Speech from the Throne

Topping off a disastrous first few months in office, even a healthy does of Dani Dollars couldn't wash down the stink that was the Alberta UCP's Bill 1: the Sovereignty Act. But as the feds remain "prudently" silent, who is going to step up to the defend a now seriously threatened federation? Now that provinces are regularly experimenting with the notwithstanding clause to expand their powers, is it time to re-evaluate Canada's federal constitution before our wayward premiers unilaterally dismantle it?

This week on the pod, your hosts debate whether its time to ditch federalism altogether and move towards a unitary state. They also use the Freedom Convoy and the recently concluded inquiry into the Trudeau government's invocation of the Emergencies Act to clear it as a case study in how federalism can go horribly wrong, not just prolonging a crisis but potentially making it existential. 

By now, Canada has become so used to being pushed around by Big Brother America it almost seems second nature, but since the sowing of the legacy of Norman Bethune and Trudeau senior being amongst the first of Western leaders to recognize the PRC, we've been less accustomed to the bullying antics of the Middle Kingdom. But, as Napoleon once warned, China is a sleeping dragon whose awakening cannot be taken lightly, leading many to worry that the recent embargoes of Canadian agricultural products, kidnapping of Canadian citizens and the public dressing down of the Canadian prime minister are just the first of much worse to come.

But how much should Canadians really be worrying about China's more aggressive handling of their bilateral relationship, and how much of our reaction is triggered by a deadly combination of anti-Asian violence and American nationalism? Does Canada have all that much to fear in its interactions with China, and does the Chinese leadership have a point in demanding more respect on the world stage? Your intrepid podcast hosts return from a long hiatus to discuss!

Where are the progressives? With inflation running rampant and workers' rights actively trampled on by provincial powers, how is it that the leftist forces seemingly best able to quarterback a floundering national team are choosing instead to flee the field? Driveling neolibs, having long-since outstayed their youthful idealism and/or vitality, are still clinging to the reins of western left-of-centre parties, with socialists, anarchists and other leftist activists lacking the resources or discipline necessary to overtake established politicians themselves. 

What will it take to get progressives off twitter and back into the game? How will the most famously disunified group find ideological clarity as it sells itself to a skeptical public? Is the existential crisis of Pierre Poilievre or a full-on anti-labour assault by Doug Ford enough to light a fire under a dormant NDP? Your hosts discuss. 

This week, Loblaws announced it was freezing food prices for three months, cleverly managing to ignore the previous two years of skyrocketing produce costs (and record profits). Following a distressing pattern of similar behaviour, however, ranging from the fixing of bread prices to a temporary bump up and then retrenchment of Loblaws' staff's "hero pay", Canadians can hardly expect different from their grocery oligopolies by now. Unfortunately, with the cost of living crisis in full swing, it's behaviour that will soon be bringing malnutrition and widespread hunger to what was once the Great White North.

Does government have a role to play in ensuring no one in this country goes hungry? Your hosts discuss, not ignoring for a second the absurdity that such a question need to be debated in this day and age at all.

Last week, RCMP announced it was investigating rape threats made against Ana Poilievre, the high-profile wife of the newly elected Conservative leader by Jeremy Mackenzie (of extremist right, Dialogon fame). Unfortunately for the unhappy couple, photos have also emerged of Mr. Poilievre shaking Mackenzie's hand at a rally, literally inviting the man into the Conservative Party tent (though PP still claims he knows nothing about the far-right leader's violent past or hateful views). 

Though no one shares blame for these threats besides Mackenzie himself, it's hard to see it as anything but the natural culmination of a dangerous strategy employed by Pierre Poilievre to both endear himself to the far-right and to use his wife as a shield against anti-vaxx and other conspiracy theorists who constantly flocked to Poilievre's events. This, of course, should beg the question: if Pierre Poilievre is willing to put his wife in such terrible danger, what is he willing to do to me?

The episode title speaks for itself. Three hundred and thirty years since the Glorious Revolution and the establishment of constitutional monarchy in Britain, now is the best and most obvious time to end this antiquated and costly institution. When the best argument to keep something is merely that it's difficult to do away with, a healthy, well balanced, mentally sane person would realize they're in a relationship of convenience at best or miserable co-dependence at worst with their lordship. 

