learn the correct lesson only by reaching the correct answer.  

First, consider what it would mean if the zoonotic hypothesis is correct. Advocates of that hypothesis often weaken their case by insisting that the virus jumped species when and where it was first detected, at a Wuhan wet market in December 2019, which we know now cannot be correct: there is copious evidence that SARS2 was circulating as early as October 2019. Nor have scientists ever found the animal virus that jumped over to humans. But that is not enough to rule out the zoonotic claim completely. 

For most of this century epidemiologists have warned of a killer virus jumping species. Most of those warnings have come to nothing. But now, suddenly, all those warnings have proved prescient; a killer virus has arrived. And if one virus can do it, why not others? Why not a super-killer virus -- the "Disease X" the World Health Organization has been warning of -- next time? Or the next? Whatever the case, we seem to be at the mercy of any number of Disease X's, any of which could jump species and decimate the human race at any time; and it i 

But virologists offer us a way to escape that fate. They will go out into the wild, collect the worst viruses they can find, and genetically modify them to infect humans. The next steps would be to select the best candidates for Disease X, develop vaccines for them, and proceed to mass vaccinate the world's population. That way we can immunize everyone against tomorrow's killer virus today. When and if Disease X does hit, it is hoped,  it will encounter a population already fully immunized against it. 

The name for this program is "gain of function research". Many noted epidemiologists support gain of function research -- notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, who for years funded it through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Fauci is passionate in defending gain-of-function, and appears sincere in his belief that it could literally save mankind. 

Now, consider what it would mean if the lab leak hypothesis is correct. There were two labs in Wuhan engaged in bat research: the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) across the river, and the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control (CDC) just down the street from the wet market. Neither one (to repeat) is known to have conducted bioweapon research. Howeever, it is documented fact that the WIV was engaged in gain-of-function research on bat coroniviruses, funded by Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Institute and ultimately (despite earlier contradictory statements) by Anthony Fauci's NIAID. Once again, we do not have samples of the virus; but it is reasonable to think those could have been destroyed or confiscated when the Army took over Wuhan at the end of 2019. 

We also know that Wuhan was experiencing a surge of influenza in the fall of 2019. As noted, SARS2 kills and hospitalizes mainly the very old and very sick; laboratory workers being neither, it is possible that it could have circulated among them undetected for the next few weeks. It is also plausible that it could have spread to their colleagues at the Wuhan CDC, and from there to the wet market down the street (which was the first superspreader event). 

Such are the implications of the rival hypotheses. Either millions suffered and died during the Covid pandemic because scientists failed to undertake gain of function research, or they suffered and died during the pandemic because scientists did undertake it.  Either gain-of-function research is our best defense against a killer virus, and should be encouraged; or it poses a bigger threat of a killer virus, one, and  should be severely limited if not banned outright. 

We have to choose one path or the other; what we must do is carefully check and debate all the evidence, and come to the best possible answer. What we cannot do is simply "move on" and leave the question unanswered. 

COVID came from the Wuhan lab and accountability is needed to ensure that we never fund this again | Rich McCormick | January 11, 2024:

Support for vax passes & mask mandates waning

by George J. Dance

According to scientists, vaccine efficacy against Covid 19 infection has waned. And so has Canadians' tolerance of Covid vaccine passports and other restrictions, according to a national polling firm. The Angus Reid Institute reported on July 20 that, while "many Canadians continue to be worried about the risk the virus poses to their own and their families’ health," and "while some are taking their own steps to prevent further spread, the appetite for government public health measures is minimal – and a fraction of what it was in previous waves."

"Last September, amid the fourth wave of the pandemic," Angus Reid reminds us, "seven-in-ten Canadians (70%) said they would support a vaccine passport in their community to require residents to show proof of inoculation to enter larger public spaces." That was the month that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won re-election campaigning to bring vax passes in. Health matters, including vaccine passes, constitutionally are not the federal government's business; but Trudeau promised to give provincial governments a billion dollars to mandate them.  

By 2022, Canadians' support of Covid restrictions had dropped - a January Angus Reid poll found a majority in favor of "lifting restrictions" in general. However, vaccine passes remained popular. As late as mid-March, the pollster was reporting that 64 per cent - almost two Canadians in three - "supported proof of vaccination at places like restaurants and theatres in their community."

And today, now that we face a reported seventh wave of Covid? According to the latest Angus Reid survey, conducted July 13-17, the vaccine pass "concept is now supported by one-in-four (25%)." Vaccine passes no longer enjoy majority support in any region or among any demographic group.  

Public support for mask mandates has taken a similar tumble. The March Angus Reid survey found that "nationally, 73 per cent supported continuing masking requirements in public spaces" - almost three Canadians in four. By mid-July, that support has fallen to a bare majority; just "half say they would support mandating [masks] in public spaces (51%)."   

Enthusiasm for renewed mask mandates remains strongest in Atlantic Canada (at 62%), Ontario (55%), and British Columbia (also 55%). It is lowest in Alberta (36%) and Saskatchewan (38%). Support has fallen most among men under 55, of which "Just one-in-three would implement a mask mandate in their community compared to a majority of all other age and gender combinations."  

Canadians have not given up on facemasks; or have they?   Almost three-quarters (74%) of those polled say that masks are effective "at reducing the spread of COVID-19." Yet just 30% report "wearing a mask when they are inside places like grocery stores, banks or movie theatres 'most' or 'all of the time'." More than half (53%) say that they "rarely" or "never" wear one.

