Tag Archives: Evan Solomon

Roundup: Jivani’s tour for disaffected young men

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Something that has gone largely unnoticed has been Conservative MP Jamil Jivani’s campus tours, modelled after the late fascist Charlie Kirk’s campus tours that were deemed essential to youth outreach for Trump’s MAGA movement. There has been some acknowledgement that under Poilievre, the Conservatives have been attracting a lot of disaffected young men, but as Jivani’s little campus tour is showing, this is much more explicitly about disaffected young white men, who are tired of being confronted about the concept of toxic masculinity, who don’t think that they can speak freely, and who can’t find jobs.

If anything, there is some bitter irony in Jivani cultivating this particular demographic because he has been beating the anti-DEI drum that Poilievre has appropriated from the MAGA cult, but part of this tour is about getting these young white men to present themselves as the real victims. To suggest that they need special policies to address their needs is pretty hard to square with the whole cry about “merit” that is supposed to replace DEI. If they need special programs, then they are not able to get ahead by merit alone, no? Of course, we know that the real reason why they want to eliminate DEI is precisely because they can’t compete based on merit, so they want to return to a system that systemically discriminates against those who are deserving but can’t get a fair shake.

This of course gets to the real issue in play—that these rallies are attracting groups who are Diagolon-aligned, and whose talk about “remigration” is code for ethnic cleansing. Sure, Jivani can tell them that it’s “complicated,” but this is not a group that believes in nuance. The fact that Jivani can’t denounce that kind of rhetoric but instead tries to mollify it is an indictment about where the Conservative party is headed in this country. Someone remarked that this is no longer the party of Stephen Harper. Unfortunately, it’s becoming the party of Donald Trump, whether they want to believe it or not, and that’s a very terrifying prospect for where things could be headed in this country, because there is no “good parts only” version that they think they can achieve.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-23T21:27:02.365Z

Ukraine Dispatch

An attack on Kyiv overnight Wednesday wounded nine people. Two Ukrainian journalists were killed by a Russian drone in Kramatorsk, while an investigation has been launched into Russian soldiers killing five civilians in a village in the Donetsk region.

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Roundup: A digital asbestos task force

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Everyone’s favourite bullshit Cabinet minister, Evan Solomon, is putting together a task force to determine the next steps in the government’s digital asbestos strategy. While we wait to see just who is going to be on this task force, because that will say volumes, it’s almost inevitable at this point that this is mostly going to wind up being more hype, because Solomon has guzzled it all down, while prime minister Mark Carney has also bought into it as the cure for Canada’s flagging productivity and other problems (rather than the obvious fact that corporate Canada is lazy). We’ve all heard everything Solomon has said so far. I’m not optimistic at all.

It's gonna be so much more hype. We are so boned.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-09-24T15:21:05.227Z

I’m also extremely sceptical about Solomon insisting that they’re going to take the lessons from the Privacy Commissioner’s investigation into TikTok and its privacy violations in order to shape the new digital asbestos laws, because that would be too much intervention for what Solomon has been preaching about “light touches.” Part of the problem with the TikTok violations are that this is their business model, and while they insist that they are trying to keep children off the platform, they put more effort into hoovering up private data for marketing purposes than they did in using those very same tools they developed to keep kids off the platform, as it was hoovering up their data at an alarming rate. So much of what makes up digital asbestos is similar business models about siphoning that personal data, as well as using techniques to keep users engaged on that platform, hallucinations and all, and not caring about it sending them on delusional spirals that craters their mental health. They don’t care because it’s the business model, and that’s why I can’t trust Solomon to actually regulate—because he has bought into the hype around that model, and if he regulates, the tech bros will cry and whine that they can’t operate in those rules, and he’ll kill the industry, and gods forbid, we couldn’t have that.