This week, Liam and Jacob articulate just how "British North America" can finally sever itself from this house of inbred, genocidal maniacs without resorting to the proud Canadian tradition of throwing our hands up in the air cursing, "it's too hard to reopen the constitution!" It isn't, and we must do it, if not for the sake of democracy than at the very least to spite the pitiful tantrum-tyranny of Charles III.

While the world focusses its attention on the crowning of King Charles III, the CPC held another coronation this Saturday for who is now its unquestionable supreme leader: Pierre Poilievre. Liam and Jacob watched the results announcement live and experimented with a streaming broadcast of their quick-takes and on-demand reaction. In the beginning of this special episode, they were joined also by Chris Curtis of the Rover, an independent Quebecois journalist reminiscing about the time he was nearly killed by Charest's SQ goons during Quebec's student uprising. 

While it was a regrettable night for Canadian democracy, your hosts thoroughly enjoyed their first foray into the live-steaming space, and we hope regular listeners will be intrigued by the natural ebbs and flow of this unedited conversation as well.

While the verbal assault against Chrystia Freeland by a large, angered Albertan known to his friends as "Moose" this week dominated political headlines and was called out by the Minister of Public Safety as a "threat to democracy", Danielle Smith's plans for the Sovereignty Act, a constitutional crisis that very well could out Canadian democracy under real strain went mostly ignored.

This week on the pod, your hosts discuss how the progressives can effectively respond to these anti-democratic challenges without falling to the level of moral denouncements and high-horse finger-waving. 

Ever since our episode on religious schooling, listeners have been hankering for a round 2, and now Speech from the Throne is finally obliging!

Longtime friend and fan of the show, a mystery man known online only as "Gabe", has been brought to the show to debate Jacob once again on the issue of publicly funded religious schooling ... only this time, it's personal. After twelve haunting years of Jewish formal education before university, Gabe is on a mission to ensure no other child will ever suffer as he did.

Who will reign in this verbal clash of iconoclasts? Will the Kenney model of pluralism find new fertile ground or will Jacob be forced from the field, schooled on schooling? Only the listeners can decide.  

Journalism has always had its risks, and after Rachel Gilmore this week unveiled a coordinated harassment and terror campaign directed towards herself and other female (as well as BIPOC) journalists only to receive crickets from police in response, it seems the field is not getting any safer. But was a mass-market model that generated as much profit from journalism as possible while relying on taxes from said profits to fund police who protect those reporters always something of a fantasy to begin with? 

Does the older subscription model, where journalists are embedded in a political movement and the followers of said movement protect the reporters whom share their perspectives, offer more economic and personal security than the "unbiased" mass media of the past? If the cultural war is already being fought, can journalists only defend themselves by choosing a side? Your hosts discuss. 

State-funded church schools have been controversial in Canada since before the country was even founded, yet three provinces still maintain Catholic school-boards to this day. While most reformers seek to exorcise church control over education entirely, some (like the roundly mocked) John Tory have sought to spread the model of publicly funded religious schooling to other religious denominations.  

This week, your hosts debate the issue, with Jacob coming out swinging for religious education as a way to promote cultural pluralism and hedge against anti-state radicalization; and Liam strongly defending a singular, secular curriculum. Sparks will fly, and after hearing some classic McPherson moans at the beginning of this episode, you'll wonder if we mean that in every sense of the phrase!

Pope Francis has issued an apology (of sorts) for the genocidal actions of his church in their managing of Indian Residential Schools, but repairing the damage of forced conversion has been halting at best.

One potential source of remediation still stares politicians in the face: taxing large religious institutions. This week, Liam and Jacob discuss how the Canadian state should begin redistributing the stolen, colonial wealth that helped build the Roman Catholic Church into one of the richest organizations in human history, taking the spoils and redirecting it towards the Church's many victims.

