From the York Region District School Board trustees, facing a bit of a challenge of their own.

• Be proactive
• Be clear
• No jargon
• Take responsibility
• Say what you are going to do to fix the problem…
• Then fix it

Link here.  Impressed.

UPDATE: Being proactive and taking full responsibility is working for them, looks like.  Just saw the Minister of Education on TV, saying: “I am very pleased to see that trustees are moving forward and wanting to take action in a positive direction. They understand the urgent need to restore the confidence in the York Region  School Board.”

Now in HuffPo.

My recommended ad campaign. 

Can you lose by winning?

It’s not a riddle, it’s a fair question.  Surveying the wreckage that now litters the Conservative landscape, it’s a timely question, too.

Because, make no mistake: the Conservatives’ leadership race has dramatically set back their party, perhaps for years to come.  Among other things, it has revealed the once-great Conservative Party of Canada to be nasty, brutish and short-sighted.  It has transformed a modern, broad-based political party into a posse of xenophobic, paranoid Duck Dynasty types – rubes who look like they’d rather jail an immigrant than attend a banquet with one.

By selecting a winner, the Conservative Party of Canada has rendered itself a loser, and wholly undeserving of power.

Some historical context.

Stephen Harper’s greatest political achievements, you see, were not what you would think.  They weren’t the things that he didn’t do.  Five points.

One, he didn’t outlaw abortion or gay marriage, contrary to what this writer (and many others) predicted.  Two, he didn’t make the great global recession of 2008-2009 worse.  While he may have initially denied the recession was coming, when it did, Harper tossed off his fiscal conservative cape, and commenced spending like a proverbial drunken sailor.  It worked.

Three, he didn’t send us into war.  When he was Opposition leader, Harper infamously called Canadians who opposed George W. Bush’s Iraq war “cowards.” But, once ensconced in power, the Conservative Prime Minister embraced his inner peacenik: he didn’t put boots on the ground in the fight against ISIS – Justin Trudeau did.  And he didn’t deploy Canadian Forces in the most lethal region in Afghanistan – Paul Martin did.

Four, Stephen Harper – unlike so many in the Reform Party firmament – didn’t ignore Quebec, or preside over a revitalized separatist movement.  Instead, he started every single speech with French, no matter where he was.  He didn’t give the always-humiliated nationalists their hoped-for humiliations. And, as a result, his party didn’t do badly in Quebec, at all – in 2015, in fact, when the CPC lost power, the only province in which they grew was Quebec.

Fifth and final, Stephen Harper didn’t wreck the place.  We’re still here.  And, when one considers the post-Brexit and post-Trump chaos that has descended on the heads of our two closest allies – well, we are pretty lucky, aren’t we?

But those things – what Stephen Harper didn’t do – aren’t achievements.  You don’t get awards for what you don’t do.  You don’t get your name on the side of a school somewhere for acting like a sensible, centrist adult.  That’s what you are supposed to be doing in the first place.

No, Stephen Harper’s two greatest political achievements – and, by extension, the Conservative Party’s – were the reason why he won in 2006, and again in 2008, and again in 2011. They are simply these:

• He united the warring factions within the conservative movement – Reform, Progressive Conservative, Canadian Alliance – and led them to power shortly thereafter.
• He rejected the sort of intolerance that had been synonymous with Canadian conservativism since Sir John A. – and expelled the bigots from his caucus, and commenced the most successful “ethnic outreach” campaign in modern times.

So, what has the post-Harper Conservative Party done?  It has turned its back on Stephen Harper’s two greatest achievements.  It has repudiated the very things that won them power in 2006.

The Conservative leadership race has been fractious and divisive.  It has seen progressive conservatives like Michael Chong booed for promoting modernism – and unrepentant Reformers, like Kellie Leitch, cheered for championing racism.  It has seen smart, traditional PCs like Lisa Raitt marginalized and ignored, and immigrant-baiting nobodies like Steven Blaney and Brad Trost given marquee treatment.

And, if the 2016-2017 Conservative leadership race is to be remembered for anything at all, it will be its willingness to replicate Donald Trump-style bigotry in Canada – and the narrow, mean-spirited bumper-sticker politics it has championed along the way.  Too many of their leadership candidates have forsaken what Stephen Harper did.  Too many have forgotten that, by coming together and bringing new Canadians into the Conservative fold, the Conservatives finally won power.

The Conservative Party will have a winner in its leadership race in May, to be sure.  It will have won that much.

But, by winning, it will have lost the country, likely for many years to come.

Krugman in the New York Times:

The attack [on Syria] instantly transformed news coverage of the Trump administration. Suddenly stories about infighting and dysfunction were replaced with screaming headlines about the president’s toughness and footage of Tomahawk launches.

But outside its effect on the news cycle, how much did the strike actually accomplish? A few hours after the attack, Syrian warplanes were taking off from the same airfield, and airstrikes resumed on the town where use of poison gas provoked Mr. Trump into action. No doubt the Assad forces took some real losses, but there’s no reason to believe that a one-time action will have any effect on the course of Syria’s civil war.

In fact, if last week’s action was the end of the story, the eventual effect may well be to strengthen the Assad regime — Look, they stood up to a superpower! — and weaken American credibility. To achieve any lasting result, Mr. Trump would have to get involved on a sustained basis in Syria.

…One thing is certain: The media reaction to the Syria strike showed that many pundits and news organizations have learned nothing from past failures.

Mr. Trump may like to claim that the media are biased against him, but the truth is that they’ve bent over backward in his favor. They want to seem balanced, even when there is no balance; they have been desperate for excuses to ignore the dubious circumstances of his election and his erratic behavior in office, and start treating him as a normal president.

