Can Ukrainians Count On "Conservatives"?

In the United States, the Republicans can't be trusted, but neither can Joe Biden. In Canada, it'll depend on genuine conservatives holding the line in Poilievre's party.

I’m supposed to be on some sort of holiday, which is why I didn’t file to the National Post or the Ottawa Citizen this past week. It’s also my excuse for letting more than a week pass between newsletters.

My other excuse is a side project that’s taking up some time. It involves CSIS, and it might not even come to fruition. Hell of a time for a break from the dailies, which isn’t really a break at all, but there’s another thing that’s impossible to ignore, which I’m on about here.

Way down below - no paywall today, but by all means do take up a paying subscription - I’m going to let Shuvaloy Majumdar loose. He’s just been elected Conservative MP in Stephen Harper’s old Calgary riding.

For any Conservatives reading this who are going squishy about Ukraine, you may well be upset with what I have to say here. But you should pay close attention to what Shuv Majumdar says.

Shuv’s an old pal from the Afghanistan days. We do not see eye to eye on everything, but we’ve kept in touch. Our paths cross occasionally. We’re both officially sanctioned by Moscow I’m proud to say, so he couldn’t be all that bad even if I didn’t know him, right? But I do, and I have my own reasons to trust Shuv’s judgment.

Shuv’s a bona fide foreign-policy brainiac and there are very few of his calibre in Canada. He’s well known for both his cross-partisan civility and for his willingness to crush the bones of Liberal idiots when it’s called for. Shuv and Pierre Poilievre are old pals from university days, and while Shuv’s either celebrated or damned for being a new-breed Conservative, in fact he considers himself straight out of the old Churchillian tradition.

If you’re unfamiliar with him, the characters over at Press Progress have composed a delightful and vaguely-accurate smear job casting Shuv as a diabolical “International Neocon Operative.” I hadn’t seen it until yesterday. Reading it makes me even more confident that the influence he’ll bring to a Poilievre government will be refreshing, healthy and intelligent. I cross my fingers.

Poking Poilievre In the Eye With A Stick

Over the past couple of weeks Poilievre and his caucus have been bloodied, mostly unfairly, for creating the appearance of not giving a damn about Ukraine. And it has been mostly unfair. I’ll be getting to that.

Even if it was all utterly and wholly unfair, Conservative Party insiders tell me as many as a fifth of would-be Poilievre voters are inclined to what you might call the Conservatives’ Tucker Carlson faction.

Carlson is that Trump enthusiast fired by Fox News for making false claims about election fraud that resulted in a defamation suit by Dominion Voting Systems that cost Fox $787.5 million. He’s more than slightly conspirazoid in matters related to Ukraine. He’s coming to Alberta next month to meet with Premier Danielle Smith and sit on a panel with National Post founder Conrad Black and columnist Rex Murphy.

The Liberals know this and they smell blood.

Whether the Conservatives would want them around or not, the Trumpish Ukraine-averse voters in Poilievre’s base are not “conservatives” in any meaningful sense of the term. I’ve been adequately subjected to their polemics to know that what we’re dealing with is as grotesque as the post-truth stupidities of the “progressives” who cast themselves as anti-imperialists while wholly ignoring Vladimir Putin’s blood-soaked determination to reconstitute the Soviet empire.

It was always going to be a hard slog, persuading the political class in the NATO capitals to find its spine for Ukraine and keep it stiff when the going got tough. It’s just a plain fact that lately, a great deal of the pipsqueaking comes from lumpen “conservatives” whose wilful ignorance about the stakes involved cannot be ignored any longer.

So if you’re a Conservative and you think you’re being clever by opposing Canadian support for Ukraine’s sovereignty (which Conservatives forged as hard-metal Canadian policy a decade ago) just because Trudeau’s Liberals have presented themselves as the champion of Ukraine’s cause in Canada, suit yourself. Shout about Chrystia Freeland all you like. You’re a millstone around Pierre Poilievre’s neck.

The Awful State Of Things, Generally

The long-fermenting cultural dyspepsia in the NATO countries seems to be reaching some sort of apogee, as anyone paying any attention to the All Out For Palestine hysteria will be aware.

