Gerry Caplan's blog

The West has been ripping off Africa for 700 years. Not the other way around

gerry caplan — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 19:30:14 +0000

According to The New York Times, Donald Trump's transition team wanted to know: "Why should we spend funds on Africa when we are suffering here in the U.S.?" Curiously enough, most Americans probably would have agreed with Mr. Trump that this was a real question. But they all share an entirely false premise.

America and the rest of the rich world have actually been ripping off Africa for the past 700 years, ever since the Portuguese began the slave trade, all the while insisting that Africa has been the beneficiary of this relentless exploitation. It's been one of the great hoaxes of the past millennium.

The battle of Romeo Dallaire's life may not be Rwanda after all, but PTSD

gerry caplan — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 20:53:39 +0000

Few of us could have been surprised by Romeo Dallaire's moving article in The Globe this weekend commenting on the tragedy of Lionel Desmond, the former soldier with PTSD who murdered his family then took his own life. Lt.-Gen. Dallaire, now retired, is surely among Canada's most admired citizens, if not the most admired. I include myself among his ardent fans, and I hope that 2017 might be the time he finally escapes from the demons that have haunted him for the past 23 years. Lionel Desmond's ghastly case only stirs up those ghosts.

Activist art needed more than ever as we head into Trump's presidency

gerry caplan — Mon, 26 Dec 2016 16:42:19 +0000

God gets even in her own sly way. How else could it be that exactly a three-minute saunter from gaudy Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, just along 57th street, two different Manhattan art exhibits stand as a rebuke to all the malice Donald Trump represents?

One, called Nelson Mandela: The Artist, includes some of the art created by Mr. Mandela after he retired as South Africa's president, along with his ruminations about life. The other is called You Say You Want a Revolution: American Artists and the Communist Party, and is dedicated to the progressive American artists who were moved by the great social causes that roiled the world during the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Justin Trudeau follows Stephen Harper's lead in Israel and Palestine

gerry caplan — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 19:12:50 +0000

The Prime Minister dispatched Governor General David Johnston to the Middle East recently on a mission that largely wasted everybody's time.

The GG was instructed to articulate the government's position favouring the creation of an independent Palestine living in peace next to Israel: "a two-state solution and a just, long-standing and comprehensive peace."

The GG's tour, so the media were informed, is part of the Liberal government's effort to "recalibrate" Canada's policy in the Middle East. Justin Trudeau promises a more "balanced" position after a decade of Pavlovian Conservative support for Israel in any and all circumstances.

Holding a referendum on electoral reform will cause more problems than it solves

gerry caplan — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 18:53:51 +0000

Parliament's Special Committee on Electoral Reform has concluded that a referendum is the best way to determine Canadian public opinion about electoral reform. But the proposition raises many questions that have so far resulted in few answers. Supporters of a referendum have an obligation to show that it can realistically deliver a clear consensus.

Suddenly, though it's news to me, moving from First Past the Post to a different voting system is a really, really fundamental value question for Canadians. Suddenly the House of Commons, entrusted to make decisions about life and death, war and peace, can't be trusted with the largely technical question of how votes are cast and counted.

Fidel Castro latest in long line of leaders who betrayed socialism

gerry caplan — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 18:45:14 +0000

Fidel Castro stands in a long line of great socialist leaders who betrayed socialism. The list pretty well includes all of them, from Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, to Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai, to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to Mengistu in Ethiopia.

In the name of the beloved masses, these revolutionaries became the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for genocide, famine, incalculable suffering, widespread torture and the deaths of tens of millions of workers for the crime of somehow displeasing their great leader.

Castro was not a mass murderer of the same order, though hundreds, maybe thousands, of opponents were executed in the early years. He also broke the hearts of the millions of Cubans who welcomed his revolution.

Canada is still torturing people and no one has been held accountable

gerry caplan — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 20:30:55 +0000

Canada ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture in 1987, yet a good number of Canadians have been tortured with the complicity of public officials. To be more precise: Torture -- physical, psychological or both -- has been inflicted by our prisons and our security and intelligence services on many Canadians -- a disproportionate number of them indigenous or people with a Middle Eastern background -- as well as on foreign citizens.

When examples of such incidents are exposed, Canadians are outraged. But only rarely are they revealed.

Hillary Clinton's legacy will be the cracks she left in that glass ceiling every single day

gerry caplan — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 18:37:44 +0000

The reward of being a congenital pessimist is that one is rarely disappointed. Bad news is always around the next corner, just wait. But at least anticipating the worst often softens the blow when the worst arrives, as it so often does.

Attentive readers of this space may recall that in column after lugubrious column, I kept warning that Donald Trump could still pull it off. This was long after most pundits and pollsters were complacently counting him out. How desperately I wish I'd been wrong.

Au revoir, Obamas. The world will miss you

gerry caplan — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 22:00:50 +0000

Along with countless others around the world, I wept when his victory was announced eight years ago, when he and his wife and the two girls walked out on that huge Chicago stage before hundreds of thousands of boisterous, ecstatic Americans.

But we too easily ignored what the results told us about his country. Despite being 72 years old with health issues and with the oblivious Sarah Palin as his running mate, Republican John McCain swept the white vote 55 to 43 per cent.