Only 14% of respondents want travel restrictions reinstated. Almost three times as many, 38%  – roughly two in five – told Angus Reid that no government action is needed in the event of a seventh wave of Covid.

The Institute surveyed a representative randomized sample of 1,602 Canadian adults who are members of the Angus Reid Forum. For comparison purposes only, a probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. 

Sources:

"Canadians still hesitant to withdraw proof of vaccination measures, masking in indoor spaces," Angus Reid Institute, March 15, 2022.  https://angusreid.org/covid-restrictions-precautions-masking-trudeau/

"Canadians’ desire to implement mask mandates or vaccine passports plunges, Angus Reid Institute, July 20, 2022.  https://www.angusreid.com/intelligence/canadians-desire-to-implement-mask-mandates-or-vaccine-passports-plunges/

"As COVID BA.5 cases surge, Canadians’ desire to implement mask mandates or vaccine passports plunges," Angus Reid Institute, July 20, 2022. 
https://angusreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/2022.07.20_COVID_Restrictions.pdf

Counting deaths 'with Covid' inflated mortality rate, B.C. data indicates

by George J. Dance

New data from British Columbia sheds light on one of the most contentious social media arguments that raged throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the dispute over 'deaths with Covid' versus 'deaths from Covid'. During the pandemic, many countries used the 'deaths with' standard: fatalities were reported as Covid deaths if they occurred within a reasonable time (usually a month) after a positive PCR test. The U.S., Sweden, and the U.K. all reported 'deaths with' Covid figures; not coincidentally, all have higher Covid mortality rates. Other countries, such as China, counted only 'deaths from': the only deaths included in the Covid count were those verified, by an investigation (a postmortem or even an autopsy), to be caused by the virus; again not coincidentally, China has one of the world's lowest reported Covid death rates. 

A big deal? Not to me. My main interest was in comparing countries, and so long as most most of them used 'deaths with', I could happily compare apples to apples. However, social media witnessed many bitter battles waged over it. Whichever standard one uses will affect the reported figures. Counting all 'deaths with' will give a higher figure, artificially high if it miscounts clearly non-Covid deaths (such as poisoning or accident wounds), and using it exaggerates or inflates the virus's impact. But how much higher?

Some Covid libertarians (opponents of Covid mandates) argued that public health authorities were using the 'deaths with' standard to deliberately exaggerate the death toll. In turn, the pro-mandate crowd argued that counting 'deaths from' would give an artificially low figure (by excluding uninvestigated deaths), and accused Covid libertarians of trying to trying to minimize the toll. The ongoing debate generated much heat, with one side accusing the other of alarmism, and the other accusing it in turn of denialism. However, for me it generated little light; whatever actual information emerged was merely drowned out in the tide of mutual recriminations. Many others also appeared to get little from the debate, as they argued in turn that it was a debate about nothing – that the distinction made no difference, as the differences between the two counts would end up being insignificant..   

Which is why I found recent news out of British Columbia worthy of comment. As per a May 26 story on CTV News, B.C.'s Center for Disease Control (BCCDC) "changed the way it counted COVID-19 deaths back in early April". The province had previously reported mortality using a 'death from' standard: "Before April 2, B.C.'s health authorities manually updated the pandemic death toll after investigating each death to determine if COVID-19 was a factor." After that date, the reporting standard became 'deaths with': "anyone who dies within 30 days of a COVID-19 diagnosis has been automatically flagged and reported as a death possibly caused by the disease."

"The province's Vital Statistics agency reviews each possible COVID-19 death and determines what the underlying cause was, a process that can take as long as eight weeks," CTV reporter Ian Holliday notes. Before April 2, then, it could take as long as eight weeks before a death was added to the provincial total. Switching to 'deaths with' makes for more immediate reporting, which is probably the reason most countries use it. The agency still investigates all deaths, though, and the data for those verified as being caused by Covid are released later. That gives a reader the chance to compare the two figures, and see how much higher (if any) the 'deaths with' figure is. 

Holliday reports: 

According to the BCCDC's weekly "situation report" released Thursday, there were 424 deaths between April 2 and May 14 that were flagged as potentially caused by COVID-19 because the person who died had tested positive within 30 days of their death. 
Of those, more than half (218) were still pending review by Vital Statistics to determine the underlying cause of death.
Of the 206 deaths for which an underlying cause had been determined, 94 were considered to be caused by COVID-19, while the remaining 112 had some other underlying cause.

As Holliday notes, that 94/206 ratio "works out to slightly less than 46 per cent of reported deaths between April 2 and May 14 for which an underlying cause has been determined." Or, as summed up in the headline: "Fewer than half of COVID-19 deaths reported since B.C. changed counting methods were caused by the disease."

These preliminary statistics (which may be the only ones that do get reported) allow us to compare the two counting methods: counting 'deaths with Covid' will give a figure at least twice as high as counting 'deaths from Covid'. That in turn allows one to compare reported deaths between jurisdictions which use different methods. 

Of course, these findings are preliminary. One should ideally look at all the data, from as many jurisdictions as possible. B.C.'s figures are only one data set, still incomplete, and possibly an anomaly. So this report's findings are hardly the last word on the subject. They are, though, an important first word, one which we have sorely lacked throughout the pandemic.  

Source:

Ian Holliday, "Fewer than half of COVID-19 deaths reported since B.C. changed counting methods were caused by the disease," CTV News, May 26, 2022. https://bc.ctvnews.ca/fewer-than-half-of-covid-19-deaths-reported-since-b-c-changed-counting-methods-were-caused-by-the-disease-1.5920782