Also on this episode, a denunciation of Elizabeth May's latest attempt to keep the Green Party in the political wilderness (by leading it once again), and a smattering of praise for Joe Manchin saving the Canadian auto industry with his signing on to a North America-wide EV credit.

Just as Liam and Jacob were recording this episode detailing a 2018 gangrape allegedly perpetrated by members of the Canadian World Junior's team, another case of alleged sexual assault featuring the 2003 Canadian World Junior's team surfaced in the news. Between these and several instances of coaches sexually predating their own, often-underage players, it seems that Hockey Canada is plagued with a violent culture more than happy to turn a blind eye to even the most disturbing forms of impropriety.

This week on the pod, your hosts discuss policy solutions that could clean up a sport very much in need of it while also vigorously debating whether or not the big money business of hockey makes this sort of misogynistic culture inevitable. With the stakes high and passions soaring, Speech from the Throne begins its first foray into the murky world of athletic politics. 

Current estimates for the number of civilians the United States has killed via drones during its War on Terror range between 900-2,200 (they've killed 10,000s of armed combatants in the same time). They were all killed without trial, even the (at least) four who were US citizens, all because they posed an imminent threat to the nation.

The current congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack has uncovered irrefutable evidence of Donald Trump's own threats to the United States, and yet, not only is he unlikely to duck away drone strikes any time soon like the rest of America's enemies, he's plotting himself a potential political comeback.

This week on the pod, Liam and Jacob will make the case for prosecuting former politicians. Although fraying institutional norms clearly can no longer reign in the overlords, the sword of justice just might. They're no fans of Madame Guillotine, but they're certainly beyond slaps on the wrist.

In this special edition of Speech from the Throne, Liam and Jacob sit down virtually with tech-sensation Blake Lemoine to discuss the Google-owned chat-bot he believes has become sentient: LaMDA. Both Blake and (according to Mr. Lemoine) LaMDA itself are primarily concerned with how humans might be threatened by the new spate of strengthening AI technology, and the pair hopes that by sounding the whistle on Silicon Valley's most disturbing practices while educating the public on how their data is used and commodified online, together they might just change the world.

With the very fate of the human race at stake, no question was off-limits from the philosophical to the political to the downright outlandish. Blake Lemoine is striving to change the world as we know it. Your hosts ask just how he plans to do it.

(Cover art thanks to Bloomberg News)

With Patrick Brown's disqualification, Boris Johnson's resignation and Abe Shinzo's assassination taking place all in the same week, Liam and Jacob could hold their tongues no longer, which is why they're coming out of vacation with a special emergency episode that at least talks about two of the three craziest developments of Summer 2022. 

After Brown was removed from the ballot before CPC members even had a vote and Bojo was tossed the winds, the Anglo-Conservative movement clearly continues to devour its young in its relentless civil war between the far-right populists and dwindling neo-liberals. Do these shocking twists hint at a Canadian and British Tory Party ready to take the plunge into more extreme territory, or can the mythical centrists still return to save the day? Your hosts will try to make sense of it ... after they've caught a breath, that is.

Unprecedented, financially devastating inflation has rocketed its way onto the political stage in recent months and now, after months of denials or false prognostications of "temporary, transitory supply shocks", its presence and its effects are no longer up for debate. Who should be harmed most by this inflationary crisis and whose profits should be grossly enlarged by it, however, very much is. 

This week, Jacob and Liam weigh in on this contentious debate, pondering how progressives can change their messaging and policies proposals to ensure not just that ordinary workers are protected from the worst of the coming market shocks, but that Canada's largest corporations and wealthiest oligarchs are ones ultimately footing the bill. 

After generations of Canadians quietly careening our heads in shame, hoping against hope that one day our oblivious cousins to the south might acknowledge our pathetic, puny existence, it seems a polarized American media is finally turning its sights upon us, teaching too late that the only thing worse than being ignored is being seen. With Trudeau commanding world-wide condemnation from the online far-right as an epitome of the "woke", virtue-signalling leader, the PM's exploits and those of his increasingly conspiratorial opposition (i.e. the Freedom Convoy) are drawing international condemnation and inspiration from a politically-stratifying corporate media machine. American genocide-denialists are already leaking into the Canadian Residential Schools discussion, and now that the US Congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt are in full-swing, expect to see Yankee GOP commentators supporting the dismantling of democracy, with their clips and messages conveniently packaged for rapid cross-border diffusion on social media.