Evan fucking Solomon says they'll take the lessons from the TikTok privacy report in order to shape new digital asbestos laws. www.thestar.com/politics/fed…

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-09-25T03:13:46.890Z

Meanwhile at the UN, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is warning about the destructive arms race happening right now with digital asbestos and drones, and is calling for international rules about limiting its spread. But of course, I can just hear someone like Solomon insisting that we don’t want too many rules, because that will “stifle innovation,” and so on. Absolutely nobody is taking any of this seriously (and no, we’re not talking about Skynet), and we’re heading for some serious problems in the very near future as a result.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine has attacked the petrochemical complex in Salavat for the second time in a week, further reducing Russia’s refining capacity.

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Roundup: A pause after malicious compliance

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Not unexpectedly, the Alberta government is pausing its book ban in large part because of the malicious compliance by the Edmonton Public School Board and others, where they weaponized the bans to show how ridiculous they are, particularly in targeting things like Ayn Rand, which Danielle Smith thinks should be “compulsory reading,” because of course she does. And yes, Margaret Atwood got involved, because one of the books that got picked for the ban was The Handmaid’s Tale, and Smith and company were roundly ridiculed by everyone. As they should be.

But as the government decides that they’re going to either come up with a more targeted criteria, or just take these school boards by the hand and essentially do it for them, nobody is actually talking about how this all started with a moral panic about queer or trans books, and that this is what the outcome is going to be once Smith and her ministers come up with the “targeted” list. And frankly, it’s disappointing to see that Naheed Nenshi is not calling this out either, instead giving credence to the moral panic by saying that this was about the UCP igniting a culture war that backfired on them, and “Instead of just saying, ‘Hey, we found a couple of troubling comic books with some troubling images, let’s take those off of shelves,’ they wrote a ministerial order.” Those “troubling images” are overreactions or taken out of context, but more to the point, they’re queer and trans materials. That cannot be toned down or ignored in the broader scheme because this is where fascism always starts. And no, this isn’t just Smith being a MAGA adherent because a lot of these particular tactics have a more tangible origin point in Orbán’s Hungary, where Americans like Ron DeSantis then adapted them for his own use, and far-right groups took their cues from the US shared their lists with members of the UCP to show their “concerns.” Nothing was an accident. Let’s not pussyfoot around this.

I don't think this has necessarily been intentional by anyone in media, but I am fascinated by the way the narrative around the Alberta book bans has shifted away from the censorship of LGBTQ2S+ stories into being much more "Look, they're even banning Game of Thrones!!"

— Mel Woods (@melwoods.me) 2025-09-02T17:18:21.140Z

In other Alberta news, their bans on students changing names or pronouns in schools, and ban on trans women in sport have also taken effect, so Egale Canada is part of a lawsuit that has been launched to challenge these laws, which will inevitably result in Smith invoking the Notwithstanding Clause, because of course she will, but she’s going to insist that she’s the reasonable one in the room while she’s doing it.

1/ Egale Canada and Skipping Stone have filed a constitutional challenge against the Government of Alberta’s Education Amendment Act, 2024 (formerly Bill 27), which places unconstitutional restrictions on the use of names and pronouns in schools across Alberta.

— Egale Canada (@egalecanada.bsky.social) 2025-09-02T21:21:32.679Z

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-09-02T21:22:03.302Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia has launched air attacks on Kyiv overnight. There were fresh attacks on Ukrainian power facilities over the weekend, and Ukraine has vowed retaliation. Ukraine is also seeing a new troop buildup along certain parts of the front lines. As the school year starts in Ukraine, many more schools have been moved underground as a result of the war. The former Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada was gunned down on Saturday in a political assassination.

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Roundup: Spending vs inflation

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Last week, the CD Howe Institute put out a report on the recent bout of inflation, and tried to pin it either on government spending or the Bank of Canada, and in the process ignored a whole lot of things that happened during the pandemic that were material to those price increases. Or the fact that early in the pandemic, we had deflation, and that the Bank of Canada needed to act fast to ensure that it did not continue lest it turn into a spiral that would lead to a depression, because that’s what deflation does.

Naturally, however, the moment Pierre Poilievre saw that they were pinning blame on government spending, he had to jump on that because it’s his entire central thesis for inflation, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. I report on economic data on a regular basis, and that includes the Consumer Price Index (or inflation) data every month, and the Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report every quarter. I can tell you what prices increased and where, because that’s in the data every month. None of the causes had anything to do with government spending.

