This is the end, beautiful friend.
From the crumbling parapets you can just make out dark shapes, moving in the rubble of global neoliberalism.
I began this past week on the front page of the National Post: Alexei Navalny's courage against Putin shames the western world; An epoch of cowardice and cynicism.
I also began the week with the results of that long hard look at the true story of the political lynching of the unforgivably Jewish B.C. cabinet minister Selina Robinson, and how the story was overlooked or avoided entirely by Canada’s overworked, understaffed and congenitally timid news media.
I ended my working week in the National Post with this: Canada is losing the fight against foreign interference. It’s three stories in one column that would elsewhere be treated as unrelated.
In fact, those three stories are each the result of the same debilitating condition of cowardice and cynicism I wrote about in the National Post on Monday, in the piece about the implications of Navalny’s murder.
One story in that column involves what happened this past week to Kaveh Shahrooz, who could have been the Conservative Party’s candidate in the Ontario riding of Richmond Hill, a major centre of Canada’s Iranian immigrant population. It wasn’t a political lynching exactly, certainly not at the scale of what happened to Selina Robinson, which was a very public execution.
What happened to Kaveh happened quickly and quietly. I’ll leave it to subscribers to decide whether or how much cowardice or cynicism was involved.
I’ll be getting into that story in a way that may not be happy-making for some of this newsletter’s subscribers who have become quite keen to see Team Trudeau displaced by a Pierre Poilievre government. I find myself aligned with those subscribers on a lot of things, but I’m not a partisan.
Just a head’s up.
“The rot is really deep. We’re losing our country.”
Kaveh is a friend, an international human rights lawyer and a prominent figure in the pro-democracy Iranian diaspora. The thing to notice for now is what Kaveh had to say in that column: “We’re losing our country and everybody is just sitting back and letting it happen. The rot is really deep. We’re losing our country.”
I can’t bring myself to disagree with that.
Another thing he said in his official statement bowing out of the race: “Disinformation about me was amplified by Iranian regime cyber accounts.” For this he has been roundly abused on the grounds that those cyber accounts weren’t from the Iranian regime. And maybe Kaveh’s critics are right about that. Judging by the howls of abuse I’m getting just for those few paragraphs about Kaveh in my column, I can understand how shouters at the fringes of the diaspora’s monarchist Pahlavist faction could be easily mistaken for Khomeinist twitterbots.
You’ll see what I mean, below.
Also cited in the column about how we’re losing the fight against foreign influence is Nicole Amiel of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, who had this question: “How can a Canadian non-profit possibly be allowed to be involved with organizing and advertising a webinar with a senior member of a listed terrorist entity?”
That bit refers to the same Samidoun gargoyles Premier Dave Eby capitulated to in a decision publicly praised by Samidoun’s lodestars in the Popular Front for the Liberal of Palestine, a notorious terrorist group of the suicide-bombing, airline-hijacking variety. Here’s Basem Naim, the senior Hamas official Samidoun’s Masar Badil umbrella group is hosting in next week’s webinar: “We have not killed any civilians.” that’s just Israeli propaganda.
Just wondering out loud here: At what point do we take all these bloodcurdling incidents involving Hamas-inspired and PFLP-approved interventions in Canada and file them in the folder containing evidences of foreign interference and foreign influence?
In the column’s lede, Ivy Li from the Canadian Friends of Hong Kong had something to say about why her courageous little organization has decided to join Canada’s Uyghurs in boycotting Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s public inquiry into foreign interference in federal elections and democratic institutions. Long story short: “There’s no way this government will do a real foreign-interference investigation.”
An aside: Our friend Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, board member of the China Strategic Risks Institute, has something to say about the official standing Hogue has granted that trio of poster boys for Beijing’s influence in Canada, Liberal Party kingmaker Michael Chan, dubiously-elected and now independent MP Han Dong and the embarrassingly pro-Beijing senator Yuen Pau Woo. Says Margaret: “They should be in the witness box themselves, not cross-examining victims of interference.”
Bingo.
My take: There’s no way this government was ever going to allow any serious inquiry into Beijing’s interference in Canadian elections or its sordid influence in the corridors of institutional power in this country. A serious inquiry would have to start with the Prime Minister’s Office, the Senate and the Liberal Party, and fan out from there.
