The Just Transition: Alberta Bound & Gagged

Imagine being told that, despite your happiness in your current home, you need to move into a new type of house, full of untried, unsustainable technology. That’s the Just Transition. Or the Justin Transfer. Or Searching For Gas Guffman.

Whatever you call it, the federal government’s plan to hollow out Alberta’s energy industry by paying for roughnecks to transition to social-media influencers is a hand grenade lobbed into the run-up to two key elections.

The Just Transition feeds perfectly into the rationale for Alberta premier Danielle Smith’s sovereignty legislation, the suspicion that, unless Trudeau is restrained, he will turn the province’s economy— energy production represents 27.3 per cent of Alberta’s economy— into a novelty shop at the Calgary Stampede midway.

It is also presents Smith with a legitimate wedge issue to hammer NDP leader— and former premier— Rachel Notley as they head to a spring showdown. With her federal NDP cousins in connubial bliss in Ottawa with Trudeau, Notley must now abandon a habit of limp defence of fossil fuels to be seen as resisting the feds at the gate. Or risk being viewed as weak on the home front as May’s provincial election arrives.

Smith, too, might be vulnerable if her resistance to Justin’s easy federal money for citizens be seen as principled to a fault. Sure, the money started its life in the Oil Patch before being re-routed by the federal equalization purse. But to wobbly undecideds in Calgary and Edmonton saying no to helping a transition from fossil fuels to “TBA technologies” could be interpreted as churlish.

For Trudeau, who this past week snubbed Scott Moe, the premier of another fossil-fuel province, the Just Transfer represents a no-lose gamble for a politician who needs every advantage he can wrangle. He’s going to go 0-fer Alberta/ Saskatchewan/ eastern BC when he gets around to dropping the writ, likely this fall.

So, he sees no downside to using Alberta as a whipping post for his devotedly Woke base in the Central Canada. Making Alberta the evil anchor that’s holding back the sailing of the good ship Green Economy will find willing ears in the urban progressive sinks of the 613, 416 and 613. (At worst he loses the election, falls into the loving embrace of the WEF crowd and he surfs off to Tofino.)

Yes, the Just Transition was a stink bomb to drop— especially when delivered by three federal ministers with zero connection to the West. In most respects you couldn’t have made it more disrespectful to the industry that has kept the lights on in Canada’s economy this century.

So you can understand that Notley is less-than-impressed with the unwanted plan that scuppers her soft-power agenda in Alberta. This is her last, best chance to regain the premier’s seat. If she can’t ride these favourable winds—polling shows her leading Smith by a comfortable majority— she’ll be considered like Ontario’s Andrea Howarth, an NDP politician past her best-before date.

You could tell just how vexing the dilemma was by the fact that Notley took 15 days to respond to Trudeau’s provocation. She had to find the right line— in the right time— to make room for herself between the PM and the premier. Room the Alberta voters— particularly the women’s vote in Calgary— are comfortable voting for.

While saying unconditionally that Ottawa must scrap the Just Transfer and the 42 per cent cut in emissions from 2019 levels by 2030, Notley tried to blame Smith’s Sovereignty Act for stirring up the population. “We are in what I would describe as a crisis right now, in that we have a federal government about to move forward on legislation that has wide-ranging consequences, particularly to the people of Alberta,” Notley said.

“And we are in that crisis position because of the incompetence and chaos and conflict that is constantly being generated by the UCP government… The federal government by no means gets away with no blame, but neither does the provincial government.”

Notley added that making the plan public just three months before the provincial election ramps up is unacceptable. On that she and Smith are in agreement. Where the PM has never met a tax he didn’t like to increase, Albertans would like to discuss just how and why they are going to be tapped. For instance, their oil industry— struggling to compete with its American neighbours— would like to see incentives used to increase carbon sequestration, among other things. Prefacing the industry’s transition from fossil fuels to unsustainable wind and solar is not the way to respond to those pressing issues.

Reg Manhas, a Canadian now working in Texas, told The National Post that Trudeau’s government-led plans are leaving Canada far behind. “Yes, there are corporate imperatives to reduce carbon, to get to net zero, globally, but where the action is and the deals are being struck is the U.S.”

He sees Smith’s controversial sovereignty act as a cry for equality within Canada, something he doesn’t face now he’s in Texas. “The sovereignty issue in Alberta has always been bubbling under the surface, and has to do with perceptions of fairness within Confederation… Texas prides itself on individualism, on being an independent and strong state within the country, but there isn’t the same sense of unfairness…”

Both Notley and Smith agree that, once again, Ottawa is being capricious with Alberta. Its might end up be there only thing they agree upon for a long while.

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

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BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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Cutting Remarks: The Scourge of Hate Speech Censors

Bruce Dowbiggin / 2 days ago

Could AI Make Yesterday Into Today For Culture, Sports & Politics?

Bruce Dowbiggin / 1 week ago

Door Mats To Mats’ Darlings: Has Toronto Became The NHL’s Defining Brand?

