Roundup: Whitewashing Orbán

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The thing that had Twitter all abuzz yesterday (aside from the launch of Threads) was a meeting between former prime minister Stephen Harper and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Harper was tweeting about “centre right parties strengthening their collaboration” through his IDU club, and lo, people were losing their minds. Harper also mentioned “the IDU’s strong support for Ukraine,” so one could be extremely charitable in suggesting that perhaps Harper was trying to get Orbán on-side with supporting Ukraine where he has not been so far, but one doubts that it had any particular effect.

First of all, the IDU is not some fascist plot. Stephen Harper is not a Bond villain, pulling the strings of these strongman leaders. He’s a political has-been, a middling economist whose only lasting legacy in Canadian politics was the GST cut. Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi are not looking to Harper for advice, and they most certainly are not taking orders from him. The IDU is a social club for awful people, but that’s as much as it is. And no, because they share tactics, it doesn’t mean it’s a plot. Parties across the globe do that regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. The Americans have made a whole cottage industry of their “political strategists” making coin by speaking to political parties around the world. There is no plot.

This being said, Orbán is a really, really awful person, running a racist, homophobic and Islamophobic government that is cracking down on civil liberties and democracy in his country. That Harper is trying to whitewash this as “centre right” politics is gross, and gives permission to people like Pierre Poilievre to engage in more authoritarian tactics in the name of the kind of legitimising that Harper has been doing around Orbán as well as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni (again, who has been particularly homophobic). But again, he’s not pulling strings. He’s trying to pretend he has power and influence that he never actually had, and too many people are willing to give him that credit because they have an image of Harper as being something he never was.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Lviv continues to dig out from the overnight missile attack, as Russia continues to insist it “doesn’t target civilians.” (Sure, Jan). It sounds like the US is preparing to give cluster munitions to Ukraine, despite the protests of human rights groups. Ukraine’s military intelligence chief says the threat of an attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is receding, but the threat remains so long as the plant is occupied by Russians. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the capitals of Bulgaria and the Czech Republic to drum up support for Ukraine’s entry into NATO at the end of the war. Zelenskyy will head to Turkey today for grain talks relating to the Black Sea deal. Ukraine’s prime minister says that once the war is over, they will abandon conscription and maintain a professional army, akin to NATO standards.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau was in Lac-Mégantic to mark the tenth anniversary of the rail disaster in that town which killed 47 people.
  • Trudeau has appointed two Mi’kmaq lawyers to the Senate—one from Nova Scotia, the other from Newfoundland and Labrador.
  • Trudeau has also become another leader who leaned into the cringe of asking Taylor Swift to come to Canada (though the worst was the Philippines. Yikes!)
  • Quebec is now the only province that has not finalised their healthcare agreement with the federal government.
  • There are more details on the Stellantis deal, and the breakdown is two-thirds federal investment, one-third from Ontario, and this also applies to Volkswagen.
  • Carolyn Bennett announced that 42 drug-related programmes in the four Western provinces will share $20 million in funding.
  • Inuit Tapirit Kanatami president Natan Obed won’t meet with premiers next week because non-rights-holding Indigenous groups were also invited.
  • Ousted AFN national chief RoseAnne Archibald is now calling for an independent investigation of what she calls government meddling in the organisation.
  • The two Edmonton women and three children who were “temporarily missing” from their Syrian detention camp are finally on their way back to Canada.
  • The Toronto Star has joined the federal and Quebec governments and two Quebec media giants in pulling their ads from Facebook and Instagram.
  • Heather Stefanson is doubling down on her refusal to search that landfill for the remains of Indigenous women, insisting the federal government needs to do it.
  • Matt Gurney is dubious about the ability to expand Ontario’s nuclear generation capacity considering nobody can seem to get LRTs right in the province.
  • Susan Delacourt muses about the government falling out of love with social media giants as the war over C-18 wages in a changed advertising environment.
  • Colin Horgan considers the issue of data ownership when it comes to both the collapse of legacy media and the rise of AI.

Odds and ends:

For Xtra, I did an analysis of NDP MP Randall Garrison’s white paper on trans health and safety, and there are places where the government is falling down on promises.

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