I also have to take some exception to the notion that government supports like CERB were driving demand. CERB was not extra spending money. It was survival money for low-income people who were out of work because of the pandemic. It staved off a wave of bankruptcies and even more demand on provincial social services or food banks (and the lack of provincial social services is the main driver behind increased food bank use, per their own reports). The “excess demand” was coming from higher-income households who had plenty of money to spend when they couldn’t go out to restaurants or go on vacations. They were not the recipients of government support, and trying to conflate the two is disingenuous, and frankly smacks of a great deal of ideological bias.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-07-19T21:10:16.169Z

Ukraine Dispatch

There has been another barrage of drones and missiles that have killed at least one person in Kyiv overnight. Here is another look at how the people in Kyiv are coping with the increased attacks.

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Roundup: Danielle Smith attacks immigrants as part of “Alberta Next” panel

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Danielle Smith is at it again. Under the rubric of going on the offensive against Ottawa, she is going to chair a series of town hall meetings dubbed the “Alberta Next Panel” to get feedback on how the province should stand up to the federal government. And if you’ve heard this before, it was about five years ago that Jason Kenney did a similar thing dubbed the “Fair Deal” panel, but he didn’t chair it himself because he had enough self-awareness to know that would be nothing more than an absolute shit show, but Smith wants to be a woman of the people. Kenney’s panel was mostly a flop, but Smith is trying to resurrect some of those unpopular ideas, along with some absolute bullshit about working with other provinces to change the constitution. She has a couple of credible people on the panel, and a couple less-credible people, but the fact that she is chairing ensures that this will be nothing short of a fiasco.

And already, the signs are bad. Really, really bad. Like one of the topics is to “just ask questions” about denying social services to immigrants who don’t have status yet, which is supposed to somehow be pushing back if the federal government is somehow forcing “the number or kind of newcomers moving to our province,” blaming them for high housing costs, high unemployment and importing “divisions and disputes,” which is an outrageous provocation. Remember that it wasn’t that long ago that the Alberta government was falling all over itself to attract displaced Ukrainians, while denouncing any plans to “redistribute” asylum-seekers that had crossed into Quebec to other provinces in order to share the burden. And why might that be? Because Ukrainians are mostly white?

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This is straight-up MAGA bait, because Danielle Smith has to keep that base of her party placated at all times or they will eat her face like they did Jason Kenney. In a sense, this is Kenney’s fault, because he invited these fringe and far-right assholes into the party while he chased out the centrist normies, because he wanted a “pure” conservative party who would keep the NDP out of power forever, and well, they didn’t appreciate his appeal to common sense during the pandemic, and his fighting back against them now is tinged with bitter irony because the only reason they now hold as much power and influence in the province that they do is because he put them there, rather than allowing them to fester on the sidelines. And so, Smith is going to keep this pander to them, as ugly and fascistic as it is, because they made a deal with their devils as a shortcut to getting back into power and staying there in perpetuity. And Smith is going to keep feeding the separatists in the province through this kind of inflammatory rhetoric, because she thinks they suit her purposes in trying to threaten the rest of the country as leverage for her selfish demands. It’s a grotesque situation, and she is determined to gerrymander the next election to keep it going.

I wonder what happens when you invite the worst possible fringe elements into your party because you’re mad someone else got a turn.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-06-23T17:09:32.466Z

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian ballistic missile struck Dnipro around mid-day Tuesday, killing seventeen and injuring more than 200 others; other attacks made for a total of twenty-six civilian deaths over the course of the day.

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Roundup: A major agreement with the EU

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At the Canada-EU summit in Brussels yesterday, Mark Carney signed a new security and defence partnership, and the joint communiqué was very, very long. A lot of stuff that might have been part of a G7 communiqué, but that wasn’t going to happen given how much time and energy was spent managing Trump and the Americans, and that included a lot of talk about upholding the rules-based international order, or combatting climate change, and that kind of thing, that would have caused Trump to throw another one of his public tantrums. But that’s the world we live in now.

