Macleans has been getting a lot of hits the past week for its 99 Ways The Government Wastes Your Money series of posts, which is about what you’d expect from Macleans, a magazine that for the most part started downhill in the late 90s and never looked back, instead deciding to celebrate itself for championing free speech by publishing Mark Steyn’s vaguely racist twaddle instead of, and this is just a thought, publishing a counter to it.¹

But, even by the standard of “look at all the ways government wastes your money” articles, this one is really amazingly slapdash. First off, it’s just a laundry list of governmental spending at all levels: municipal, provincial, federal, et cetera. This makes it sort of meaningless, because the article isn’t a complaint about how a specific government wastes money. It’s a general complaint. It’s like writing “99 Reasons We Hate Cloudy Days And Not Looking at Puppies.” It’s generic and doesn’t actually describe any specific solution. It’s just free-form bitching. When Jim Demint writes Here Is 350 Instances Of Government Spending That I Hate, Vol. 6, he at least makes sure to stick to the federal government, because then he can actually use his findings – intellectually bankrupt as they may be – to make something resembling a point.

Worse, it’s free-form bitching that’s all over the place. The article conflates government spending that is wasteful (giving a high-paid management official an enormous pension, for example) and government spending that is malfeasant (the Tories spending government funds to advertise their policy initiatives in the run-up to the most recent election) and government spending on subsidies, economic stimulus and infrastructure that the writers even admit might have purpose, but hey it’s a recession and we all need to tighten our belts and yadda yadda yadda (spending money to build a footbridge in rural Quebec). This is ridiculously sloppy. It’s getting offended at the government spending money not because the writers object to the government spending in any particular way (wastefully, borderline illegally, to promote policies with which they disagree, whatever) but because whatever, it’s gubmint spendin’ and gubmint is baaaaaaad.

But worst of all, it’s free-form bitching without context. We ran a budget deficit of about $33 billion in Canada in fiscal 2010-2011. The spending Macleans is bitching about adds up to maybe a couple of hundred million dollars, using the most generous math and the largest figures for each item. But it`s worth remembdering that the Tories`GST cut is probably responsible for at least $10 billion of that deficit. If runaway government spending existed – and that is a premise Macleans has most certainly not proven – it is to some extent a manufactured problem. Not acknowledging this is bad journalism. But these days, unfortunately, one expects little more from a cover story in Macleans.

1. Seriously, the constant backpatting by Andrew Coyne during the whole Steyn thing was kind of nausea-inducing. [↩]

My “Villain” entrant in Torontoist’s 2011 Heroes and Villains is sort of a repeat.

The Toronto Police shut down the Occupy Toronto encampment in St. James Park this morning, and from 3 AM through to about 8 I was onsite liveblogging it for Torontoist.

I have to say, I feel vaguely robbed by the lack of a riot. Dear police and protestors: next time I have to get up at 3 AM to cover your potential clash, please have at least a small riot or something, okay? Not a big one, just… something? This was so painfully civil it felt like somebody’s idea of a parody, “Canadian Protest Riot” or something. The police were respectful and helpful, the protesters were largely polite and cooperative (okay, there was one guy who was barefoot and half-dressed who kept taunting the cops and getting up in their faces, and honestly I don’t think it would have been controversial if the police had arrested him, but they didn’t), and the media were all over the place basically ensuring that both sides were as amiable as possible and kibbitzing with both sides.

I mean, nice to get back to that after the G20, don’t get me wrong. But why couldn’t we do this at, like, noon or something so we could all sleep in?

TOrontoist asked me to weigh in on Toronto’s new proposed cycling bylaw, so I did just that. Because that is how I roll. (On a bike, you see.)

My election post-mortem is up at Torontoist, along with the election liveblog from last night.

Torontoist’s provincial election endorsement – most of which I wrote – is up for you to read. It is, perhaps, somewhat predictable, but you have to admit that Torontoist didn’t just let me write “FUCK TIM HUDAK” one thousand times in a row. Which was tempting.

My obituary for Jack is up at Torontoist.

Over at Torontoist, I dueled with Patrick Metzger over the issue of allowing corporate advertising inside of schools.

In a recent tweet, Michelle Bachmann’s campaign wrote:

Lesson in economic recovery: Consider Canada. No stimulus & unemployment is 20% lower than US.

Uh, guys – we did have a stimulus. We passed stimulus in 2009 as part of the budget, at practically the same time that the USA did: $40 billion in spending and $20 billion in tax cuts for a total of $60 billion in stimulus spending and cuts. Now, our budget was only $274 billion CDN in expenditures, so that $60 billion represented about 22% of our overall budget, whereas the USA’s stimulus of $900 billion measured against its expenditures of $3.5 trillion USD represented about 26% of its budget, so percentagewise our stimulus was a bit smaller than yours, granted – but then again, thanks to strict banking regulations that most of the world didn’t have, we didn’t take nearly the hit that the United States did from the financial collapse of 2008.

So basically Michelle Bachmann is wrong. I know, you’re having trouble processing such an idea! But that is in fact the case.

My election aftermath post is up at Torontoist.

Also, I don’t think Harper and the Tories will make dramatic shifts to the right on social policy: I genuinely don’t think they’re that stupid, and I suspect if they tried there are enough newly minted Tory MPs that would break ranks (and Layton is smart enough to get them to do it), because regardless of party unity the public would be 90% against, say, banning same-sex marriage or criminalizing abortion. But they’re definitely going to bring in some horrible fiscal policies (income splitting, for example), and destroy a lot of effective government regulation, and let industry write laws benefiting them (man, the telecoms in this country are so happy today) and nothing’s gonna stop that.

I’m liveblogging the federal election results tonight with the rest of the Crack Torontoist Election Team Central Brigade here.

Torontoist made its endorsement of a party in the federal election today. I wrote it.

If you’re not Canadian, you might not appreciate how unbelievable the last of this set of best-case scenarios is:

For the sake of comparison: you see that 43 in the Liberals’ Conservatives’ best-case scenario for the New Democrats? 43 seats is the most the New Democrats have held in any Parliament ever.

(via Threehundredeight)

A while back I said that Canadian politics was less interesting than Rebecca Black. Apparently somebody decided that this merited a truly horrible combination.

And of course Jack Layton doesn’t merit a mention. It’s probably because of the moustache.

(h/t Carl Sack)

I’m liveblogging the Canadian federal election debate over at Torontoist.