News roundup, 22 April 2026

- The European Union is working on a carbon pricing scheme known as EST2, scheduled to come into effect in 2028. The scheme includes rebates to offset the impact (which will potentially leave lower income households better off); there are concerns, though, that far too little effort is being put into public education, especially regarding the rebates. One of the weaknesses of democracy is that it's not enough to have a good policy, you have to sell that policy to the public - and the more complicated the policy, the harder it is to do that. There's a saying in politics - "if you're explaining, you're losing"; that doesn't mean you should never explain things, but that when your explanation is a response to something that your opponents have already put out there, you have a problem. Given that fact it's especially important to work on educating the public about the tax and the rebates well before the pricing scheme takes effect. Otherwise, opponents of the policy may be able to whip up a populist fury before the actual facts can get out the door.

- Iran fired on three ships in the Strait of Hormuz today, and has reportedly seized at least two of them.

- The Trump regime is demanding what they call an "entry fee" before reopening talks with Canada on renegotiating the Canada-United States-Mexico Free Trade Agreement (CUSMA). The "fee" would not be monetary, but rather trade concessions; normally one would expect concessions to be made in the course of trade negotiations rather than as a condition of entry into said negotiations, but that's how Trump rolls I guess. For their part, Canadian negotiators say that they've already offered some concessions to no avail. 

- When Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), the metro system serving the San Francisco Bay Area, conducted a review that concluded that conventional fare enforcement disproportionately affected ethnic minorities due to the human judgment aspect, they decided instead to upgrade the gates at their stations, replacing the easily-jumped waist-high barriers with metal-framed Plexiglas doors. Besides being more effective and less inequitable than what went before, they found that vandalism dropped dramatically under the new system. Not to say that most fare evaders are vandals, of course, but it seems that a disproportionate number of the vandals are fare evaders.

- A 72 year old Winnipeg man has been arrested after unsigned, threatening letters sent to NDP MLA and cabinet minister Nahanni Fontaine were traced to him. The suspect is facing charges of criminal harassment and uttering threats.

- Chip Roy, a far-right Republican member of Congress from Texas, has introduced a bill which he has dubbed the "Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists" (MAMDANI) Act. This bill would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to allow for, among other things, stripping the citizenship of any immigrant who is a member of a socialist party or who "advocates" for socialism (as well as communism or Islamic fundamentalism).

- Tucker Carlson has apologized for his past support for Donald Trump, as the consequences of the war in Iran become more apparent. Better late than never I suppose, but he should have seen something like this coming.

News roundup, 2 April 2025

 - A wide range of tariffs are set to be announced today by the Trump regime, taking effect immediately. Trump is calling this "Liberation Day". Some background info here. A resolution before the US Senate from Virginia senator Tim Kaine is expected to make things awkward for Republicans representing states expected to take a hit from the tariffs, but won't have a real impact even if it passes, since it is nonbinding.

- Mark Carney plans to carve out an exemption for New Flyer in the countertariffs imposed on US manufacturing; meanwhile the company is working towards all buses for the Canadian market being assembled here.

- Former parliamentary reporter Rachel Gilmore had been asked by CTV to do an election-related fact-checking segment on their morning show, but the network cancelled the segment after a single episode following pressure from the Conservatives and their fellow travellers.

- The cancellation of the carbon tax took effect yesterday. This is expected to bring some savings to consumers, but preventing backsliding on emissions will require measures that may well cost more overall in terms of public funds. The question I've never been able to find a clear answer to, though, is this: If tax relief is politically necessary, why not provide said relief by reducing or eliminating the GST (or PST for provinces) rather than the carbon tax? That way everyone sees relief, not just those who drive. I guess they're afraid of worsening the urban-rural divide, but I think that divide is basically beyond healing at this point anyway.

- The Trump regime has admitted that they shipped an innocent man to their contracted prison in El Salvador due to what they call an "administrative error". They say it's now out of their hands, though, as he's no longer in US custody.

- Wisconsin held an election for a vacant seat on the state supreme court yesterday. A liberal judge squeaked a victory despite Elon Musk having spent millions of dollars on her opponent's campaign.

- Western Australia's police force has repurposed a Maserati seized from a repeat driving offender into a publicity device to warn people not to drive like idiots.

News roundup, 17 March 2025

- Mark Carney was sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada on Friday. Sadly (but predictably) the first thing he did was to eliminate the consumer-level carbon tax. As I've said before, if it were up to me I'd have reduced the GST by an amount equivalent to the carbon tax, and if that still left some GST in place I'd have gotten rid of that too and increased the carbon tax to replace the revenue. Of course, that wouldn't help with rural alienation, but I'm not sure that anything is going to reach those people in the near future anyway.

