Segacs’s World I Know

Horrific news out of Orlando today. Hate crime, domestic terrorism, whatever you want to call it, at least 50 people are dead today who should be alive and well:

An American-born man who’d pledged allegiance to ISIS gunned down 49 people early Sunday at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the deadliest mass shooting in the United States and the nation’s worst terror attack since 9/11, authorities said.

Some thoughts:

1. Saying that it has nothing to do with the victims being gay is to erase a hate crime by trying to cover it up or mask it. It’s disrespectful to the victims, who died simply because someone hated them for who they were. It’s erasure in retrospect, even if it’s well intentioned.
2. Yes, it is about gun control. Sadly, I don’t expect this to have any more impact on the debate than the zillion mass shootings before this. At some point, America decided it was okay with the consequences of the “right to bear arms” and this sort of thing will keep happening. And happening. And happening.
3. Trump is going to make this all about hatred of Muslims and hysterical fear of immigrants — even though the shooter was a domestic terrorist who lived in Florida. He’ll probably succeed, too.
4. Don’t expect people to refer to a “cycle of violence”, at least, which is what the media would be doing if this were a nightclub shot up in Tel Aviv instead of in Orlando.
5. There’s really nothing good to say. It’s all horrific and awful. My thoughts are with the families and friends of the victims.

This morning, UPAC arrested 7 high-ranking politicians, including former Quebec Deputy Premier Nathalie Normandeau on charges of fraud, corruption and abuse of public trust:

The group of seven, which includes people associated with the provincial Liberals and the Parti Québécois, were arrested shortly after 6 a.m. on Thursday in Quebec City, Charlevoix and the Gaspésie, UPAC chief Robert Lafrenière said.

[ . . . ]

Others arrested are:  former Liberal cabinet minister Marc-Yvan Côté, Normandeau’s former chief of staff, Bruno Lortie, Roche engineering employees Mario Martel and France Michaud, as well as Ernest Murray, a former political attaché to former Premier Pauline Marois and François Roussy, former mayor of the town of Gaspé.

The discussions being sparked in social media as a result of this are interesting. Corruption has long been assumed to be a part of most political processes, especially here in Quebec. The long, drawn-out Charbonneau Commission was met by the population with a shrug, probably because many of its so-called “shocking” revelations were things that everyone pretty much knew but nobody openly acknowledged. Our politicians abuse party fundraising, cozy up to organized crime, and fix bidding contracts in exchange for kickbacks? That discussion is as old and tired as the endless debate about the Cavendish extension.

Of course, anger over corruption does tend to flare up on occasion. The student-initated “Maple Spring” gave voice to a general anger against the Charest-led Liberals, which ultimately brought down the government and ushered in 18 turbulent months of Marois-led PQ rule. That time period was so fraught, so divisive, such an ugly chapter in Quebec’s recent history that it still gives me the chills. I’m no fan of the Liberals — they’ve always been a hold-your-nose-and-vote party — but I also have absolutely no desire to return to debates about kippas and headscarves, identity politics, or whether Muslims in Quebec deserve the same rights as the rest of us.

And so when I see people — particularly PQ supporters — gleefully greeting the news of more Liberal corruption, I have to wonder: Would you prefer your political leaders to be corrupt or evil?

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Google searches for “moving to Canada” rose by 1000% after the US primary “Super Tuesday” results:

In the four hours around the close of polls across Super Tuesday states, searches for “how can I move to Canada” on Google spiked by 350%. By midnight, the query had risen to more than 1000% its normal search volume. It was especially high in Massachusetts, where Trump dominated the field with just under 50 per cent of the vote.

It’s trendy for Americans to talk about moving to Canada if their candidate loses an election. It’s far less common for them to actually do it. According to Statistics Canada, about 9,000 Americans move to Canada per year, compared with about 33,000 Canadians who move to the US annually. And the US has 10 times as many people as we do, so the discrepancy is even bigger when you look at per capita numbers. Politics aside, most people move for more practical reasons, like jobs.

… But if this time you really, really mean it, I’ll be considering marriage applications as of September.