Intermission:
In the middle of the week my laptop went nuts, I had to buy a new one and have it formatted or whatever the term is, and then get the contents of the old one evacuated to the hard drive of the new one. I lost a working day, but this gave me the opportunity to kick back for a long and lovely lunch date with a dear old pal, the amazing and award-festooned Kim Bolan.
Kim’s most recently the author of this killer five-part overseas investigative series in the Vancouver Sun, no paywall: Lethal Exports: B.C. Gangsters in the Global Drug Trade. It’s not about foreign influence in Canada. It’s about how the rot that’s set in here has spread across the ocean to devour people throughout the Pacific Rim.
I also put some time aside to sit in on a panel discussion with National Post editor-in-chief Rob Roberts and the Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley, hosted by the good people at Temple Sinai in Toronto. The Temple Sinai crew put together that alternately amazing and heartbreaking whirlwind tour of Israel earlier this month. For the panel, I came in via Zoom on the big screen, cunningly avoiding Toronto altogether. It was a great discussion.
Just this week, by way of a quick digression. . .
Apart from the ambit that encloses “foreign interference” in Canada, when Ottawa says ‘national security’, what does it really mean?
Remember when Justin Trudeau got up in the House of Commons and insinuated it was really anti-Asian racism that was behind the alarms about scientists from China’s People’s Liberation Army infiltrating Canada’s top-security infectious diseases lab in Winnipeg?
Remember how the Trudeau government said the reason the documents about the Winnipeg intrigues couldn’t be disclosed to Parliament was “national security”? Remember how the matter was so serious the PMO defied the foundational conventions of parliamentary supremacy to the point of taking the Speaker of the House to court for the first time in history, so as to keep the documents under lock and key?
It turns out that “national security” had basically nothing to do with it after all. What the PMO wanted was just to avoid the embarrassment that would have resulted if the contents of the documents became known. And now, the entire Opposition is seeking to have those documents released to the public, as soon as possible.
You’ll want to keep all this in mind in the context of the Hogue Inquiry’s disquistions on the safeguarding of “national security” in the foreign-interference commission’s proceedings. You’ll also want to remember that the Trudeau government fought tooth and nail against any inquiry at all into Beijing’s efforts to monkeywrench the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the Liberals’ benefit.
Remember the whitewash carried out by “Special Independent Rapporteur” David Johnston, one of Beijing’s best friends in Canada going back years? That didn’t exactly do the trick for Team Trudeau. Maybe Hogue’s inquiry will. Here’s the report Johnston should have written.
And before leaving Russia and China entirely. . .
Before we get to the sensitive stuff about the Conservative Party, Iranian “diaspora politics” and the Shahrooz affair on the other side of the paywall, I’m going to leave subscribers with some readings and stress a point I made in the National Post.
The point: The thing that’s so striking about Alexei Navalny’s life and death is the shocking contrast of Navalny’s immense courage and optimism against the cowardice and cynicism that the leaders of the liberal democracies can’t seem to find it within themselves to transcend.
Being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I guess at least there’s this: The Navalny murder and the two-year mark of Putin’s full-on invasion of Ukraine has prompted the United States and the European Union to launch a barrage of new sanctions at Putin’s enablers. The sanctions hit companies in India, Turkey, Serbia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Singapore Hong Kong and other places, and the EU sanctions target companies in China for the first time.
More background if you want it (but only after you’re done reading this newsletter!):
On resistance to the Putinist warlord oligarchy that swallowed up Alexei Navalny, The men who dare defy Vladimir Putin: One by one, Russia’s democratic opposition leaders are being killed or jailed. The focus of that piece was Vladimir Kara-Murza, the British-Russian historian, journalist and activist who was jailed for 25 years last year after returning to Russia to take up the opposition to Putin’s bloody war of conquest in Ukraine.
Kara-Murza hasn’t been entirely forgotten, but almost. See also We can be heroes, just for one day. Related, in ways you might not think at first: On the crippling costs of Canada’s unseriousness: Fabulists, useful idiots and a whirlwind of dezinformatsiya.
On police-state compradors and corporate collaborators, to the point Kaveh Shahrooz was making: Is Canada already too far gone?
It’s going to get awkward from here on in, I’m afraid. I’m with Uncle George: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”