- The Bureau of Reclamation, which among other things is responsible for managing dams on the Colorado River system, is facing staffing reductions of up to 40% as part of the regime's war on the public sector, and has been ordered to stop nearly all spending. Given that some of the bureau's spending is on things like maintenance for dams, and that the region is plagued by high demand for water as precipitation declines, this does not bode well.

- A court challenge to Ontario's anti-bike lane legislation has brought to light internal documents that suggest that the move will not make a meaningful impact on congestion, and will furthermore mean a 54% increase in the risk of collisions for all road users. Of course, if you're a populist like Doug Ford the truth isn't really what matters; what matters is what "the people" think. Hopefully the court will put the government in its place.

- Federal judges in the US that rule against the Trump regime are being threatened with violence; moreover, some Republican legislators are making moves to start impeachment proceedings against some of them. Combine that with the fact that Trump might simply ignore court orders, and the prospects of containing him through peaceful means do not look good.

- Europeans are torching Teslas to show their displeasure with Elon Musk. Some Americans are also taking various forms of direct action in this department, a matter that the regime wants investigated as "terrorism". Meanwhile the FBI is investigating a suspected arson attempt at the home of a Bayer executive.

News roundup, 12 Sept 2024

 - Jagmeet Singh has indicated that he now opposes the carbon tax as introduced by the Liberals, saying that it puts too much burden on working people. I kinda, sorta get what he's saying, but I think a better approach would be to oppose the GST. If I was in charge, what I'd do is eliminate the GST and raise the carbon tax to make the change revenue neutral; that way there'd be no net increase in the regressiveness of the tax regime, but a strong incentive to shift one's purchases towards more environmentally benign things. Of course politics is the art of the possible, and maybe Singh fears that the existing carbon levy is so tainted by the fact that it was introduced by the Trudeau government that the only way to avoid being associated with the Liberals is to reflexively oppose it.

- The Toronto International Film Festival has cancelled the screening of Russians at War, a documentary by Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova. The film profiles frontline Russian soldiers, some of whom express doubts about the war, and its official description as submitted to TIFF describes the war as "unjust", but nonetheless some Ukrainian groups denounced the film as "propaganda" (perhaps because it humanizes the Russians too much for their liking).

- The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed new rules that would limit the sizes of vehicles for the consumer market. A good move on both safety and environmental grounds; unfortunately there's a good chance that auto industry lobbyists will kill it.

- A division of Cox Media Group has pitched the idea of having smartphones do what many have suspected for years that they already do - namely listen to ambient conversations and direct advertising to their users based on the content of said conversations. Notably, the pitch mentioned that Apple, Google, and Meta are all clients of CMG; all those companies have denied that they make use of this capability, but meanwhile Ford has filed a patent for something similar that would direct ads towards their cars' users.

- Following the sudden death of Cathy Merrick, the Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, at a public event, the Winnipeg Free Press published a photo of Merrick lying on the ground. The AMC was outraged at the publication of the photo and called for a boycott of the newspaper. The paper is apologizing for their handling of the incident.

- Peter Nygard has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for five sexual assaults committed in his company's Toronto office. Including credit for time served he'll be out in 7 years if he's still alive (a big if, that).

- A few thousand years ago the Sinai Peninsula was a much greener place than it is now. A Dutch engineer has a scheme to make the desert bloom, though some environmentalists fear that there could be serious unintended consequences, assuming that the scheme works at all.

News roundup, 1 April 2024

- The Kinew government says they have plans, to be revealed in tomorrow's budget, that they say will justify their request for an exemption to the federal carbon tax. We'll have to see how that goes.

- Speaking of the carbon tax, countrywide protests against it are scheduled to start today. There's something kind of ironic about their choice of a date... or maybe it was intentional. When the Tories' campaign against the tax uses terms like "so-called experts", they're not going for your vote or mine, they're going for people who hate expertise on "principle". People who are ignorant, and proud of it. One can't help but think of the story (perhaps apocryphal) of how US Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was told by a supporter, "Mr. Stevenson, you have the support of every thinking American". Stevenson supposedly replied "That's not enough, ma'am, we need a majority". Pierre Poilievre is going for the votes of the kind of people who would kick off their protest campaign on April Fools Day, and it's likely to pay off for him.