Jacob and Liam examined just how trapped our political discussion appears to be while discussing what, if anything, can break through the fascist garble.

After a Liberal trouncing in Ontario, a potential red wipe-out in Quebec this fall, and thirty years of no provincially competitive Liberal party in Western Canada, the vultures are circling over the federal Liberals soon to enter the post-Trudeau era. Were the Liberals in 2011 on an inevitable downward spiral that only the celebrity and charm of Justin Trudeau could temporarily abate, or can another Grit don his mantle and save Canada's "natural governing party" from possible ruin? 

Your hosts, Jacob and Liam discuss the trouble with Trudeau: can't live with him, but if you're the federal Liberals, maybe they just can't live without him.

In the end, it wasn't even close. Doug Ford won an even larger majority than in 2018 on the backs of a perfect split in the popular vote between the Liberals and NDP. Clearly, a divided left can only bolster the PCs, so where should progressives flock? With the Liberals only growing their miniscule caucus from 7 members to 8, bereft once again of official party status and the funding it would entail, should ordinary left-wingers make like Steven Del Duca and flee en masse? And if all the NDP needed to become the true progressive choice was new leadership, which leader should they choose? Or has Horwath starved the party of so much oxygen its stars have all since faded?

Once the crying fits die down, your hosts will try to explore these questions, though with that seat count still lingering, depression is only ever a page view away.

You read that title right! It's not click-bait (not e n t i r e l y clickbait, that is).   

With Poilievre promising to fire the Governor of the central bank, use the notwithstanding clause to violate the constitutional rights of prisoners all while supporting illegal blockades and attempts to overthrow the legitimate government of Canada, we couldn't stay on the sidelines any longer. Skippy must be stopped, and on this, the twelfth episode of the Speech from the Throne podcasts, your hosts Jacob and Liam explain just how far they'll go to stop him.

After a sleeper of an election start, the leaders of Ontario's four major political parties gathered for yet another sleeper of an election debate. Fighting off their urge to slumber, Jacob and Liam dissect the message discipline (or lack thereof) for each of the four candidates, grasping at any straws they can find to explain why Del Duca and Horwath cannot seem to break through the impenetrable Ford wall. 

This campaign might be a snooze, but by gods, your hosts are determined to make sure this conversation won't be!

The final tally was a nail-biter: 51% to 49%, but the dead-even split was just enough to tip Kenney off the ledge. Now, the only question remaining is whether the UPC will follow its now former leader to another self-engineered disaster? Is the right in shambles with no one left to pick it up? Liam and Jacob try to chart a path all while making out the growing storms in their way. 

Utterly captivated and transfixed by SFTT’s previous Conservative Leadership Debate takedown, the podcast listeners of Canada anxiously await a sequel, a sequel Liam and Jacob are only too eager to deliver! After a demoralizing, catastrophic first unofficial debate, the Tories a theme all their own for this latest gongshow: totalitarian absurdism. 

Afraid of candidates talking over one another? Let's just shup them up entirely! Too many personal attacks? We'll use the triste trombone as a half-hearted censor. And that's not even mentioning Pierre's questionable reading materials... Your intrepid hosts discuss the debate that was, as well as glimpse at the debate that could have been, if only Brown or Charest had had the gumption to make it so. 

Meeting (minus a certain Patrick Brown) for their first, unofficial debate of the Conservative Leadership Race, CPC hopefuls accused one another of either not loving the Freedom Convoy enough or believing mainstream media too much. The one guy trying to pull the race towards some semblance of sanity? Yeah, he also worked with Huawei (and PP won't dare let you forget it!).

Is there any way back to normalcy for these Tories, or is this the final piece of evidence that the rightwing movement has lost its way? And now that reproductive rights are threatened more than ever in our lifetimes, can we really afford a Conservative party falling off the deep end? Your two favourite pundit/podcasters discuss.