In a later newsletter I’ll lay out the case for the proposition that these hysterics mark the point in the 20-year-long march of the “progressive” agenda when it has finally flamed out in exhaustion and dementia. In the meantime, many of my colleagues in the journalism trade continue to misrepresent the ceaseless brownshirt jamborees that were erupting even before the blood of October 7 had dried on the ground as “pro-Palestine” events. This is not helping.

They’re almost entirely excuses for unhinged outpourings of rage about Israel’s mere existence as a Jewish state and occasions for obscenely antisemitic antic-making, which I’ve noticed out loud more than once. It’s all fun and games and firebombs and sloganeering and nighttime gunshots fired at synagogues until it takes CSIS, the RCMP, the federal Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, the Ontario Provincial Police and the Ottawa Police Service to break up a terror plot targeting Jews in Ottawa.

You can’t even take your kid to see Santa without “Intifada!” screamers with megaphones going crazy at the mall. This was happening over the weekend in Metro Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa. Maybe I’ve missed it, but has any “mainstream” media properly covered this latest twist in obnoxious “anti-Zionist” bullying?

Call it what you like, this thing burst from its larval stage ages ago, and it has now reached terminal velocity. It’s flaming out before our very eyes. It isn’t pining for the fjords. It’s not just resting. It’s over. We’ve entered the time of zombies.

Of course, Prime Minister Trudeau demands an end to its excesses as if he’s just the spokesman for some neighbourhood interfaith study group. The thing is, when not speaking out of both sides of its mouth on the horrors in Gaza, the Trudeau government trots out Foreign Minister Melanie Joly to talk out of her hat. The latest: Feasibility of two-state solution has increased since Israel-Hamas war started - Joly.

This is backwards and upside down at the same time. The consensus of informed opinion remains that some sort of two-state arrangement must figure into any peace deal in the long run, but after October 7, that 75-year-old ideal is now more distant and practically unimaginable than ever.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war has almost totally eclipsed the urgent necessity of arming Ukrainians. The Americans all of a sudden can’t quite sort out how to deal with it.

Israel’s most powerful enemies, it should go without saying, are Ukraine’s enemies. Even Putin’s guarantors in Beijing (there are only about 2,500 people remaining in China’s ancient Jewish community) are now inciting antisemitism in their captive Chinese audiences, and encouraging their own belligerent lunacies about Israel.

On the subject of this edition of The ReaI Story, I’ve got no dog in the hunt, but if you’re a Conservative, you do. If you’re leaning away from full bore solidarity with Ukraine, you might want to check your damn head.

Hold on a moment.

Because this edition of the Real Story may be unpleasant for many of my subscribers, I want to show you a photograph. I’m not a great photographer but do look closely. There’s a story to it I find strangely relevant to the current moment.

The China Cloud is a 43’ three-masted junk with the dramatically swept lines and distinctively stepped masts of those grand vessels. From a distance its hull is reminiscent of an old-style St. Pierre dory (I had one of those once upon a time). Look closer and right away you see it’s something else altogether.

The China Cloud is a bit of a legend on the west coast. She seems to just appear and reappear now and then, out of nowhere. You see a distinctive lateen-rigged vessel on the horizon and you know, yes, well I’ll be damned, it’s her. I’d seen her only once since the first time I encountered her when I was a young fella in the early 1980s, and then the other day, holy smokes, there’s the China Cloud.

I see she’s been reconfigured with some sort of a glass-enclosed cabintop affair that sadly detracts from her graceful symmetry, but at least whoever the current owners are they’re keeping her fit and afloat.

The China Cloud was the last boat built by the great Allen Farrell. He built more than 40 vessels on the coast, and he was 70 years old when he launched the China Cloud from Scottie Bay on Lasqueti Island. He’d built her there on the beach with hardly any power tools, in 1981. He’d made liberal use of driftwood for some of her wilder curves and her frames were steam-bent cedar he’d pulled to their proper curvature with his bare feet.

She had no engine, but was powered when not under sail by a single 18’ sculling oar, known in Hong Kong as a yuloh. Allen had seen junks in China when he was a coal stoker on a trading ship. Always wanted to build a junk, so he did, and he sailed her countless sea miles before clocking in for shifts at the great shipyard in the sky, 21 years ago.

Allen’s first serious sailing vessel was a 36’ schooner he and his amazing wife Sharie built in 1949. They sailed Wind Song to Hawaii, to Fiji and up and down the coast to Mexico and back, more than once, all without an engine or any electronic navigation, not even radar.