You may recall how, a month and a half ago, pundits eagerly declared that Mr. Trump “became the president of the United States today” because he managed to read a speech off a teleprompter without going off script. Then he started tweeting again.

David Frum, one of the few principled Republicans left, made essentially the same point over on Twitter:

This – I say as a former full-time journalist, a teacher of journalism, and a lifelong student of journalism – is a profound failing of the journalistic craft. From the first day in J-school, you see, we are trained to “get the other side of the story.”

So, we ferret out the “other side” – even if that side of the so-called dialectic is a proven liar, or a devoted neo-Nazi, or is just one deranged voice in opposition to millions of sane ones.  And we bestow upon that single addled voice as much credibility and prominence as the many on the other side of the divide.

That dynamic – along with the equally false one that prohibits us from passing “value judgments” – gives the solitary lunatic/white supremacist even more credibility.  Even when we know that Donald Trump is a racist, sexist conspiracy nut who is unfit for the position of dog catcher, let alone President of the United States.  Even then.

My (aspirational, ideal) journalism takes judicial notice of reality: i.e., racism is bad, sexually assaulting women is bad.  It is okay to say so; it is imperative we say so.  And, ipso facto, it is bad journalism to call white supremacy “white nationalism” and neo-Naziism “the alt-Right.”

My (perfect world) journalism rejects giving as much prominence to a misogynistic loser who lives in his Mommy’s basement as I would to an accredited surrogate of Hillary Clinton.  That is doing a disservice to reality, and disservice to one’s readers.

Will any of this change?  Perhaps. Maybe.  I’ve seen scattered evidence, since January 20, that Messrs. Krugman and Frum aren’t alone: many journalists are starting to accept that they are partly culpable for Trump’s improbable victory, and are doing what the Russians (ironically, given what should be the top news of 2017) call samokritika – self-criticism.

Journalists are starting to accept that some of the traditional journalistic aphorisms – “getting the other side” and “no value judgments ever” – aren’t doing us, or them, any good.  They create a false reality, because they’re fake news.

And we all know who benefitted most from the explosion in fake news in 2016, don’t we?

My son is at Vimy today with his St Mike’s classmates – and I know he will always remember the significance of it. More than 3,500 Canadians killed, more than 7,000 wounded. But the Canadians drove out the German Sixth Army, and – as some say – Canada itself came of age. 

I didn’t want to post a picture of the monument. I wanted a picture of the men who fought there, because I think that is what Vimy Ridge is about. 

When I run everything, this is the only sort of thing I will allow on TV.

I still stand by most of it.  Link here.

Snippets:

It is far easier to get into a war than to get out of one. As the civilized world reflects on what to do about Syria, that truism bears remembering.

The grim statistics, however, continue to shock us all: Tens of thousands of Syrians dead, in excess of two million wounded or displaced. Most, civilians — women and children.

Atrocities are commonplace, with new horrors being perpetrated by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad every day. The usual measures– condemnations, diplomatic censures, embargoes — have done nothing to stop the killing of innocents. With the complicity of China and Russia, and with the military support of Iran, Syria’s little Hitler has survived far longer than anyone predicted he would.

Meanwhile, the pogroms continue apace. At some point, we aid and abet the bloodshed. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, as Edmund Burke famously observed, is for good people to do nothing. History shows us that much.

Every strategic path in Syria carries risk. We know that if we keep doing what we are doing, many more will die. If we intervene, the same may well be true. But intervene we must. There are compelling reasons to do so.

…destroying the al-Assad regime hurts Iran. Syria’s conflict has become a proxy war, and no Middle Eastern nation has as much to lose in al-Assad’s departure than the maniacs in Tehran. With al-Assad’s departure–ideally at the end of a noose, after a war crimes trial– Iran stands to lose much.

Third, the terrorists in Hezbollah are an extension of al-Assad’s power base. Hezbollah’s “secretary-general,” Hassan Nasrallah, has overseen multiple atrocities to prop up the Syrian dictatorship. At present, the terrorist group has trained and advised Syrian forces, and has killed opposition fighters and civilians. They have worked closely with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to crush dissent. With al-Assad gone, Hezbollah will be dealt a serious blow.

Fourth, al-Assad represents a real and present danger to Israel and the West. So far, Israel’s government has wisely absented itself from the Syrian conflict, because it knows that pan-Arab opposition to Syria’s regime depends on it. But make no mistake, the security of Israel, and by extension the West, will greatly benefit from al-Assad’s removal and by a destabilized Iran and Hezbollah.

The final argument in favour of military intervention is simple: Morality. Inaction in the face of such terrible war crimes is complicity. And the Syrian people overwhelmingly seek our help; as the recently defected Syrian prime minister, Riyad Hijab, has said, only the West possesses the ability to force al-Assad out.

With care, with deliberation, it is time to do so. We need only cast our eyes over history’s genocides to know what will happen if we stand by saying much, but doing nothing.

I’m bewildered as to why Trump gave the Syrians advance warning that he was going to bomb Syria.  But I’m delighted Trudeau has said exactly the right thing, in precisely the right way.  Kudos.

Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on U.S. strikes in Syria

Ottawa, Ontario
April 7, 2017
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, issued the following statement today on U.S. strikes in Syria:

“Canada fully supports the United States’ limited and focused action to degrade the Assad regime’s ability to launch chemical weapons attacks against innocent civilians, including many children. President Assad’s use of chemical weapons and the crimes the Syrian regime has committed against its own people cannot be ignored. These gruesome attacks cannot be permitted to continue with impunity.

“This week’s attack in southern Idlib and the suffering of Syrians is a war crime and is unacceptable. Canada condemns all uses of chemical weapons.

“Canada will continue to support diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis in Syria.”