The Sixth Estate

I view the rise of so-called “fact-checking” in the mainstream corporate news with mixed emotions. First of all, it is nice to see them, you know, doing their jobs for a change. But second of all, why do they need a fact-checking column? Does this mean that they’re not, um, checking the facts in their other news articles?

The latest exercise in fact-checking has been launched by the CBC in connection with the BC election. There’s a great deal of hype surrounding the BC election, because it looks as though a far-right Social Credit-turned-”Liberal” Party ally of Stephen Harper is about to be trounced by the purportedly socialist NDP. I say purportedly because, among other things, the top advisors to the two parties recently collaborated to establish a “public affairs” firm, Kool Topp & Guy, an action which I think hints at the unpublicized convergence of political opinion between the two parties. Kool Topp & Guy offers the following rather painful analogy by way of describing its founders’ unmatched skill:

top-notch talent at every position – our speedy sniper swooping in from left wing (Topp), our playmaking centre who can be counted on to win the key draws at either end of the rink (Guy) and our right-winger with the cannonading slapshot that puts the puck in the net every time (Kool).

I wonder how they decided who got to be the center.

Anyways, I digress. CBC has started its fact-checking column, and the likelihood that there will not be any significant difference between a Liberal government and an NDP government is, seemingly, not on the agenda. Instead, CBC has gratifyingly if perplexingly turned to a lie which was started by the Liberals a week or so ago, and it has since been repeated, straightfaced, by a legion of reporters who you would really think ought to be old enough to know better:

We got six consecutive credit downgrades in the 1990s.

That’s premier Christy Clark, launching the rumor. She at least knows it’s a lie, because she started it. Whether or not the journalists were competent enough, I don’t know. At least one of them was obviously uncomfortable enough repeating it that they decided to launch a “fact-checking” column. I can’t help but notice that the CBC has repeated the original lie at least twice — here and here — without batting an eye.

So I guess in the modern news business, fact-checking is just something you get around to… eventually. But not before you’ve published the story. Oh, no.

In this case, the truth is that B.C.’s credit rating was actually downgraded twice under the NDP. Between 1997 and 1999, different combinations of the four bond rating agencies downgraded BC’s credit rating, twice. Now, you might think that actually adds up to at best two credit downgrades, not “six consecutive” ones.

Speaking of which, it’s the following rampant editorializing which got me ticked with the effort. It seems that the anti-NDP bias is so pervasive in the news media that even when they’re printing “fact-checking” columns defending the NDP from Liberal fictions, they still can’t help injecting a little dig about how the NDP are horrible money managers (unlike, say, Liberal premier Clark, who has yet to balance a budget):

While the 1990s is a decade the New Democrats hope voters forget, it’s one the B.C. Liberals want them to remember.

Actually, given that the whole excuse for this “fact-checking” column was that the Liberals are lying about the NDP’s financial record, it would seem as though the 1990s is a decade the Liberals are hoping voters forget.

Which shouldn’t be too hard, since voters have 90% of the news media eagerly helping them out in this task.

CBC then closes with a statement that itself is in need of a fact-checking review:

It wasn’t until 2006, after the fallout from 9-11 and the U.S. housing crisis, that Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government earned B.C. an AAA credit rating.

Hm. Well, I take back what I said about reporters being old enough to remember what happened 15 years ago.

Here’s a puzzle for my readers: try and guess which one of the following two editorials, each of them discussing a slight bump in the tax rate for the wealthiest individuals, comes from the Globe & Mail, and which one comes from the local leftist rag:

Just kidding! They’re both from the Globe and Mail. The one on the left was published a year ago, when the Ontario NDP agreed to support that province’s budget in exchange for a slight bump in the upper-bracket tax rates. The one on the right came out this week, after the rather surprising news came out of B.C. that one of the country’s most right-wing political party, the so-called BC Liberal Party — actually a coalition of Harperite Conservatives and unreconstructed Socreds — was contemplating an equally minor tax increase to “balance” its own budget.

I use those quotation marks advisedly. The bottom line is actually a deficit according to any reasonable accounting standards — hundreds of millions of dollars in Crown-owned properties are going to be liquidated to make up the difference, which doesn’t really count as an ongoing revenue source, I should think. That hasn’t received much criticism from the media either.