This means that Canada is now on the road to participating in programmes like ReArm Europe, which seeks to drive down the cost of joint military procurement projects by increasing the scale of the buys, and helps to keep those industries in Europe rather than relying on the American defence-industrial complex, but the hope is that this agreement will open the Canadian market to those procurements as well (though I am curious to know how many Canadian firms are actually Canadian and not just American branch-plants).

Today will be the big NATO summit where increasing the expected defence spending target is the major focus, though there will likely be some sidebars around de-escalation with Israel and Iran. Ukraine will also be a focus, though president Zelenskyy is not expected to attend (though he was in the UK yesterday to sign new agreements on military production there, and to have lunch with the King at Windsor Castle). Nevertheless, that five percent target—to ostensibly be divided up as 3.5% operational spending and 1.5% in related spending that has some kind of a defence-adjacent component—is going to be incredibly difficult for the majority of countries to achieve, but especially to sustain. You already have some countries who met their two percent target by front-loading a bunch of procurement, but they have no idea how they’ll manage to stay at two percent, let alone 3.5%-plus going forward. (It’s also a dumb metric because it doesn’t deal with contributions to operations, and the disparity between the denominators among member countries is pretty vast, to say nothing about the fact that it’s easier to hit your targets if you crash your economy to drag your denominator down). One hopes there will be some cooler heads around the table, but it looks like the 5 percent is a done deal, which will create problems down the road.

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Ukraine Dispatch

The attack on Kyiv early Monday wound up killing at least ten, including a child, as an apartment block was struck. Ukraine says that it attacked and set ablaze an oil depot in Russia’s Rostov region.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1937171580552966364?s=61

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Roundup: The Auditor General on F-35s and ArriveCan

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Yesterday saw the release of the Auditor General and Environment Commissioner’s reports, and lo, these ones actually got a tonne of media attention and took centre stage in Question Period, which is a far cry from most of their recent reports. The reason, of course, is that the topics were sexy—F-35 fighter jets and the ArriveCan app gong show in particular, the latter of which the Conservatives have been salivating over for three years now, which made the day pretty much insufferable as a result. But there was more than just those.

  • The F-35 procurement costs have ballooned because of delays, pilot shortages, infrastructure, and inflation but acknowledged the Canadian government has little control over most of these factors.
  • CBSA failed to follow procurement and security rules when it used GC Strategies to contract out work on ArriveCan, and didn’t follow-up to ensure work had been done before more contracts were awarded.
  • Public Services and Procurement has been slow to modernise and downsize office space, and turn over surplus buildings for housing.
  • Indigenous Services has failed to process Indian Act status applications within the required six-month timeline, with a backlog having grown to over 12,000 applications.
  • The climate adaptation plan is falling short, with only one of its three pillars in place and little connection between spending and results.

I’m not sure that the F-35 news is all that surprising, but it does actually work to either justify a potential move away from the platform, or to reflect increases in defence spending calculations. The GC Strategies findings are also not unexpected, but one thing the Conservatives have been failing to mention is that CBSA is an arms’-length agency, so ministers had no real say over any of its contracting practices (as the Conservatives try to insist that any minister who had carriage on the file should be fired). Meanwhile, their narrative that this was somehow about “Liberal friends” was never mentioned in the report, nor was there any mention about partisan considerations, or indication that the firm had any connection to the government, so these are just rage-bait accusations used solely for the performance art, which is how most things go with these guys.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-06-10T21:22:14.366Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Tuesday’s attack from Russia was one of its largest strikes on Kyiv, which also hit civilian targets in Odesa, and Kharkiv was subjected to a nine-minute-long drone attack that killed at least two and injured 54. Another prisoner swap took place yesterday, this time for an undisclosed number of sick and wounded soldiers.