It's not just Trump. It's the entire Republican Party.

gerry caplan — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 16:54:55 +0000

It's not just Trump. It's the entire Republican Party. Yet, almost half of all Americans support Trump, the Republicans, or both. What does this tell us about the state of the States? If we weren't all having a conniption about a Trump presidency, we'd be worried sick about whoever the Republican nominee had been.

Remember: 17 people originally ran for the Republican nomination. And as we are not often enough reminded, while none was quite as destructive and uniquely deplorable as Trump, all could boast peddling truly extreme and often ludicrous ideas. With only a few anxious days to go before the election, it's useful if we frighten ourselves even more with reminders of one of the reasons Trump won -- his opponents.

One year later, Justin Trudeau is poised to disappoint nearly everyone who voted for him

gerry caplan — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 22:26:13 +0000

I come not to bury Justin Trudeau but to praise him. Sort of.

Just about everything I believed about him before his 2015 election triumph was largely wrong. I deeply underestimated the man; I did him wrong. Was I blinded by simple partisanship, or has he grown so much so fast since last October 19?

I simply refused to take the man seriously as a potential prime minister. I thought the Conservatives had a winning put-down in their assertion that Justin Trudeau was "just not ready" to be Prime Minister.

Conservative leadership slate pretty uninspiring -- but at least there's no Donald Trump

gerry caplan — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 19:09:29 +0000

The Conservative Party of Canada has not yet figured out why it lost the election last year. To hear Conservatives talk, you sometimes wonder if they know they lost at all. It seems that many of them believe their 99 seats counts as a "moral victory." The NDP should sue for breach of copyright.

Then there's the widespread view among people within the party that the problem was their "tone." It's not at all clear what they think they mean by this, but it seems to have little to do with a series of mean and bigoted policies that failed to appeal to any but the Conservative base.

Nothing 'sunny' about Canadian's extradition to France. Why should China be any different?

gerry caplan — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 21:21:20 +0000

If he weren't languishing in a French prison for a crime he says he didn't commit, Dr. Hassan Diab might've smiled ruefully when China pressed Justin Trudeau for an extradition treaty with Canada the other day.

When Mr. Trudeau, who sees sunshine where others see black clouds, boasted of "Canada's extremely high standards on extradition," Dr. Diab might have guffawed out loud. But since it's been two years since he was extradited from Canada to France and imprisoned, he might have lost his sense of humour.

U.S. liberals have long history of punishing not-quite-left enough candidates. This time the world can't afford it

gerry caplan — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 21:43:08 +0000

It seems a significant number of Americans are torn about voting for Hillary. They know Trump is not just deranged and dishonest, but mean as a rattlesnake and would be profoundly dangerous as commander-in-chief. But Clinton, they insist, is deeply flawed, too, as we are reminded every single day. So a pox on both their houses -- yes, even if it gives Trump the presidency.

I must say straight out this seems to me folly of the greatest kind.

But it's an old predicament in American politics, usually played out not among millions of people but among the embarrassingly small number of genuine leftists in the country, with a few of us foreign pinkos looking on from the sidelines. If we can't get a real progressive candidate, fuggetabout the whole election.

Trudeau's media love affair draws to a sour end

gerry caplan — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 22:22:45 +0000

As October ushers in the first anniversary of the Trudeau government, a clear pattern has emerged. The public's love affair with Justin Trudeau remains undiminished, intense and glowing. But the media's attitude toward the Prime Minister and his government has palpably turned sour and frustrated.

According to recent polls, as of August Liberal popularity stood at 48 per cent, with the Conservatives way behind at 29 per cent and the NDP trailing badly with 13 per cent. The Prime Minister's personal popularity remains sky-high, especially when he's pitted against no one leading the other two main parties.

Skepticism, not pacifism, is NDP's best approach to foreign war

gerry caplan — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 18:57:09 +0000

In trying to rally his dispirited troops the other day, interim NDP leader Tom Mulcair made the following somewhat surprising statement: The party's "core values," so he told his applauding caucus, are "environmentalism, pacifism, feminism, socialism."

I join the applause, or at least three-quarters of it. I can march behind the banner of socialism, feminism and environmentalism with pride and conviction. But pacifism, not so much. In fact pacifism has never been an NDP value, assuming that words have any meaning.

In all likelihood, judge who told rape survivor to 'keep her knees together' will return to the bench

gerry caplan — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 17:20:19 +0000

If I were a betting man, I'd say Judge Robin Camp will not be dumped from the Alberta bench by the Canadian Judicial Council panel in Calgary which is hearing his case. The case is based on the 2014 trial in which he acquitted a man accused of assaulting a 19-year-old woman while verbally assaulting the alleged victim with a whole series of wildly inappropriate comments. Yet some witnesses before the appeal panel have done an impressive job of minimizing the judge's transgressions.

Justin Trudeau continues to dodge tough human rights questions

gerry caplan — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 21:48:26 +0000

In principle, all Canadian politicians forthrightly favour human rights and make it a central tenet, an overriding principle, of their foreign policy platforms.

No one, for example, wants to defend selling arms to Saudi Arabia, not even those opposition Conservative MPs who actually did the deal when they were in government. Or the new Liberal government that is supporting the Conservative deal they once loudly opposed in opposition.

Health Minister Jane Philpott should be judged on her work, not 'gotcha' politics

gerry caplan — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 18:10:35 +0000