More appalling is the generally resigned but accepting attitude that has been taken with respect to the tax increases themselves. Which aren’t major: the highest personal income tax bracket gets bumped up slightly, as does the corporate income tax rate and the provincial medicare insurance premium. Nothing to write home over really. The business groups have responded with the usual refrain that this will make B.C. uncompetitive.

But their criticism has been fairly muted, all told. The Globe & Mail, which has never met a right-wing budget it didn’t like, said that the corporate tax hike was “regrettable,” but that the increase in the health tax, which is a flat tax, is actually a good thing because it will “heighten awareness of health-care costs.” Har. And why don’t the tax increases on the wealthy and on corporations serve the same purpose, you might ask?

Anyways, the sneering classist bigotry aside, I can’t help noticing how mild-mannered the media is being about this. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that a Liberal-NDP coalition in Ontario brokered a similarly slight boost in the upper-income tax rates, and, well, all hell broke loose. One business group leader claimed that small increases in income tax were morally equivalent to ethnic cleansing. If we let the NDP influence taxation policy, he claimed, it would be like watching Rome get sacked by the barbarians all over again.

I can’t help but notice that the only obvious difference between the evil barbarian Hitlerite tax increase in Ontario and the regrettable but acceptable and maybe even praiseworthy tax increase in British Columbia is that the Ontario tax increase was brokered by a coalition vote with the NDP, while the B.C. tax increase has been introduced by one of the staunchest right-wing political parties in the country.

Lest you think I’m overplaying the hypocritical-media-partisanship angle, let me pose a thought puzzle: how do you suppose the national media would have reacted if it had been an NDP government, instead of a Liberal-Conservative one, which brought in a modest tax increase in B.C. this week?

In a way it’s a sign of how sick our democracy is, and how pliant our national media has grown, that the future of the Parliamentary Budget Office (and especially its soon-to-retire manager, Kevin Page) is more in doubt than the future of the government whose routine accounting mismanagement he has regularly exposed since gaining his office several years ago. Still, Page’s term will be up soon and the press is making a show of debating what will happen to the office. It’s rumoured that the Conservatives would rather abolish it altogether, but will keep it alive to avoid criticism. I predict they will pick some staid careerist who’s learned that success under this government equates to keeping one’s head down and mouthing platitudes while offering as much bowing and scraping as seems appropriate.

Anyhow, the Globe & Mail has printed a piece by economist Kevin Milligan proposing a “compromise” that will assure the future of the PBO. Basically, Milligan proposes the following: the government will make the office an independent commission so that it cannot be censored or checked by political interference. In exchange, the PBO’s mandate will be narrowed to a few specific issues on which he or she can provide “unique” information to Canadians.

I don’t mean this as an anti-Milligan piece. Milligan is from all I can make out a very competent academic, and he’s by no means a Harper propagandist. In the past he’s printed numerous pieces taking apart various Conservative tax policies and suggesting that they are either unhelpful to lower-income people, or will have serious long-term revenue implications, or both. But on this particular issue, he seems almost hopelessly out of step with what seems to me to be the actual problem his “compromise” is supposed to solve. Which, in my opinion, it won’t solve.

Now, it’s true that the Parliament of Canada Act in its current form gives the Parliamentary Budget Officer an extremely vague remit, covering economic projections, budget projections, costs of legislation, and research requests from MPs. It’s also true that the Conservatives have complained that this remit was broader than they really wanted it to be.

The trouble is, the reports that Page has really ticked off the government with aren’t obviously on the fringes of this broad mandate. Instead, they’re at the very core: how much will a proposed military procurement program really cost? How reliable are the finance minister’s economic projections? What is the actual substance of the government’s proposed austerity program? And so on and so forth. The chief complaint presently levelled against Page isn’t that his office is producing a stream of irrelevant and unnecessary reports about GDP projections. It’s that he’s been producing a stream of politically inconvenient reports about the government’s real and proposed programs, which are very much relevant to Parliament.

As a result, although Milligan seems to feel that the Conservatives could trade greater independence for a narrower mandate, it’s by no means clear that any narrowed mandate would be acceptable to anyone else. Milligan himself gets very vague on the question of what his proposed new mandate would look like: “putting price tags on legislative initiatives and providing baseline budget forecasts.” This sounds very much like what Page is doing already. He doesn’t name any specific initiatives by Page which he feels fall outside of the proposed mandate. It would be nice to know what he has in mind.

