Notes on the coming disturbances.
Is the damage irreparable? Possibly. A "housing crisis" that will last a lifetime, institutionalized thoughtcrime & a stacked senate. But first, some good news from Hezbollahland.
A note to subscribers:
The Real Story’s pattern of a newsletter on Sundays that’s something to put up your feet with, along with a sharper-focus piece in the middle of the week has been disrupted over the past month or so because of those special projects I’ve mentioned. I seemed to be shifting to a Monday publication schedule for the main event. And now here we are, Tuesday morning, with four newsletters, more or less, in one.
I’d rather not do this. It didn’t help that I was away in the States last week. As things turned out after that special-project hiatus I’m back in the saddle at the Post. Do have a read of the column after you’re done here, or maybe before you come to part four of today’s Real Story. Post headline: What if our housing crisis can't be fixed? No easy way to return Canada's residential real estate markets to 'normal'.
The column caused bit of a stir, in a good way. My apologies for not getting back to all the readers’ responses and emails. The column follows on this Real Story edition, The Great Unraveling, In Real Time, especially this bit: Just getting back to barely-affordable “normal” housing costs would mean doubling household income or magically cutting home prices in half or something. That’s how bad it is.
I’ll be elaborating on all this below. I fear I may have understated the case that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives and Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats all appear to be whistling past a graveyard, that things really are spinning out of control and it’s far worse than our political class dares to let on.
For one thing, do we really expect to ask nearly seven percent of Canada’s population to remember that they’re here on “temporary” permits, and then tell them they’ll just have to leave when their permits expire? Do we expect them to all just go away?
I give it two years, tops, before things really start coming unglued. The Conservatives will have swept into office, expectations will have been raised, and I have no cause to believe that Pierre Poilievre will be able to put things back together again, try as he might.
Oddly, I am not overcome by dread. Maybe it’s because I’m resigned. Maybe because it’s just something that has to happen. Historically, it’s taken cataclysmic events, like the two world wars and the Great Depression, for things to eventually sort themselves out. God forbid.
Because this edition of The Real Story is not going to be what you could call “upbeat” I’ll begin with these two items.
Hassan Nasrallah has left the building.
When tyrants tremble, sick with fear, And hear their death-knell ringing, When friends rejoice both far and near, How can I keep from singing?
That’s from an old folk song from the 1860s, and that particular lyric is from a version the American author Doris Plenn remembered in the 1950s, from her granny. Given the notoriety of my disposition in these matters, readers will understand why I am drawn to this uplifiting Protestant hymn at the moment.
Over the past few days, the Israeli Defence Forces have managed to both eviscerate and decapitate Hezbollah, the Iranian regime’s immensely powerful “Party of God” proxy that occupies much of Lebanon. After having immobilized hundreds of lower-echelon operatives via their own pagers and walkie-talkies, the Israelis have knocked the stuffing out of Hezbollah’s senior chain of command. Amazing and genius.
Update: This rogues’ gallery is incomplete. Here’s a bunch more Hezbigshots who are no longer among the living.
It’s pretty ridiculous that it fell to the IDF to take out Lebanon’s trash in this way. And of course the loss of civilian life was horrible. But the thousands of Hezbollah rockets that have been fired into Israel since last October 8 had to be answered eventually, properly and efficiently. It was necessary to Israel’s territorial and human security, to put it succinctly, but it’s also true that Hezbollah’s mass murders, suicide bombings, assassinations and assorted terror plots on behalf of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have caused mayhem the world round.
In Thailand, even, and Bulgaria. And savagely in Argentina, with the slaughter of 85 innocents at the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), a Jewish community center, and most lethally and mercilessly in Syria, on behalf of the tyrant and Khomeinist satrap Bashar Assad.
Unreported: Canada’s Khaled Barakat, the reigning ideologue in the Samidoun Network and its partner front, Masar Badil, was in Beirut last Friday conferring with his colleagues when that very loud noise was heard in the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut, where Nasrallah was holding court in an underground bunker.
When he’s not jetsetting around to countries where he isn’t already barred from entry, Barakat enjoys safe haven in Canada despite evidence from the Israeli internal security agency Shin Bet that he’s a member of the politburo of the terrorist-listed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He comes and goes as he pleases, as does Charlotte Kates, Samidoun’s international coordinator, recently in Tehran to collect an award from the Khomeinist regime. Because, you know, diversity is our strength.
The Samidoun Network has been behind most of the ugliest anti-Israel and antisemitic street rallies in Canada that have erupted since last October. Owing to an especially bloodcurdling harangue at one of those rallies, Kates is expected to face charges of Public Incitement of Hatred and Willful Promotion of Hatred when she appears in court on October 8. See under You Can Get Away With It In Canada, from this Real Story edition.
Meanwhile, in Beirut, here’s Barakat celebrating the atrocities of last October 7 and explicitly urging the activist set to ramp it up: “This is the time to escalate, to stand with the resistance who are confronting a bloody, genocidal enemy that aims to wipe out the people and their leadership, yet fails to do so despite its horrific crimes and massacres.”
Also in Beirut: Laith Marouf, of course. Newsletter subscribers may remember him. He’s that Syrian correspondent for the Kremlin disinformation platform Sputnik and Tehran’s propaganda channel Press TV who Diversity and Inclusion Minister Ahmed Hussen was happy to present with a $133,000 “anti-racist action” cheque a couple of years ago. Because, as mentioned, diversity is our strength. Marouf’s federal income turned out to be several hundred thousand dollars shy of the amount he’d initially been reported to have hoovered up.
Marouf invested his tax-dollar windfalls into his own Free Palestine Television, and here he is on Sunday in Beirut, in conversation with the Activist News Network. “If we have martyrs, we will be winning.”
If you insist, Laith. I’m sure the IDF will be pleased to oblige.
The end of the Trudeau Epoch is in sight
I don’t mean to be partisan here, but I’m including this in the upbeat portion of this edition because the overwhelming majority of Canadians want to be rid of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government. For a host of good reasons. And this is almost certain to happen next year in the most dramatic way.
As things stand, the polls suggest a Conservative win with 219 seats in the House of Commons, leaving the Liberals with only 64, the Bloc with 39, the New Democrats with 18 and the Greens with two. Trudeau’s 2015 majority was driven by women and younger voters, the demographics that allowed him back with minorities in 2019 and 2021. The Liberals have now lost big time in those constituencies.
Abacus Data’s polling shows that 37 percent of women would now vote for Poilievre’s Conservatives and only 23 per cent would vote Liberal. As master pollster Darrell Bricker observes, 39 percent of voters in the 18 to 29 age bracket and 44 percent in the 30 to 44 age bracket also plan to vote Conservative.
The decades-old pattern of older voters preferring the Conservatives and younger Canadians voting Liberal or NDP has been broken, along with Canada’s multigenerational and miultipartisan consensus on immigration. Although much of the press and various federal quangos are preocccupied with attempting to make the case, this doesn’t mean younger Canadians are becoming “right-wing.”
There are reasons, and that’s what my Post column was about, which I’ll come to below. Forget analyses that rely on “left” and “right” stereotypes. Canada’s primary political divisions are now all about class, between the class that owns and the class that doesn’t, between the working poor and the managerial caste.
This has left the Liberals competing with the NDP in a scramble for whatever votes can be conjured by the incitement of resentments about “systemic” disparities disfavouring Ottawa’s heavily-astroturfed racial, ethnic and gender identity grievance oblasts. Which brings us to. . .