Their son Barrie’s first boat was Sea Song, a deep-draught 24-foot cod boat he built on a beach up at Nelson Island when he was 19. No power tools. Built it by hand. Barrie would go on to revolutionize gillnet fishing on the coast, building or designing roughly 300 boats.

In this country we don’t build boats like this anymore. We don’t build people like this anymore. I find this directly relevant to Canada’s current predicament somehow.

And now back to our main feature.

Ces foutus Américains fous. With caveats.

Against the backdrop of the current dyspepsia, the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis along with its western friends, collaborators and Putinversteher are undermining what was until recently a solid, grassroots liberal-democratic consensus: We all have to back Ukrainians without equivocation in their resistance to Russia’s war of conquest; Ukraine must win this war.

In Canada, the “right-wing” aversion to aiding Ukraine in its war of resistance owes nothing to the direct influences of dainty European surrender monkeys and practically nothing at all to European neo-gauleiters like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. It’s a phenomenon that comes from Americaland.

I should first be clear about a couple of things here.

I do not like saying mean things about Americans or the United States. I’m a Canadian and my country has been a foreign-policy bouncy castle and a military-budget romper room for decades. All this time that we’ve been enjoying ourselves in the cultivation of elaborate snark about the USA as a defining national character trait, the Americans have been guarding us in our sleep.

But the reality of it is that lately we’ve been dealing with ces foutus Américains fous, those crazy f*cking Americans. By that, I’m referring to American political tendencies and cultural obsessions of the “left” and the “right.”

Another caveat: No matter how many times you hear that Conservatives are “taking pages out of the Trump playbook,” which is a stupid cliché that should have been retired the moment it was first uttered, it’s mainly the they/them Trudeau Liberals who have imported American cultural pathologies into this country. Let’s just stop for a moment and “take a knee,” shall we?

Yet another caveat: When it comes to Ukraine I’ve never trusted Joe Biden. To be fair, I suppose he should be trusted to do what he thinks is in his country’s interest, even when it’s not in Ukraine’s interest. Like dribbling and doling out military hardware in such a way as to make the Russians pay for their barbarism amortized over however many years it might take, rather than making Moscow pay dearly and up front and in full by giving the Ukrainians what they need when they need it to win this damn war, fast.

I wrote this a month after Putin sent in the troops last year: Why Joe Biden's White House Can't Be Trusted To Defend Ukraine. In the National Post: Don't trust the Russians — or the Americans, either. I believe I can say without boasting that I’ve been vindicated.

A last caveat: There is no particular shame in having become so distraught with the state of President Biden’s “leadership” on the Ukraine front, or with the preening duplicities of German chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president Emmanuel Macron, to find oneself inclined to wish the Ukrainians would just throw in the towel.

But Ukrainians do not want to hand their country or any part of it over to Russia. To do so would be a surrender of the worst possible kind for Canada, as Shuv Majumdar will explain below.

Trust what Biden says or trust the Republicans? Trust Neither.

It would also be a surrender based largely on American bullsh*t. It’s just not true that the United States is carrying the Ukraine burden for lazy-ass Europeans. It’s a thing you’ve probably heard a lot lately, now that Biden and the Republican Congress have reached an impasse on a deal that would extend American funding for the war effort.

The European Union has its own share of gridlock politics to contend with, but the EU has well outpaced the U.S. in aid commitments to Ukraine.

Total EU pledges are twice as hefty as the commitments Biden wants from Congress. There’s last summer’s €50 billion “Ukraine Facility” package, all on its own, and that’s not counting increased support from several European states, not even counting the United Kingdom. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy has done your homework for you, here.

It’s also not true that the $68 billion Congress has so far approved in military hardware for Ukraine is simply money lost to the American economy. Almost all of that money, 90 percent of it by some estimates, is spent in the United States, building armaments to replace what Kyiv has been picking up from American stockpiles. Throw in other American financial support in humanitarian aid and so on and it all still amounts to one third of one percent of the American gross domestic product.

Canada’s contribution is roughly equivalent to that of the United States, GDP-wise, and both countries’ contributions are proportionately smaller than aid from 15 European countries. Estonians and Bulgarian are more generous than Yanks or Canucks. So are the Lithuanians, Latvians, Norwegians and Finns.