The second error, in my opinion, is that compromise is even on the table here. The Conservatives do not have either an interest in or a need to compromise on this. They have it within their power to narrow the PBO’s mandate unilaterally without offering any sort of “compromise”  on the office’s independence. They have it within their power to appoint a new PBO who will informally and privately agree to limit the scope of his inquiries with or without any change in the legislative mandate. They have the option of abolishing the PBO altogether.

And regardless of which of these options they choose, the political consequences they face will be negligible. The vast proportion of the media signalled during the 2011 election that they would support the present government unconditionally. They did so by endorsing the Conservatives in record numbers — among major English papers who published endorsements, only the Toronto Star failed to endorse the Conservative Party in the closing days of the campaign — even though said government had just turned a modest budget surplus inherited from the Liberals into the largest budget deficit in the country’s history, and was fresh off of a conviction of contempt of Parliament brought on by its blatant refusal to provide MPs with spending estimates on proposed new programs.

Given, in other words, that the media has already endorsed the principle of refusing to share financial information with Parliament, it’s hard to imagine that they — or the minority of Canadians they speak for — would be at all interested in punishing the party for that very same crime. Why would it be wrong in 2013 but not wrong in 2011?

In short, I don’t think the Conservatives would be willing to offer a compromise on the PBO’s mandate that would be acceptable to anyone else, and I don’t think that the Conservatives have anything to lose from failing to offer a meaningful compromise. The Conservatives have learned well that the constituency they speak for — a constituency which is large enough, influential enough, and as it happens geographically distributed in such a way that it can elect a majority to the House of Commons — is not actually interested in transparent fiscal management, whatever that constituency may say about the wild-eyed profligates of the NDP.

It follows that the real task, daunting and impossible as it may seem, lies not in pursuing futile compromises with those who are currently abusing the treasury, but rather in educating Conservative supporters about the importance of transparency and accountability in a democracy. These are things they used to claim they valued, too.

Well, at least they’ve come out and said it: income inequality is a growing problem in Canada. The Globe & Mail said it. The Toronto Star said it. CBC said it. Even the National Post managed to get it out, interspersed amongst gripes about how Canadian income inequality isn’t nearly as bad as American income inequality, which, I suppose, it isn’t. All of this is based on a newly released Statistics Canada report which reveals that the income share of the richest 1% of Canadians has grown from over 7% of the economy in 1982 to over 10% today. It’s a good thing StatsCan writes press briefings to accompany its data releases. As you can see from the above linked commentary, that’s pretty much as far as our nation’s highly paid professional journalist corps managed to dig into this story.

That fact can be seen from a rather appalling interpretation of tax inequality in the StatsCan press release, which was eagerly picked up and echoed by the press corps: the notion that over the past 30 years the “tax burden” on the rich has increased. This is reported in all media. CBC even put it into the headline: “1% have seen their income increase over almost 30 years, but so has their tax burden.”

This is an incredible claim. I mean that in the most literal sense: it is not a credible claim. The tax burden of the rich has not increased, at least not in the sort of taxation measured in this report. You can check out the data for yourself if you don’t believe me, but in the meantime, here’s my summary: in 1982, the richest 1% took in an average of $117,400, and they had an average tax rate of 33%. In 2010, the richest 1% took in an average of $427,600, and they had an average tax rate of 33%. The bottom 90% paid 16% in taxes in 1982, and paid 14% in taxes in 2010.**

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Even when it doesn’t matter.

Recently an Ottawa botany professor has suggested that the Bank of Canada erred by using a Norwegian species of maple tree as the basis for the leaf on the new $20 bill. The Norwegian maple is an invasive species in eastern Canada. It also appears it was the inspiration for the maple leaf on the $20 bill.

None of which matters, except that the Bank of Canada promptly trotted out a spokesman to issue the following denial:

“We created an image for the bank note that represents a stylized Canadian maple leaf, if you will, so that it wouldn’t represent any specific species, specifically not the Norway maple.”

Sheesh. Governments aren’t exactly truth-prone at the best of times, but the Conservative rot has evidently spread so far that even a minor, trivial, and irrelevant goof-up in the design of the new currency is a threat that must be quelled through dubious piffle.

In a dispute over the proper identification of a maple leaf, I’m afraid I have to side with the professor of botany over the government PR flack.

