What Happened Today: Feb 18, 2022
Civil liberties battle in Canada; China’s family push; Porsches up in flames
The Big Story
As law enforcement continues its sweep today to arrest and remove those participating in the weeks-long trucker protest in downtown Ottawa, the unprecedented use of emergency powers against the political protests continues to rattle the leaders of banks and civil rights groups, as well as elected officials on both sides of the border. In a joint letter urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden to immediately reinstate the vaccine and quarantine exemptions for cross-border truckers that the protestors support, 16 U.S. governors joined the premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan in a public letter: “We are deeply concerned that terminating these exemptions has had demonstrably negative impacts on the North American supply chain, the cost of living, and access to essential products for people in both our countries.”
Instead, Trudeau’s administration has intensified its crackdown on financial transactions and accounts linked to anyone and any entity involved with the protests, with Canadian banks and credit unions carrying out government demands to immediately freeze any such account and hand over all account details to federal law enforcement as well as the nation’s spy agency, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. Financial institutions worry that the intrusion into people’s privacy, previously reserved to combat international terrorists and drug cartels, will undermine their reputation with customers. “Banks aren’t welcoming their conscription into the unprecedented effort,” one Canadian banking industry insider told The Wall Street Journal. Hundreds of riot police deployed in one of the largest law enforcement efforts in Canadian history are currently dismantling the protest encampment in Ottawa. The raid caused the Canadian House of Commons and Senate to postpone a mandatory debate of the administration’s federal emergency declaration, which will expire unless approved by a vote in both chambers for its 30-day application. Ahead of the vote anticipated to take place on Monday, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has announced it will sue the administration for its use of the emergency powers, arguing it’s a violation of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “This law creates a high and clear standard for good reason: The Act allows government to bypass ordinary democratic processes. This standard has not been met,” the association said yesterday. “Emergency legislation should not be normalized. It threatens our democracy and our civil liberties.”
Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/canadas-banks-pressed-into-effort-to-quell-protests-11645146830
Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads
The Rest
→ The Chinese government’s Family Planning Association has launched a new campaign to “intervene” in abortions sought by teenagers and unmarried women as part of its effort to “build a new positive culture of marriage and parenting,” according to the association’s newly published campaign materials. The scope of the government’s intervention remains unclear, though the association has outlined several education programs that promote “positive” representations of families to “rebuild the culture of raising multiple children.” First founded in 1980 as part of China’s since-abolished one-child policy—during which an estimated 400 to 600 million abortions were carried out in China between 1980 and 2015—the Family Planning Association’s campaign comes after its assessment last year warning of rising numbers of abortions and a birth rate that’s fallen for the past five years.
→ A polling firm hired by the House Democrats campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DNCC), found in a survey of some 1,000 participants across the 60 House districts that will be the most competitive in the upcoming midterm elections that swing voters are unhappy with several of the Democratic Party’s efforts related to the coronavirus pandemic and other key legislative issues. It showed, for example, that 59% of swing voters agreed with the statement “Democrats are too focused on pursuing an agenda that divides us and judging those who don’t see things their way.” In slides from a presentation this week to the DCCC that were shared with SFGate, the polling group raised a red flag that Republicans critiques of how Democrats have handled government responses to the pandemic have “alarming credibility,” with 66% of swing voters and 57% of all voters polled agreeing with the statement that Democrats “have taken things too far in their pandemic response.” The midterm election will decide who has control of both chambers of congress, as well as the governor’s race for 36 states.
→ After lifting strict border controls against international visitors who were double-vaccinated—but still prevented from entering the country as part of the “Fortress Australia” policy—Australia’s tourism industry has seen the number of flights booked for travel to Australia double overnight, according to Andrew David, the head of the airline Qantas. With visitors from other countries accounting for $61 billion of the nation’s economy, and 100,000 international workers who left Australia for other nations after the strict lockdowns impacted their wages, businesses are aggressively recruiting workers and promoting travel packages in the hopes to revive Australia as a marquee post-pandemic international destination. Some fear that an exodus of skilled workers like chefs and restaurant managers will dampen the recovery. “We’re not going to get them back,” said John Hart, the director of trade group Restaurant and Catering Australia, adding that political tensions will likely temper travelers visiting from China, which accounted for 1.4 million annual visitors before the pandemic. Hart and other groups are targeting international visitors from Japan and India to help close the gap.
→ A new map published by ProPublica shows the “more than 1,000 toxic hotspots” with dangerous levels of pollution that dot the United States.
→ Catching fire 200 miles off the coast of Terceira Island, a Portuguese territory, the 22 members of the cargo ship Felicity Ace were rescued without injury by helicopter and aid vessels, while all of Felicity Ace’s luxury vehicles, including 1,100 Porsches, 189 Bentleys, and several Lamborghinis, remained aboard the burning ship. Destined for the port in Davisville, Rhode Island, the high-end vehicles were to be dispersed to American buyers just as automakers struggle to keep up with vehicle demand among supply chain delays. The owner of Felicity Ace has said he plans to tow the ship to shore and rescue the remains.