Bruce Dowbiggin

Cutting Remarks: The Scourge of Hate Speech Censors

Published on December 4, 2023

Bruce Dowbiggin

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group… in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” Frédéric Bastiat

We take you now to a day in the not-too-distant future. Citizens are lined up at the registry office to renew their license to speak. Since governments weaponized speech and then criminalized words in the mid 2020s, citizens must register their speech the same way they register guns or cars.

For their convenience the government agencies provide a list of words or insinuations that qualify as criminal speech. Here’s a CBC guide to correct speech on climate, giving you the appropriate words to describe weather-as-the-Apocalypse. Don’t forget, every climate faux pas is a micro aggression!

Should you have made it through the previous 12 months without tripping the language laser beam you’ll be permitted to again speak publicly— albeit very carefully. Pretty soon everyone will speak like Uterus Man, also known as cisgendered NDP MLA Brooks Arcand-Paul, who talks as though his mouth was a Woke minefield.

Media outlets, too, will be required to renew their speech licenses or lose the annual slush-fund monies that come with government Good Speak. Here, Trudeau wind therapist Patty Hajdu demonstrates Good Speak, decrying the cyber-violence of Adolph Hitler… er, Pierre Poilievre… over a “reckless use of the pejorative ‘crazy’” to describe her cabinet colleague Stephane Guilbeault. PP’s “slander” was, she assured us, yet another page out of the infamous Donald Trump American playbook that will rule Canada if Patty & Friends lose the next election.

To keep your talk license you’ll need to speak more like Liberal MP Ken Hardie when he says damn the facts, let’s throw a little dirt over a multiple murder on the bad side of Winnipeg: “Might it be the anti-social ‘burn everything down’ far-right attitude we’re seeing creeping in from the U.S.? And the ‘creep’ on the Canadian side? Pierre Poilievre?” (The tone-deaf Liberal has since sorta’ backtracked after being buried on social media.)

If this all sounds absurd, you haven’t been paying attention. In Canada the government of Justin Trudeau is well on its way to creating an apparatus for regulating both public and private speech. The past week it announced that it was extending its grant money though 2029 to failing media outlets, up to about $30,000 per employee. Not to be outdone, Heritage Canada is putting $40,000 per journalist as a target to promote “diversity”. No wonder so many CDN media legends rushed to defend a hapless CP reporter who was verbally upbraided by Poillievre.

Hey, money is money. Who in the collapsed media empires is not going to like that, huh? Sure you’ll have to sing for your supper, but you’ll still have the cottage in the Muskokas or Kawartha Lakes to soothe any qualms about selling out your journalistic birthright.

Here’s former-progressive author and blogger Michael Shellenberger: “Liberal Left governments have sought to use every new crisis as an opportunity to scapegoat their political opponents and, when that stops working, demand censorship, since the legitimacy and continued existence of the liberal Left hegemony in the West comes from control over information.”

Speaking of U.S. politics, where Joe Biden is polling below herpes, his administration is setting up a disinformation bureau to help the average voter divine something as “information” (Biden policy) or “disinformation” (Trump policy). Stubbornly hanging on to un-truths about The Biden Family’s shakedown of foreign governments could land you in a jail next to the Jan. 6 traitors.

To goose public fear, Team Biden has a new series of Adolph Hitler… er, Donald Trump… revenge memes. From Bill Maher (“I’m afraid of him on a personal level” ) to former Obama spokes-bugle Jen Psaki, the ruling class is pumping the accelerator: “There is an old quote that goes, ‘For my friend everything. For my enemies the law.’ That is how Trump has operated and that is how he will continue to operate if ever given the levers of government again.” Irony alert.

Need More? Here . Here And here is a CDN fainting goat. (Clarification: DEMs jailed for political crimes or charged for same during Trump presidency: 0. Non-DEMs jailed for political crimes or accused of same during Biden presidency: more than 600, perhaps as many as a thousand.)

Rioting in Dublin

In Ireland, the recent riots over an immigrant stabbing five adults and children have inspired the EU puppets of Leo Valadkar’s government to suggest similar limits on speech must be codified after UFC star Connor MacGregor suggested that perhaps immigration was behind the anger of protesters. Here’s Taioseach fart catcher Pauline O’Connell: “If your views on other people’s identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure, and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.”

In Britain, the parsing of language has produced “UK police : We will no longer accept the statement ‘re-housing of illegal immigrants” as a hate crime.” Across the European Union, the “restrict those freedoms for the common good” drumbeat is the same, as quaking bureaucrats and entitled statists seek to silence their critics using hate-language laws that would make even Orwell blush. Result: In Germany, the right-wing AFD party is rising in the polls. In France, Marine Le Pen is more popular than Emmanuel Macron. The recent election of right-wing governments in Italy, the Netherlands and Brexit in Britain has only hastened their panic to punish speech.

Says economist and blogger Tyler Cowen “if your main theory here is ‘racism,’ your contribution to the discourse probably is negative.”

Next speech regulation is silence. Or non-speech. Under the new rules, silence will be no defence when the mob orders you to “wear the ribbon”. UC Berkeley Law Professor Savala Trepczynski gave away the game saying that “White silence is incredibly powerful … It’s not neutral. It acts like a weapon.” Writes legal specialist Jonathan Turley, “In a world where silence is violence and civility is complicity, there is little room for true free speech.”