- Donald Trump's criminal trial for the hush money allegedly paid to Stormy Daniels begins later this month.

- Far-right extremists and their fellow travellers are trying to create a parallel economy, or as they call it a "freedom economy", because they think the established banks and e-commerce platforms are too woke.

- Several American and European investigative journalists have come to some conclusions about "Havana syndrome". Whereas the conclusion from US officials a year ago was that this was not something inflicted by a foreign adversary, and a recent report found no sign of physical harm to the patients (which would lend support to the mass hysteria theory), this report draws connections to Russian intelligence. Certainly this does have a ring of plausibility.

- AI is becoming sufficiently widespread that it's creeping into almost everything. That might be OK if it were reliable, but it isn't. It even poses problems for further developments in AI (and our control thereof), since as AIs are trained on text found on the internet, they will encounter more and more text that was produced by AIs in the first place.

- Former Winnipeg city councillor Bill Neville has died. He was a "conservative" of a sort that most present day conservatives would not recognize as one of their own; as a friend of his said, he "was part of a political culture that seriously valued forethought and moderation". The conservatives of today would consider forethought and moderation to be an affront to their freedumb.

News roundup, 29 March 2024

- Officials have abandoned hope of finding any more survivors from the hapless construction crew that was on the Francis Scott Key bridge when it collapsed. Meanwhile the next priority is to clear the remains of the bridge so that shipping can resume. As to how long that could take, an engineering professor said "I'd be shocked if it's weeks, but I don't think it'd take a year." That's a lot of uncertainty.

- The Kinew government in Manitoba has cleaned house at Efficiency Manitoba, removing nine out of the ten board members appointed by the Tories. They have also restored the standard 1 to 1 supervisor to apprentice ratio in the trades, a move welcomed by Manitoba Building Trades as well as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, but condemned by the Winnipeg Construction Association. In addition they're tinkering with the credits for property taxes, in order to shift a bit more of the burden onto high value properties. On the downside, though, they have joined the chorus of provincial leaders calling for an end to the carbon tax. Don't get me wrong, I kind of understand why they're doing it (the right has been very successful at making carbon pricing politically toxic) but I wish they'd have pushed for a more creative approach to the problem than simply doing away with the tax. Like if you're concerned about the cost of living, why not hit the PST, and if that costs too much in revenue, hike the carbon tax to compensate? That would keep average costs around the same but make greener products cheaper while making more polluting products more expensive, and I'd like to think the public could be sold on that idea, but maybe not. Or maybe there are administrative barriers that aren't obvious except to insiders in finance ministries, I dunno.

- School boards in Toronto, Peel, and Ottawa are suing Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok, alleging that they are harming students' mental health. I wish them luck (it's almost certainly true, after all). I have to admit that this is one of the very few issues on which I find myself in agreement with Ron DeSantis, at least in principle (the devil is always in the details with something like this, though, and DeSantis isn't someone I'd count on getting it right with something like this).

- The judge who issued the gag order prohibiting Donald Trump from commenting publicly about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors did not include himself or his family on the list. No doubt he had to do it that way to avoid any perceived conflict of interest, but it's no surprise that Trump is taking full advantage of that omission.

- The city of Richmond, California now has only one remaining local news website, the Richmond Standard. It's owned by Chevron, which has a huge presence in the city and seems to get away with a lot of shenanigans as a result.

- Former US senator Joe Lieberman has died. Hopefully No Labels will follow.

- A Boston Dynamics robot dog used by the Massachusetts State Police was shot during a standoff.

News roundup, 20 March 2024

- Pierre Poilievre plans to introduce a non-confidence motion against the Trudeau government based on the carbon tax. This is largely symbolic as it is not expected to pass, but a signal that the Tories are going to be making this the centre of their campaign. Sadly, it's highly probable that it will work; Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne sums it up neatly as follows:

As for the Conservative Leader, Pierre Poilievre, I suppose he is to be congratulated. The Liberals won three elections on a promise of taking action on climate change, which had become equated with the carbon tax. Many people concluded this meant the public wanted action on climate change, and were willing to pay the carbon tax.

But Mr. Poilievre saw through the public. He understood that the public are deeply, almost perversely, hypocritical on this as on most things: they want something done about the climate but they want someone else to pay for it. Or, perhaps: they are prepared to pay for it, if they have to, but they want to be lied to about it.