It’s not the inspiration for the leaf symbol that matters. It’s that on such a trivial, insignificant, and piffling matter, when it could easily have said “sorry, that’s our bad, but the Norway maple really does live in Canada now, even if it isn’t native” — no, instead, the government’s first instinct was to lie.

It’s Christmas time, and even Margaret Wente was feeling unusually charitable in Saturday’s column (and pretty much plagiarism free, for the time being). So if you’re hoping to get your regular dose of venom and bile from the chattering classes, you’ll have to settle for me.

I’d like to juxtapose a couple of stories from today to demonstrate the sad spectacle of Canadian democracy as it now exists. First of all, there’s the relative non-story of a First Nations chief slowly starving to death in protest that the Prime Minister and Governor-General of the country refuse to meet with her. This would seem a fairly paltry demand, but both men are reluctant to do so. Earlier this week, the Governor-General absurdly explained that he did not have the authority to meet anyone without approval from the Prime Minister.

He does not, apparently, need any such authority to write simpering nonsense in a national paper about how Canada is busy converting the heathen natives of Mexico to the wonders of adversarial common-law court systems, which, he says, are the absolutely necessary bedrock on which democracy is built. (This will no doubt come as something of a disappointment to the residents of Quebec.)

There’s still a possibility, but I really hope that Theresa Spence has second thoughts. I don’t want her to die, and it’s a safe bet that some cynical young partisan activist in the Prime Minister’s Office has already drafted a suitable speech for the occasion. (“Like all Canadians, I was shocked and saddened. But let me be clear: this government is working as hard as ever to solve the Indian problem, which was caused by the Liberals.”)

And our second story: the state broadcaster, aka the Conservative Broadcasting Corporation, has for some reason found it necessary to explain in excruciatingly painful detail the government’s plan to provide Santa Claus with a CF-18 fighter escort on his upcoming trip across Canada. The CBC isn’t the only media company to waste time on this utter propagandistic drivel, but unlike all the others, I own the CBC. So my comments are directed specifically to them.

For as long as I can remember, NORAD has “tracked” Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. But in recent years they’ve steadily upped this story. This year, it comes complete with a promotional video, a lengthy interview with one of the pilots, and specific details of Santa’s sled and flight pattern.

I know Santa occupies a special position in families where children are normally taught that they must tell the truth at all times, but at some point we’ve got to call a stop to this nonsense. There is, obviously, no CF-18 escort. There are no fighter pilots providing such an escort. At a time when the nation’s democracy is in crisis, surely we have better things to do than to trot out an increasing number of people to spread an increasingly detailed series of blatant untruths over the public airwaves. And I’m not stupid, either. This is a blatantly obvious attempt to insert the military into a jovial family celebration at a time when the military’s multi-billion-dollar plans to appropriate our taxes and spend them on unnecessary American fighter jets is front and centre in the news. Nicely played, assholes.

To add insult to injury, the military provided CBC with a graphic of the schematics of Santa’s sleigh. The graphic states that the sleigh’s emissions are classified (how can they be classified when Canada doesn’t even own the sleigh?) and its speed, which is “faster than starlight.” But not, apparently, light from other sources, which as we all remember from high school physics is much, much faster still — if it wasn’t so, why would it take so many years for light from most stars to reach our telescopes?

Apparently, CBC made a show of calling the minister’s office for comment on the planned escort mission, to which the minister responded with a poem. The only question they should have asked is how much money the military spends on this ridiculous public relations charade every year. And they should have noted that the minister’s office refused to answer that question.

I only ask because a few days ago the government released a transparently self-serving “response” to a request from its own MPs, showing that it costs as much as $150,000 to respond to a question tabled by an opposition politician in Parliament, and therefore that opposition politicians should not be permitted to ask questions of the government.

This is yet more evidence of the fantastic fiscal competence of “Canada’s responsible majority government,” I must say. The British government says that the average written response to a question costs just £164.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Well, try that on for size. Let me be clear, says Stephen Harper: “Canadians have not spent years reducing the ownership of sectors of the economy by our own governments, only to see them bought and controlled by foreign governments instead. It is not an outcome any responsible government of Canada could ever allow to happen.”