Criteria:

• Any gender (this is Canada after all)
• Any socioeconomic status (we have socialized healthcare and a considerable social safety net; I don’t need to marry you for your money)
• Preferably a nice person (’cause we’re nice in Canada, eh?)
• Must love snow
• Must hate guns
• Must be able to quote John Oliver at length. And eventually Rick Mercer, though I’ll allow you some time to brush up first.
• Bonus points for sending me chocolate with your application
• Bonus points for witticisms about Drumpf’s hair

Four thoughts about this New York Times piece on Bernie Sanders being the first viable Jewish candidate for President:

1. He’s usually highly accessible to the media. But he declined to be interviewed for this article. Which is both admirable and highly telling: Admirable because the religious views of American politicians are usually front and centre in campaigns (unlike here in Canada, where we mostly consider it to be their personal business). But also telling, for the same reason, because any experienced US politician knows that NOT talking about religion is just as conscious a choice as talking about it.
2. 92% of Americans said they would have no problem voting for a Jewish President. That’s refreshing. (Though I doubt the numbers would be nearly as high for a Muslim President.)
3. The idea that many American Jews don’t feel the need to support Sanders out of a sense of loyalty. That’s nice, too, considering voting based on tribalism rather than ideology is far too common. It also speaks to a sense of security that the Jewish community has achieved in the US.
4. But it also speaks to many Jewish Americans’ discomfort with Sanders, which is probably a result of the US Christian Evangelical right wing having politicized support of Israel as a right-wing issue — and, consequently, relegated the left wing to have to prove itself as NOT anti-Israel. Sanders may be Jewish, but he represents a socialist wing of the Democratic party that has ties to a lot of Israel’s enemies. Even those among the US Jewish Community who believe in Sanders’ domestic policies are somewhat wary of his foreign policy credentials when it comes to the middle east.

How any of this will play out in the Democratic primaries, or, indeed, in a general election, is anyone’s guess. I want to believe that even the most right wing Jewish Americans would stop short of casting a vote for the likes of Trump. But there isn’t much to suggest how votes would split in the primary in states with large Jewish populations like New York. An AJC poll puts support for Clinton at 40% versus only 18% for Sanders, but it dates from last September — long enough ago to be irrelevant.

Very likely Sanders will pick up support from younger, more left wing Jewish Americans, while older ones will continue to support Clinton. But I don’t think there will be a Lieberman-like surge among American Jews to throw their support behind Sanders as “one of our own”. Nor do I think Sanders will make an effort to campaign on that basis.

All that to say: It’s complicated.

Today is the UN’s internationally designated Holocaust Memorial Day. (Not to be confused with Yom HaShoah, which falls in early May this year.)

This year, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is urging us to not only remember the victims of the Holocaust, but to turn our focus towards fighting persecution that is taking place in today’s world, right here in 2016:

Don’t stand by is the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2016.

The Holocaust and subsequent genocides took place because the local populations allowed insidious persecution to take root. Whilst some actively supported or facilitated state policies of persecution, the vast majority stood by silently – at best, afraid to speak out; at worst, indifferent. Bystanders enabled the Holocaust, Nazi Persecution and subsequent genocides.

We said “Never Again” but that did nothing to stop genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia or Darfur.

We said “Never Forget” but we can’t apply that only to antisemitism when there’s so much discrimination even in our supposedly democratic, free home countries, against people with different skin colours, gender identities, sexual orientations, religions or traditions.

We tore down the concentration camps in Europe and made them into museums. But prisoners are still being sent to death camps in places like North Korea.

Adolf Hitler has been dead for 70 years, but politicians are still running for office and using minority-baiting and drumming up hate, fear and prejudice in order to gain power.

We’ve acknowledged the tragic outcome of saying “none is too many” and yet we still react in fear when desperate refugees from civil wars in places like Syria want to come to our shores.

Competing about tragedies (“ours was worse than yours”) only serves to divide us, to pit us against each other and to further build walls between humans. Instead, let’s focus on calling out injustice and persecution wherever we see it. Not just today, but every day.

It’s not just about being Jewish. It’s about being human.

Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers for the TV show “The Wire”. And also some colourful language, such as you might expect when talking about terrorist bastards.

This week has been a bad one for the world. Unless, of course, you happen to be a giant terrorist asshole. Terror attacks in Beirut, Baghdad, and the deadliest attack in Paris since World War 2 have sent the world reeling. The group known by many acronyms — ISIS, ISIL, or what I’ll refer to in this post as Daesh, has claimed ‘responsibility’ (if such a word could even be used) for all three attacks.

All this has happened against a backdrop of unprecedented humanitarian crisis, as hundreds of thousands of refugees continue to flee Syria’s deadly civil war. Western governments are debating how they can cope with what they’ve dubbed a “migrant crisis”, as though the problem only started when desperate refugees started showing up in Europe. It happened on the eve of the G20 summit in Antayla, Turkey, and in the lead-up to a huge global summit on climate change taking place in Paris.

The responses to the attack, in typical format, have followed the Rorschach Test pattern; people see in tragedy what they want to see. More foreign aid. Less foreign aid. More military intervention. Less military intervention. More solidarity with refugees. Close our borders to refugees. It’s about Islam. It’s not about Islam. And so on, and so forth. French president Francois Hollande has taken a hard line, promising military strikes against Daesh, closing of borders, and crackdowns all around.

Everyone has an opinion on how to fight this so-called “war on terror”. But is this really a “war”?

It strikes me that this so-called “war on terror” bears a lot of resemblance to another misnomer: the so-called “war on drugs”.

Sure, this isn’t exactly an original observation. Plenty of people have pointed this out in analysis after analysis. But, other than depressingly similar tactics, sources of funding and consequences, these two so-called wars parallel each other in other ways. Here are just a few:

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There are petitions going around urging Justin Trudeau to appoint Elizabeth May as Environment Minister.

I think that’s a terrible idea. Here’s why:

After a decade of Stephen Harper’s “war on science”, we finally have a government committed to returning to evidence-based decision making. Trudeau wants to bring back the long form census. He wants to make scientific committees independent again. He’s committed to bringing knowledge and scientific literacy back into public policy.

Wow. Just wow.

Prime Minister Trudeau. It’s been a long time since Canada has heard those words. Before my lifetime, anyway.

I dared hope for a Liberal minority. I never in my wildest dreams could have predicted a Liberal majority.

The Tories have been turfed out. Stephen Harper has announced he will step down as the leader of the party — the only leader the party in its current form has ever had. A long decade of darkness in Canada is drawing to a close.

The NDP dropped back to third place, its Quebec bubble having burst. One of the ridings it hung onto was my own of Laurier-Sainte-Marie, where Gilles Duceppe was defeated by Helene Laverdiere. I’m happy about that and proud to have played my part.

Overall, though, the NDP simply couldn’t compete with the Liberal surge as undecided progressive voters looked for a bandwagon to jump onto. Our broken First Past The Post system simply left no room for vote-splitting on the left, and Mulcair was unfortunately the loser on that front. I still respect him and think he ran a solid campaign. And I hope he will stay on as party leader and MP for Outremont, and participate actively in government. He and Trudeau agreed on quite a few issues, and the NDP could certainly make their mark in this next parliament.

The Bloc Quebecois won 10 seats, but got a lower proportion of the popular vote than they did back in 2011. Duceppe lost his riding and will probably retire again — for real this time.

Justin Trudeau will have his work cut out for him. A majority means he can get things done. It also means he has no excuses.

The real work begins tomorrow. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of it. Canada has suffered greatly under Harper, and a lot of work will be needed simply to stop the bleeding and start reversing the damage. Restoring funding to gutted federal programs, improving the status of women, minorities, immigrants, First Nations, restoring human rights and equal citizenship for all. Fulfilling his promise to amend Bill C-51. Dealing with the fallout of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as details emerge. Healing the wounds caused by wedge politics driven by racism. Bringing back openness, transparency, science and information to Parliament. Healing the wide chasm between Conservative and Progressive voters. The list seems never-ending and the work is surely daunting.

But that’s all for tomorrow. Tonight, we celebrate.

Merci, Canada.