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Roundup: Lots of new faces, but a few questionable choices

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The Cabinet shuffle proceeded apace yesterday morning, and Mark Carney put together a Cabinet of 28 ministers and ten secretaries of state (as opposed to ministers of state, meaning they are subordinate to ministers). Some of the big names stayed in—Dominic LeBlanc, François-Philippe Champagne, Chrystia Freeland, while Anita Anand and Mélanie Joly swapped roles. Sean Fraser is back in Cabinet as justice minister, but Nathaniel Erskine Smith is out, and everyone was all over the fact that he was the mildest bit sore about it considering that he decided to run again for the sake of taking on the housing portfolio, and he probably would have been better staying there than giving it to former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson, who has been accused of being asleep at the wheel as housing prices in Vancouver skyrocketed and their housing crisis accelerated on his watch. There is gender parity in the Cabinet itself, but not the secretaries of state, but there are a number of indigenous ministers, including Mandy Gull-Masty as the first Indigenous minster of Indigenous Services. Carney says that this new Cabinet will work with “urgency and determination” to bring about the greatest economic transformation since the Second World War, but those are a lot of expectations. (Photo gallery here).

I’m genuinely pissed Nate Erskine Smith is out at housing — and all together from Cabinet. It’s a terrible call. Whatever you think of Robertson — not much, for me — NES was a perfect fit for housing. He knew what he was doing. He could communicate it well. Own goal.

— David Moscrop (@davidmoscrop.com) 2025-05-13T20:04:24.898Z

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I am going to spend a minute to rail about the fact that Evan Solomon was named minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation, because there is something so absolutely grubby about it. Solomon is forever ethically tainted from the manner of his departure at CBC, but Carney was one of the people he brokered art sales for, and the two are good friends. So Carney found him a safe seat in a city that Solomon hasn’t lived in for over a decade, and then slid him into Cabinet in a bullshit made-up portfolio (that a bunch of the Canadian tech sector are projecting their hopes and dreams on), while at the same time Carney pats himself on the back for how “pared down” this Cabinet is. Pared down except for this made-up portfolio for his friend (and a few other questionable decisions, like a secretary of state for “nature.”) This is exactly the kind of thing that makes people cynical, and that’s even before we get to the problematic nature of the state of AI, the fascism of tech bros, and gullible people believing that this technology will solve all kinds of problems when there is little proof that plagiarism machines can actually do so. This whole thing just gives a complete sinking feeling about the judgment involved.

So was including Evan fucking Solomon.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-05-13T21:19:59.501Z

I thought this was supposed to be a pared-down, gimmick-free cabinet.Canadian digital policy is about to take three enormous steps backwards, as Mark Carney confirms what’s I’ve suspected since I read his leadership platform: he’s 100% on board the AI hype train.

— Blayne Haggart (@bhaggart.bsky.social) 2025-05-13T16:13:15.407Z

As was expected, Pierre Poilievre responded to the shuffle, and while he made a few contrite remarks off the top about working together for the country and not “reflexively opposing” everything, he then turned to gratuitous swipes about the people chosen, and implored Carney to “steal his ideas,” even though they were incoherent, and his platform was made up of fantasy math. Frankly I’m not seeing much of a change in tone, nor do I actually expect there to be a real one, because that’s not who Poilievre is, and him trying to show his softer side is going to be impossible for him to maintain.

In other reaction, here is The Logic’s analysis about what this Cabinet says about Carney’s economic plans for the country. My colleague Mel Woods at Xtra notes that Rechie Valdez is the new point person on LGBTQ+ issues, and it remains to be seen what that is going to look like in an age where you have provinces like Saskatchewan and Alberta who are legislating attacks on trans youth, while we look at what is happening south of the border. Susan Delacourt remarks on how Carney is carefully trying to construct distance from Trudeau with this Cabinet, but some of the Trudeau-era impulses remain. Justin Ling is much more critical of some of the choices made in this shuffle (and some of them were a choice).

Ukraine Dispatch

Continuing to call Putin’s bluff, president Zelenskyy is prepared to head to Istanbul for “peace talks.” And if Putin doesn’t show, the EU is prepared to tighten sanctions even more, which is going to really squeeze the Russian economy, which is in worse shape than they like to claim.

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