You could say that the Trumpist hardliners in Congress are holding Ukraine hostage to get what they want on border security. You could also say that Biden is holding border security hostage, and for no appreciable reason, except maybe he’s dicking around with Kyiv, as usual. Just a guess.

Over at Claire Berlinski’s excellent Cosmopolitan Globalist, Robert Zubrin makes a sensible suggestion and offers an important observation: “Senate Republicans have offered Democrats a deal. They will approve US$60 billion to pay for arms for Ukraine in exchange for funds and enforcement reforms to strengthen US border security. . . This being the case, that price needs to be paid. The alternative is total catastrophe.”

Similarly, at The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last puts it this way: “Holding Ukraine aid hostage for immigration reform is a strategic mistake by Republicans. Biden should exploit it by giving them what they want.”

America border security is an insanely out-of-control mess. More than two million migrants were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border this past year. The numbers have spiked this month, with U.S. Border Patrol processing roughly 10,000 apprehensions every 24 hours.

It is no vice to demand that the White House get its act together on this file. The economist Noah Smith points out here that recent national polling shows Republicans ahead by 18 points on the question of which party better handles immigration, with 45 percent of voters picking the GOP over the 27 percent that back Biden.

Meanwhile, back in Canada. . .

Of course it’s not fair. Politics isn’t fair. But it is what it is.

Trudeau’s Liberals, who got their start eight years ago by abdicating any genuine commitment to liberalism without telling voters that’s what they were going to do, have put on a good show of solidarity with Ukraine. This is thanks almost entirely to Freeland’s camp in cabinet and caucus.

But Freeland herself isn’t above playing parochial games and using Ukraine as a shuttlecock. This is not to say I’m especially impressed with Poilievre’s willingness to play along. But like I say, it is what it is.

Poilievre didn’t help matters last week when he referred to Ukraine as a "far away foreign land," which Freeland deftly noticed was the phrase history’s most famous appeaser Neville Chamberlain used in his notorious accommodation of Adolf Hitler at Munich, in 1938. What Chamberlain said: "How incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."

That’s a pretty nasty insinuation you made there, Ms. Freeland.

The rumpus was over five nay votes among a whole bunch that Poilievre’s Conservatives had cast in what are known as “confidence” votes in debates about the federal budget estimates. If you don’t have confidence in the estimates, you vote against them. It’s the way Parliament works.

Those votes came thick and fast following Conservative objections to the updating of the Canada-Ukraine free trade deal in Bill C-57. It was all over Article 13.10 of the agreement, which mentions carbon pricing, which Conservatives hotly oppose, which Ukraine adopted anyway more than a decade ago, all of which Poilievre’s people took to mean the Liberals were rubbing their noses in it.

This strikes me as boring. But to be fair again, the Liberals have quite the gall casting themselves as Ukraine’s heroes and the Conservatives as Orbanesque villains.

It was less than two years after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 that Trudeau’s first pick for foreign minister, Stephane Dion, was sending envoys to Moscow to chat up the Kremlin about “normalizing” relations.

When Ukraine’s friends in Europe were pleading for help to break their reliance on Russian energy after Moscow’s full-bore invasion in February 2022, the Trudeau government waived sanctions on six of Gazprom’s pipeline turbines - against Ukraine’s pleadings - just because Germany’s flighty Olaf Scholz wasn’t happy about having to face the fact that, well, there was a war on.

On it goes like this.

As promised, here’s Shuvaloy Majumder, edited and condensed for brevity and clarity, with links for background. Conservatives should listen up.

Real Conservatives Support Ukraine

It was the Conservative Party that launched and invested in Operation Unifier, making sure that command, control, and communications for the Ukrainian Armed Forces could get up to NATO-grade over time. It was Conservatives who imposed hard sanctions on Russia after Putin invaded Eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014.

I'm proud that Prime Minister Harper challenged Vladimir Putin at the G-8, making it the G-7, restoring the principles of an international economic partnership centered around market democracies and what they're willing to accommodate.

I am a Member of Parliament for Calgary, which is the core of our energy life. And the things that these Liberals put into their free trade agreement update were unprecedented. We never had Environmental, Social and Governance language built in, which is a moving target around how energy decisions can be made. We never had detailed discussions around how taxes would be aspirationally imposed in any jurisdiction, in any trade agreement.