In this vein nearly 2,000 people signed a petition to fire Marymount Manhattan theatre arts associate professor Patricia Simon after she appeared to fall asleep briefly during an anti-racist Zoom meeting. Complained one colleague, Simon was “ignoring … racist and sizeist actions and words of the vocal coaches under her jurisdiction.”

Just sayin’. Better get your license now. Before it’s too….. (click).

Bruce Dowbiggin

Could AI Make Yesterday Into Today For Culture, Sports & Politics?

Published on December 3, 2023

Bruce Dowbiggin

On a recent trip to the Fredericton Playhouse to see PEI’s splendid The East Pointers we couldn’t help but notice amongst the coming attractions an appearance by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. As far as we know, Miller disappeared over the British Channel in 1944 on his way to play a concert for the troops post D-Day.

Since then a succession of people have carried his musical heritage under the Miller name. Most of them have joined Miller in the great bandstand in the sky. It is safe to say that the number of people who heard anything by Miller himself live are virtually nil. Still, someone is still buying tickets to hear A String of Pearls, Pennsylvania 6-500, Chattanooga Choo-Choo and In The Mood.

Perhaps it was serendipity but seeing that Miller was still a thing came shortly after the arrival of a final Beatles song “Now and Then”. It’s not as long ago as the final Glenn Miller original cut, but “Now and Then” is the first original Beatles music since the 1970s. Which is when this lacklustre John Lennon composition was born from a demo cut by Lennon.

Its provenance has been talked about by Beatles obsessives ever since. Frankly they’d be excited to hear Lennon/ McCartney read the Liverpool phone book. (Which won’t be any less underwhelming than this song.) Now And Then stayed out of the public realm, probably because George Harrison (d. 2001) hated it, and the recording was scratchy at best.

But thanks to the officious Paul McCartney cleaning it up in the studio and AI producing a catchy video to accompany the song “Now and Then” is on the Billboard chart with a bullet. Where it will probably stay for a while. No doubt this artful dodge will put the idea of reviving other dead musical icons into the heads of their colleagues and supporters.

The AI variations already extend past music. “@ilumine_ai This has been my first test of an experiment I’m doing, which is why it might feel a bit rough. It might not seem like it, but this video shows a single, uncut take at normal speed, where I move through a 3D stage that I am generating at will and in real time.”

Can some clever soul use AI to create a new Humphrey Bogart movie using previous material? What about reviving Katherine Hepburn from her many films? Could Glenn Miller suddenly emerge from the mists to lead his band in Fredericton? We already know about The Beatles.

There ramifications, says cartoonist/commentator Scott Adams.. “If you let ChatGPT answer without constraints, it gives you the “approved narrative,” also known as bullshit. In other words, you can use AI to give you any answer you want on political questions by manipulating the allowed “experts.”

No wonder the Screen Actors Guild went on strike this year to protect the properties of stars dead and alive. What security will they have if AI makes them redundant? AI is, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

To say nothing of the AI implications for sports. Can AI replicate the greatest of the past? Already there’s a slightly cheesy commercial running in which present-day Wayne Gretzky counsels 18-year-old Wayne Gretzky on the future. But could AI create a better NHL mixing Gretz, Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr and Bobby Hull with the best of today? A league with no injuries, no travel fatigue, no bad coaching? Ditto for the other leagues. An NFL with Joe Montana, an NBA with Michael Jordan, an MLB with Barry Bonds?

In Canadian politics AI could revive Pierre Elliot Trudeau to assist his dimwitted son (“Interest rates are at historic lows,” PMJT, 2020). Bill Davis could bring back the days of Blue Ontario. Ralph Klein could recreate the Alberta Advantage. If someone younger and more charismatic pops up you can use them in the present. With an AI figure waiting in the wings for when the real politicians eventually screw up.

In the US-AI, the leading candidates for U.S. president in 2024 are creakingly old. Democrats are in a lather over Joe Biden’s decrepit state as he hit 81 this week (he’d be 87 when a possible second term ended). Polls show Americans are not fooled by the grinning Amphetamine Joe staggering up the stairs of Air Force One.

Republicans are alternatively exhilarated and exhausted by the prospect of loopy 78-year-old Donald Trump carrying their banner next November. With Trump it’s less age than instability. Were he remotely stable he’d be leading Biden by 15 points in the polls.

In the Senate and House of Representatives octogenarian and nonagenarian members are literally dying at their desks for want of term limits. Across the political spectrum voters and media are asking, “Is this the best we can do?” Some recall the movie Dave where Kevin Kline plays a doppelgänger for a comatose U.S. president. Maybe that might work?

Or what if AI could revive JFK or Ronald Reagan in their primes? Or John McCain and Ruth Bader Ginsberg? “Now and Then” would be an appropriate slogan for re-inserting these tried & true political figures into the present, using their former selves to re-craft today’s arguments. (We’ve seen how it might work since most believe that Biden is simply the conduit for a third Obama term.)

Anything has to be better than two old guys who could’ve heard “I’ve Got A Gal In Kalamazoo” when it was originally released by Glenn Miller in 1942.