Tag Archives: Randy Boissonnault

Roundup: Overselling “soft populism”

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It was quite the weekend for uncritical media for Pierre Poilievre, after he had a bad couple of weeks of being called out for a series of egregious lies that could no longer be spun or both-sidesed. Nevertheless, the National Post was there to gush about his so-called “soft populism” that was full of comments of people insisting he was really within the mainstream and which studiously ignored his attempting to normalize far-right actors in order to capture the PPC vote, or his shifting the Overton-window to make their particular pronouncements acceptable discourse when they remain radical. Nobody wants to talk about his attempts to take MAGA Republican populism and just use the “good parts only” in the hopes that he can ignore the bad stuff that comes with it, but that’s not how real life works, and these are things we should be discussing.

Meanwhile, Poilievre released a fifteen minute “documentary” on housing over the weekend that the usual pundit suspects gushed over, not because it contained anything true, because it didn’t—it’s the exact same pseudo-intellectual “economics” that he got from crypto-bros on YouTube, but it’s done with higher production values and data-visualization crimes, conspiracy claims, internally inconsistent arguments, and the inability to distinguish between correlation and causation, but hey—it looked slick, so that’s what everyone is going to glom onto. And while I get that it’s the weekend, the Post wrote-up a recap with absolutely no critical pushback to any of its claims, while the CBC couched it in poll numbers and some government talking points, again, with no actual pushback to any of Poilievre’s misleading claims.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians have been shelling Kherson, and killed at least two people over the weekend. Russian advances appear to be easing off on Avdiivka, while their claims of having captured Maryinka remain unsubstantiated. Former president Petro Poroshenko was denied permission to leave the country (because of martial law) when it was found out that he was planning to meet with Hungarian prime minister and Putin apologist Viktor Orbán. Ukrainian officials are investigating claims that Russians shot surrendering soldiers, which is a war crime.

https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1731338721583079724

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Roundup: Google joins the bully tactics

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Following Facebook’s particular tantrum over the online news bill, and their announcement that they will remove Canadian news links from their site, and end some of their media fellowship programmes, Google has stated that they will do the same, and lo, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s absolutely a bully tactic, but so far the government is holding firm. It has been pointed out that when these web giants tried this in Australia, they lasted four days before they returned to the table, so we’ll see how long this lasts.

This having been established, a couple of things: Despite the media narrative, the bill is not a “link tax.” Links are nowhere in the spirit or the text of the bill. These companies were not supposed to be paying for hosting links on their sites, but rather, this was supposed to be an exercise in trying to rebalance the marketplace. Facebook and Google have so distorted the advertising market and destroyed it for media companies that this was supposed to be a way of essentially trying to compensate the public good of journalism for how they distorted the ad market. What the law is supposed to do, once it’s in force, is create transparent conditions for those negotiations to take place, with the oversight of the CRTC as an arm’s-length regulator. Again, this is not paying for links. There is no prescribed tariff rate for these links, but it was about addressing a market failure in a way that is as arm’s-length from government as possible. But web giants don’t like transparency (the deals they signed with media companies previously were all secret), and they don’t like to be held accountable. And the distance from government is also why the government didn’t just tax them and redistribute those revenues—never mind that web giants are expert at evading taxes, and the howls of government funding journalism from those revenues would be worse than the existing funds that the government already provides print journalism (which, again, they tried to keep as arm’s-length as possible through advisory boards making the qualification determinations).

I’m less inclined to be angry at the government, because they were largely being responsive to what the news industry was asking of them, even though that is tainted by the self-interest of certain zombie media giants. We should, however, absolutely be angry that these web giants are throwing their weight around and bullying sovereign governments like this, and it makes the case even more that these companies have become too big and need to be broken up. The fact that they are beating up on Canada won’t endear them to other jurisdictions, like the EU, but that’s in part why they’re doing it—they don’t want other countries to do what Canada is attempting here. But this may very well be a case that they are overplaying their hands, and those other countries or jurisdictions they are trying to scare off won’t be deterred.

Meanwhile, the opposition parties are having another normal one about this. Cripes.

Ukraine Dispatch:

No news from the front-lines of the counter-offensive, but emergency workers in the four districts surrounding the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant are conducting drills in preparation for the event of a nuclear incident or leak involving the plant, as they are convinced Russia will stage. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Greta Thunberg to discuss the ecological impacts of war, including of the burst dam. Zelenskyy also met with former US vice president Mike Pence, for that matter. Human Rights Watch says that they have evidence that Ukraine has also been using illegal landmines as part of their operations.

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