What we’re saying to the Liberals is:

Listen, you're playing garbage games at the expense of Ukrainians, while at the same time, over these last eight years, you've given Vladimir Putin a gas turbine so Putin can continue his energy dominance of Russia, of Europe.

You've denied our allies and partners the gas and oil they need and even the energy technologies required to offset their dependence on Putin. You're not bringing ambition to the kind of defense production that the Ukrainians have asked for.

Just the other day, the Ukrainian Ambassador said ‘Yes, look, we know we have cross party support for Ukraine.’ This is the Ukrainian government talking. ‘We know we have cross party support for Ukraine. Of course we want more energy cooperation. Of course we want defense production.’

And that's the argument we're making now, saying to the Liberals who have a horrible record on actually succeeding at confronting Vladimir Putin, to say, ‘this is how we want to help Ukraine bring victory, not taxes.’

This government's instincts, right from the very beginning: Stephane Dion in his first days as foreign affairs minister dispatched senior officials to Moscow, the assistant deputy ministers, to normalize relations after Russia began their invasion on Ukraine in 2014.

I'm saying, our instincts are exactly the same as they were then. Our principles are about peace through strength, and we're trying to bring actual ambition to a partnership with Ukraine that can deliver victory sooner rather than later, because we know the longer this goes on, the harder it gets.

Even the Liberals voted against supplementary estimates during the Harper government that included voting against things like Operation Unifier, so this is a cute game they've been playing with their talking points. And I'm sure that other politicians and parties in the past have done the same. I'm not saying any one party is above this gamesmanship.

What I find troubling is that you have an actual consensus in Canada on Ukraine, and you have the governing party trying to wedge the opposition party against it because they're so desperate to pretend that somehow an American stream of politics is finding its way into Canada. In fact, Canadian Conservatives are heirs of the British Conservative tradition, not the American Republican one.

I met many people in my own campaign, not just in the nomination race but also in the byelection in Calgary, who surveyed the institutions they were supposed to trust - our Parliament, our media, our academic life, our bureaucratic life, our health institutions. And what we have seen happen over these last eight years is a wrecking ball run through the institutions that should be arbiters of public trust.

And with broken trust comes economic anxiety, and the desire to find information that seems truthful. When I encountered folks they'd tell me at the doors: “We like what you say about ‘woke.’ We like what you say about energy. We like what you say about Calgary and Alberta and our conservative cause. But you're not one of those ‘Stand with Ukraine’ people, are you?”

And I tell them, “Well, listen, I'm not going to lie to you. Yes, I do believe in Ukraine and I believe that they had borders.”

I think Tucker Carlson is an interesting guy. I've been watching him since the 90s. He's built a huge constituency since then. But he started out as a neoconservative, promoting wars that I ended up participating in, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wars that were mismanaged and resulted in huge costs in both countries, particularly in Afghanistan, a devastating failure.

So I understand why people are skeptical of foreign adventurism. I share that. But I would tell them, the question of Ukraine does not start with the Orange Revolution of 2004 as some people say. It actually starts with something called the Budapest Memorandum of 1994.

At the end of the Cold War, Ukraine had immense power. It had the third largest nuclear stockpile in the world. It could have held onto that and leveraged it for massive influence. But instead, it traded it for sovereign borders, borders guaranteed by the United States, by the United Kingdom, and by Russia.

Why did they do that? They did that because they wanted to live in peace as their own sovereign country with the borders that were guaranteed by major powers. That's the best deal they could have made at the time.

So, one:

Our deals matter, Just Google Budapest Memorandum if you don't want to take my word for it. There's lots of literature out there from all kinds that will verify that what I'm telling you is not untrue.

Two:

When you see President Xi Jinping and President Putin sitting in Beijing at the beginning of the Olympics, plotting out their unlimited ambition, they put a declaration out about our Canadian Arctic - our sovereign borders, our backyard. And we know that they're going to make good on their promises because they've got a whole operational plan they're deploying around the world right now.

Third:

Say what you will about the war. Our country has $3 trillion of natural resource wealth in food and fuel that would secure the world, and secure Canadians. And so, from a very narrow national interest, to protect our Arctic border, to empower our energy production, to be a better ally, to help our allies secure their borders, for all these reasons, I stand with Ukraine.