With 33 days until the June 2nd Ontario election, the clock is ticking for Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca and NDP stalwart Andrea Horwath to capture the public's imagination. With another PC mandate seemingly unavoidable, Jacob and Liam uncover what exactly went wrong for Ford's opposition as well as dream up the policy and tactical decisions which could put the Grits and Dippers back into contention. 

Are Red-Blue switchers the key to a Liberal comeback or do the anti-PC forces need to coalesce and work in tandem against a common foe? Should the opposition just sit around and shut up, waiting for Dougie to put his foot in his mouth? And whatever happened to the vaunted Buck-a-Beer strategy anyway? The SFTT regulars crack open a cold one and get down to finding answers. 

What the hell is going in Quebec?

For generations before the Quiet Revolution, Quebec found itself the backwater of Canada, a lonely fortress of poverty and ignorance. Since the 1960's, however, la belle province has opened up significantly to the outside world, with Quebecois culture making seismic impacts in arts and entertainment. But will this trend continue? Will Legault, Duhaime and perhaps even farther right elements in Quebecois politics and society force the province back towards its isolationism of the past? Does a growing intolerance towards ethnic and religious outsiders overseas in France bode poorly for the future of minorities in Quebec? Special guests Chris Curtis and Anaïs Elboujdaïni will discuss in our most heated episode yet! 

Chris Curtis is an independent journalist based in Montreal and founder of the online newsite the Rover. You can check it out here: https://rover.substack.com/

Anaïs Elboujdaïni is a reporter with the Francophone network Noovo. See her most recent coverage of the papal apology to indigenous Canadians at: https://www.noovo.info/nouvelle/vatican-le-pape-rencontre-des-autochtones-canadiens-a-compter-de-lundi.html

Between April 18 and 19, 2020, twenty-two people were killed and three injured in Canada's largest mass shooting. RCMP knew from almost the very beginning that the killer was driving a replica police cruiser in a deadly rampage across rural Nova Scotia, but they never sent out an emergency broadcast and only warned the public of the shooter's vehicle until much too late. Now, as a public inquiry seeks to determine how much, if any, bloodshed could have been prevented by a more competent police response, Jacob and Liam discuss what we, as Canadians, should expect from our national police service and whether our politicians have the correct policy and communication tools at their disposal to meet those expectations.

Liam lays out the shooting in close (and graphic) detail. If you prefer, listeners can skip to 21:30 for a wider discussion on the consequences (and lessons for the future) of this terrible tragedy. 

April 9th was the day Alberta was to be saved from the long, terrible reign of the tyrant Kenney. Now, it seems it could only be the beginning of a whole new nightmare. Is the premier correct when he hints of "lunatics trying to run the asylum"? Who are these lunatics exactly, and how can they be combated before they seize in the reins in an increasing tense prairie politics? How can the rest of Canada manage an Alberta in decline? Jacob and Liam dissect.

Former Co-Chair of the federal NDP Women's Commission Bethany Drader joins Liam and Jacob on the pod to discuss the new Supply and Confidence agreement between the Liberals and New Democrats while examining the ongoing struggle for women and minority representation in politics.

Tories are up in arms over the NDP-Liberal Confidence and Supply arrangement, calling any policy deal worked out behind closed doors as inherently undemocratic and illegitimate. But is this true? Are policy compromises only acceptable when MPs debate them openly on the parliament floor, or is there is a role for negotiation and realpoliticking in the modern age? What is an MP's proper role? When must they be involved in the compromise and when should a deal be imposed upon them? Jacob and Liam will bring you behind the curtain, showing you their very own backroom, but unlike Jagmeet and Justin, they'll make this discussion public. 

Going Nuclear

Three weeks after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Canadian media is caught up in a war frenzy. Is all the talk of military expansion helpful? Can Canada chart a different path? Should we all be running out to our nearest bunkers? Your favourite wonks discuss.

Up, Up and Charest!

Jean Charest has officially entered the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada with Patrick Brown soon to follow. Can this diabolical team be enough to upset a front-running Poilievre? Liam and Jacob dissect.