That’s not a statement Harper made months ago that I’m dredging up to demonstrate Harper’s hypocrisy. That’s apparently a statement he made Friday, the very same day he approved not only a foreign communist dictatorship’s takeover of Nexen, but also, slightly less worrying but equally hypocritically, a foreign fragile democracy’s takeover of Progress Energy. I guess I don’t need to put the case any more plainly than Stephen I himself did. The Harper government is, by its own admission, not a responsible government.

Then, there’s the ridiculous hypocrisy of implying that we’ll approve this major sale in the oilsands, but we wouldn’t approve another one. How could we approve another one? There aren’t many large Canadian players left in the oil sands. It’s too late to worry about letting the sector get taken over by foreign interests. Unless they want to go after Syncrude or Suncor next, the Chinese will have a hard time finding a major Canadian oil producer left to buy.  If you doubt me, cast an eye down the “Canadian” Association of Petroleum Producers’s list of members. There’s a half-dozen governments on that list now. Our government isn’t one of them. We’re literally seeing the nationalization of Canada’s oil sands… except not by Canada.

In a tragically ironic sense, this actually gives Canada the opportunity to start thinking about LAO — Life After the Oilsands. We have no choice. Except for the few residents of Alberta who will still be allowed to work in the region once Chinese temporary workers take over the joint over the next 10-20 years, there won’t be much more money left to be made in oil. It’s not the first huge resource that this country’s government has catastrophically mismanaged, but we’ve blundered along so far because we’re big and there was always another mega-resource left to mismanage. Sooner or later we’re going to run out of new opportunities, though. If we haven’t already.

More to the point, though, I think people are getting the wrong idea about these new guidelines. The media is implying that the guidelines somehow mean there won’t be any more CNOOC/Nexen-style takeovers. In fact, Harper even said so himself: “Foreign state control of oilsands development has reached a point at which further state control would not be of net benefit to Canada.” But I defy anyone to find anything in the new guidelines, helpfully made available by the National Post, that actually bars more takeovers by foreign dictatorships. It just isn’t in there. So we’re left to hope that prime ministerial whim will reflect the will of the Canadian majority, which, in the fire sale of Nexen, it clearly does not.

One statement in particular struck my eye as being especially silly in the new “policy.” The following lists several ways in which the Canadian government is reserving the right to require foreign governments to meet certain performance requirements before the next Nexen-style takeover will be approved:

The appointment of Canadians as independent directors on the board of directors, the employment of Canadians in senior management positions, the incorporation of the business in Canada, and the listing of shares of the acquiring company or the Canadian business being acquired on a Canadian stock exchange.

Oh. That’s important to you, is it? Reserving senior management spaces for Canadians? The pro-China fifth columnists in the Prime Minister’s Office didn’t seem to think that was very important earlier this year, when they traded away exactly that power in the Canada-China foreign investment agreement:

7.1. A Contracting Party may not require that an enterprise of that Party… appoint individuals of any particular nationality to senior management positions.

Oops.

I believe that we may be at the beginning of a major transition in which Canada passes from the American sphere of orbit and enters the Chinese one. I realize it sounds ridiculous, given our shared border and all, but Canada has changed its allegiance before — from France to Britain to America — and the Americans don’t seem terribly bothered yet by the Chinese acquisition of Canada. We’d better hope it’s a smooth transfer of power. The alternative is to end up like Poland, ca. 1939.

As I pointed out in my last post, the fact that the Conservatives have admitted they will miss their budget projections next year isn’t news. There hasn’t been a single annual budget yet that actually reached the projected balance it was supposed to, and, as a result, the date at which the Conservatives promise we’ll be back into surplus territory has crept farther and farther back in time. Now it’s past the 2015 election. This is kind of surprising, since it was widely expected that the spin-happy Conservatives would make a great flourish out of balancing the budget before the next election. Maybe that’s still the plan, despite the published figures.

Anyhow, I thought it would be useful to look at this from a broader perspective, which is what I’ll do in the next couple of posts. Today we’ll talk about debt, as opposed to deficit. Debt is the overall amount the Canadian government owes from previous years; the deficit is just the difference between revenue and expenses in the current year. As you’ll see in a moment, Canada’s responsible majority government has been hard at work serving our best interest.