→ The day before the filing deadline to enter Los Angeles’ mayoral election—which has become a referendum on the city’s surging crime rate and homelessness—Rick Caruso, a real estate mogul, tweeted that he threw his hat into the ring because “we cannot tolerate the homelesseness [sic], crime, and corruption.” In 2020, the L.A. city council cut $150 million from the LAPD’s $1.9 billion budget, a move that Caruso believes demoralized the police. “We’ve emboldened the criminals,” Caruso said, promising to hire 1,500 additional members of law enforcement. “They get arrested and get let out. It sends a message there’s no consequences.”
→ Stat of the day: This week the Student Debt Crisis Center updated its figure on the total cost of student debt—and the number is into the quadrillions: $1,882,889,321,008, to be exact.
→ The Walt Disney Company has unveiled plans to build several utopian towns. The first of these “Storyliving by Disney” communities will be built in the Coachella Valley in California, just two hours from Los Angeles. Cotino, as the town is called, will have 1,900 housing units surrounding a 24-acre oasis with the “clearest turquoise waters.” The escape from reality promises home buyers “a place where world-famous Disney service makes moments more memorable.”
→ Out now: Issue #05 of The Tab, Tablet magazine’s new printable weekly digest. In this week’s edition: Chinese antisemitism, Oslo’s Jewish Sewing Circle, The Righteous Gemstones.
Weekend Reads
→ In an interview and profile in the Financial Times ahead of the release of his new solo album, the Wu-Tang mastermind RZA fears that much of today’s rap has become sanitized and lacks the variety and vitality that acts like Rakim, Nas, and others offered in vivid and complex portraits of street life:
“Sometimes hip-hop music glamorises certain things,” he says. “It glamorises prison life, it glamorises gangsters and thugs. I understand that, because I grew out of that. But it doesn’t give you the total tragedy of what that can end up being, nor are we being represented with a lot of alternatives.” He reels off a list of back-in-the-day acts, from Eric B & Rakim to Queen Latifah, some of whom specialised in rapping about street life, others who looked beyond it. “The point being made is there was more bounce, there was more substance. Hip-hop has become one-sided.”
Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/cddbf315-f0b2-4b26-9e4f-eb2595718c12
→ TED Talks was supposed to be about a lot of great ideas about a brighter future, but this sharp look at two decades of TED Talks shows that the spectacle was less about idea quality and more about the branding of a topic with some vague inspirational notion:
You just need an interesting topic and then you need to attach that topic to an inspirational story. Robots are interesting. Using them to eat trash in Nairobi is inspiring. Put the two together, and you have a TED Talk.
I like to call this fusion “the inspiresting.” Stylistically, the inspiresting is earnest and contrived. It is smart but not quite intellectual, personal but not sincere, jokey but not funny. It is an aesthetic of populist elitism. Politically, the inspiresting performs a certain kind of progressivism, as it is concerned with making the world a better place, however vaguely. “The speaker’s work and words move you and fill you with an expanded sense of possibility and excitement,” Anderson writes of the successful TED Talk. “You want to go out and be a better person.” All this can be achieved, Anderson proposes, without any serious transfers of power. In fact, in Anderson’s view, not only is culture upstream from politics, but politics itself—dependent on what he calls “tribal thinking”—destroys the free movement of ideas, with all its world-changing potential. “The toxicity of our political … nonconversations is a true tragedy of the modern world,” he writes. “When people aren’t prepared or ready to listen, communication can’t happen.”
Read more: https://www.thedriftmag.com/what-was-the-ted-talk
→ Academic freedom seems short on defenders these days, but David Cole, national legal director of the ACLU and Georgetown Law professor, has penned a strong rebuttal to the effort to terminate lawyer Ilya Shapiro from his new appointment as Cole’s colleague at Georgetown Law center because of tweets Shapiro wrote about President Biden’s upcoming selection for the Supreme Court. As Cole writes, “Shapiro’s argument, if one can dignify a tweet with that label, is baseless and offensive,” but Georgetown’s move to place Shapiro on administrative leave runs directly counter to the law center’s core academic principles:
But that doesn’t mean he should lose his job—or that the Georgetown community will be better-off if it banishes him. Expressing one’s position on affirmative action, or any other matter of public debate, even in an offensive manner, cannot be the basis for termination if academic freedom is to be respected. … In an instance such as this, in which he immediately responded by deleting the tweets and apologizing, the commitment to academic freedom demands tolerance for those with whom we disagree.
Read more: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2022/02/15/the-university-and-freedom-of-expression/
"... tow the ship," not "toe the ship," unless it's some huge toe :)
The reason the Canadian parliament has (been forced to) postpone(d) debate is that Trudeau and his allies don't want a vote of no confidence that he would probably lose. Most of my Canadian friends are long-time Liberal voters, and all of them despise Trudeau.