They want to pretend that a tax that applies only to “the big polluters” would not be passed on to them, or that they would not also pay the costs of whatever regulations and subsidy schemes Mr. Poilievre eventually proposes, if he does. They know it is a lie. They know that nothing is free. They just don’t want to have it rubbed in their faces. Which is more or less the point of a carbon tax.

Or perhaps it’s simpler than that. It may simply be that the public were all for action on climate change as long as the economy was strong, but as soon as inflation began to climb, they lost all interest.

Either way, Mr. Poilievre correctly read their ambivalence, understood that they were every bit as cynical as he is and is about to be rewarded for it. To the victor the spoils and all that.

Cynical indeed, but in the words of Sir Humphrey Appleby from Yes Minister, a cynic is what an idealist calls a realist. I do have to take issue with one thing Coyne says here, however:

What if, instead of receiving the occasional opaquely labelled “climate action incentive payment” – too small to notice, too far removed to make the connection – Canadians had been compensated with offsetting income-tax cuts, something they would have seen and felt every two weeks on their paycheques?

A far better approach, to my mind, would be to apply the offsets to sales taxes, not income taxes. You see, one of the things about a carbon tax where the critics actually do have a valid point is that carbon taxes are somewhat regressive, all other things being considered. And offsetting a regressive tax by cutting a progressive tax like income tax is the wrong way to do it; if you offset carbon taxes by a reduction in the GST, you have no net increase in the regressiveness of the tax regime, and people will see the savings every time they buy something. Yet I never see this idea brought forward, even to later dismiss it. Why, I wonder?

- New York Attorney General Letitia James appears to be preparing to seize property owned by Donald Trump in the state due to his failure to cough up the bond money to allow an appeal of the civil fraud case.

- The British government is planning to conduct a review of the takeover of the Daily Telegraph by a company based in the United Arab Emirates. This is expected to delay the deal long enough for a new piece of legislation to stop the takeover entirely.

- The Manitoba NDP is moving forward with plans to create an independent seniors' advocate; the Tories, for their part, plan to use their limited power of delay on this legislation. Not clear why they'd choose this hill to die on, except maybe that such a position could make things awkward for them once they're back in power.

- A majority of Winnipeg residents now favour reopening Portage and Main to pedestrians. Most of the owners of buildings at the intersection, though, are opposed, the exception being the Manitoba Métis Federation which owns the former Bank of Montreal building at the southeast corner.

- The recall campaign against Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek seems to be backed by a rightwing organization called Project YYC that uses a lot of buzzwords like "common sense". Some of you may recall that back when the campaign started I said in this very blog that it reeked of rightwing populism; I'd say this new information supports this.

ND may sue Minnesota over carbon tax

Interesting:

North Dakota’s attorney general said he expects the state to sue Minnesota over a plan there to tax carbon created by electrical generation.

After discussing the issue with the state Industrial Commission in a closed session this month, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said “It is very likely that we will be suing the state of Minnesota.”

At issue is a measure by Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission to add a fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide to the cost of electrical generation starting in 2012. The majority of electricity in North Dakota is generated by coal-fired power plants, which emit a large amount of carbon relative to other fuels sources. North Dakota officials argue that the move would place an unfair tax on electricity from the state and discourage its use by Minnesota utilities.

Stenehjem said possible legal action would relate to constitutional protections against restrictions on commerce between states.

From the Bismarck Tribune. Let's hope this gets tossed out of court...

BC election post-mortem

Not only did Gordon Campbell win a third straight majority, the STV referendum was soundly defeated as well. Last time around it should have won, coming very close to the required 60% of the vote, but this time it failed to crack 40%. I don't know what went wrong there. My initial thought was that maybe this time STV supporters didn't bother to vote, but turnout is only down about 8% from the 2005 election. Go figure.

The one bright spot, such as it is, is the fact that there is now a precedent for a government introducing a carbon tax and winning reelection afterwards. I certainly understand the objections many leftists have towards a carbon tax; it is, afterall, an unavoidably regressive form of taxation. My response to this would be to say that instead of balancing it with lowered income taxes, which is the usual approach to this, we should use a carbon tax to replace the sales tax. Then at least you're replacing a regressive tax with another, rather than replacing a progressive tax with a regressive one. Sure, implement cap and trade as well, but I don't think we can afford to go on without every available tool to reduce our emissions.

Critics of carbon taxes also raise the point that if a carbon tax actually works, the government soon loses revenue (since people buy less of items subject to the tax). Now being the pinko commie bastard that I am, I'd say replace declining carbon tax revenue with a hike to the upper income tax brackets, but that's just me.