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Last week, the media delivered its resounding judgement on the Conservatives’ fall budget update. Jim Flaherty, they say, has unfortunately allowed the projections to slip. The deficit has grown. Canada may not balance its budget on time. Curiously, this fact does nothing to change the obvious cognitive dissonance now in play in the right-wing media. Conservative deficits are bad. But Liberal deficits would be even worse, because the Conservatives are going reluctantly into deficit, whereas the Liberals do so enthustiastically. CBC, also known as Conservative Biased Commentary, gave an online column to former Harber Cabinet minister Stockwell Day to deliver this message, along with some trumped-up nonsense about how “quantitative easing” means going into debt (no, it doesn’t).

Anyhow, it’s time for Sixth Estate’s budget commentary series. The theme as the same as the last time, and the time before that. The fact that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has announced we’ll “miss” our budget balance projections yet again isn’t news, despite what you may have read in the news media. In fact, that’s what’s happened, every year, since the Conservatives came to power. When it comes to accurately predicting the state of the nation’s finances in future years, you can see from the following chart that Flaherty is almost unbelievably consistent in never quite delivering a performance as good as he’d promised:

What this chart shows are the Conservative surplus and deficit projections announced every year as part of the budget, with the last line, the light blue one, indicating this fall’s budget update. As you can see, the government invariably comes in slightly below where it claimed it would be. That’s precisely what happened this fall, so it’s pretty much par for the course.

That doesn’t mean the overall deficit or surplus hasn’t changed. It has. The Conservatives started out with a small surplus of several billion dollars per year. They changed that into a record-winning deficit of $50 billion per year. Canada has been clawing itself back out of the budget deficit hole ever since. Good thing we didn’t have a left-wing government in power. Imagine how big their deficit would be! Thank God for responsible Conservative money management.

What this has meant is that, ever since the Conservatives first got us back into deficit, the day at which they claim they’ll balance the budget has slipped progressively farther and farther into the future. In the 2009 budget, they promised we’d be back into the black in 2013. Last year, they said it would be more like 2014. This spring, they promised to balance the budget in 2015. This fall, they said it would be more like 2016.

I wonder what they’ll say next year.

Try this one on for size. The Canadian media, which for the most part hasn’t met a Canadian corporation they think shouldn’t be sold to foreign interests, has latched on to what they claim is evidence of Chinese “hard-ball” with respect to the purchase of our Nexen oil company by the government of China. The Leader-Post explains the details, but there’s been similar speculation in all the major papers over the last few days:

If you’re a Viterra shareholder, you’re probably wondering why it’s taking so long to close the $6.1-billion takeover of the Regina-based grainhandling company by Glencore International… China is holding up the $6.1-billion deal to take over Canada’s largest agriculture company over Viterra’s half-interest in a canola crushing facility in that country… The Chinese government… is waiting for the Harper government to make up its mind about the proposed $15.1-billion acquisition of Nexen Inc. by China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC).

It doesn’t seem entirely logical. Let me just follow the thought process on this one. The Chinese government wants to buy one of Canada’s largest oil companies. But the Canadian government is dragging its feet, mainly because of massive public opposition to the deal.

So, the Chinese find another major Canadian company up for sale to an international consortium, this one Viterra, and they try to block that sale to punish us for not selling them Nexen. They can do this because Viterra has a minority stake in a plant in China. Here’s the message: if you don’t agree to sell your major corporate interests to us, we will try to block you from selling major corporate interests to other countries, too.

In this particular case, it’s a pretty silly conflict. Ironically, at least with respect to Viterra, the Chinese government appears to be defending Canada’s economic interests better than the Canadian government is. I’m a little bit confused about why anyone thinks this would be a major factor in anything. Viterra shouldn’t be sold to multinational interests, either. It will be, of course. The Canadian government says it’s okay with the deal. And it will go through. If worst comes to worst, I’m sure Viterra can find some way to sell off its interest in an unimportant Chinese plant in exchange for selling itself off to the highest bidder, Glencore International.

So, although this is a fairly bizarre scenario, it’s something I’ve predicted will happen now that we’ve decided to open our borders to the Chinese. Rising American-Chinese tensions are probably going to define the next 50 years. Canada is poised to become a site for proxy battles between commercial interests of two empires. It’s as absurd as St. Laurent or Diefenbaker deciding that large chunks of the country should have been sold off to the government of the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. The Americans and Chinese may not care, of course, not as long as they both think they’re getting a reasonable share of the proceeds from the fire sale.

It doesn’t bode well for Canada, though. Welcome to Poland, 1939.