Monday, January 04, 2021


MILESTONES: 1945–1952

NOTE TO READERS
“Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations” has been retired and is no longer maintained. For more information, please see the full notice.

The Chinese Revolution of 1949

On October 1, 1949, Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The announcement ended the costly full-scale civil war between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), which broke out immediately following World War II and had been preceded by on and off conflict between the two sides since the 1920’s. The creation of the PRC also completed the long process of governmental upheaval in China begun by the Chinese Revolution of 1911. The “fall” of mainland China to communism in 1949 led the United States to suspend diplomatic ties with the PRC for decades.


Communists entering Beijing in 1949.

The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921 in Shanghai, originally existed as a study group working within the confines of the First United Front with the Nationalist Party. Chinese Communists joined with the Nationalist Army in the Northern Expedition of 1926–27 to rid the nation of the warlords that prevented the formation of a strong central government. This collaboration lasted until the “White Terror” of 1927, when the Nationalists turned on the Communists, killing them or purging them from the party.

After the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, the Government of the Republic of China (ROC) faced the triple threat of Japanese invasion, Communist uprising, and warlord insurrections. Frustrated by the focus of the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek on internal threats instead of the Japanese assault, a group of generals abducted Chiang in 1937 and forced him to reconsider cooperation with the Communist army. As with the first effort at cooperation between the Nationalist government and the CCP, this Second United Front was short-lived. The Nationalists expended needed resources on containing the Communists, rather than focusing entirely on Japan, while the Communists worked to strengthen their influence in rural society.

During World War II, popular support for the Communists increased. U.S. officials in China reported a dictatorial suppression of dissent in Nationalist-controlled areas. These undemocratic polices combined with wartime corruption made the Republic of China Government vulnerable to the Communist threat. The CCP, for its part, experienced success in its early efforts at land reform and was lauded by peasants for its unflagging efforts to fight against the Japanese invaders.


Chiang Kai-shek

Japanese surrender set the stage for the resurgence of civil war in China. Though only nominally democratic, the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek continued to receive U.S. support both as its former war ally and as the sole option for preventing Communist control of China. U.S. forces flew tens of thousands of Nationalist Chinese troops into Japanese-controlled territory and allowed them to accept the Japanese surrender. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, occupied Manchuria and only pulled out when Chinese Communist forces were in place to claim that territory.

In 1945, the leaders of the Nationalist and Communist parties, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, met for a series of talks on the formation of a post-war government. Both agreed on the importance of democracy, a unified military, and equality for all Chinese political parties. The truce was tenuous, however, and, in spite of repeated efforts by U.S. General George Marshall to broker an agreement, by 1946 the two sides were fighting an all-out civil war. Years of mistrust between the two sides thwarted efforts to form a coalition government.

As the civil war gained strength from 1947 to 1949, eventual Communist victory seemed more and more likely. Although the Communists did not hold any major cities after World War II, they had strong grassroots support, superior military organization and morale, and large stocks of weapons seized from Japanese supplies in Manchuria. 

Years of corruption and mismanagement had eroded popular support for the Nationalist Government. Early in 1947, the ROC Government was already looking to the island province of Taiwan, off the coast of Fujian Province, as a potential point of retreat. 

Although officials in the Truman Administration were not convinced of the strategic importance to the United States of maintaining relations with Nationalist China, no one in the U.S. Government wanted to be charged with facilitating the “loss” of China to communism. Military and financial aid to the floundering Nationalists continued, though not at the level that Chiang Kai-shek would have liked. In October of 1949, after a string of military victories, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the PRC; Chiang and his forces fled to Taiwan to regroup and plan for their efforts to retake the mainland.

The ability of the PRC and the United States to find common ground in the wake of the establishment of the new Chinese state was hampered by both domestic politics and global tensions. In August of 1949, the Truman administration published the “China White Paper,” which explained past U.S. policy toward China based upon the principle that only Chinese forces could determine the outcome of their civil war. Unfortunately for Truman, this step failed to protect his administration from charges of having “lost” China. The unfinished nature of the revolution, leaving a broken and exiled but still vocal Nationalist Government and Army on Taiwan, only heightened the sense among U.S. anti-communists that the outcome of the struggle could be reversed. The outbreak of the Korean War, which pitted the PRC and the United States on opposite sides of an international conflict, ended any opportunity for accommodation between the PRC and the United States. Truman’s desire to prevent the Korean conflict from spreading south led to the U.S. policy of protecting the Chiang Kai-shek government on Taiwan.

For more than twenty years after the Chinese revolution of 1949, there were few contacts, limited trade and no diplomatic ties between the two countries. Until the 1970s, the United States continued to recognize the Republic of China, located on Taiwan, as China’s true government and supported that government’s holding the Chinese seat in the United Nation
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Communists like us: Ethnicized modernity

 and the idea of `the West' in the Soviet Union

Alastair Bonnett
https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968020020040101
Article information 

Volume: 2 issue: 4, page(s): 435-467
Issue published: December 1,2002


ABSTRACT 

This article offers a portrait of communism in the USSR as an

ethnicized form of modernity; a form defined in relation to the idea of ‘the West’.

First, I introduce the ‘racialized modernity’ thesis and suggest that notions of race

and racialization are neither adequate nor appropriate categories to apply to the

reification of modernity in the USSR. I then turn to western views of Russia, emphasizing the role accorded to Russians of the ‘not quite European’ Europeans. These

two sections provide the background to a discussion of the development of an

ethnopolitical form of communist modernity – a form in which the proletariat was

simultaneously an ethnic and political category – which is introduced in the rest of

the article. Section six is somewhat different, charting the abandonment of the

communist vision. The so-called ‘return to Europe’, although a supposedly stalled

and certainly an ambiguous process, is presented here in terms of the reanimation

of western and Russian myths of communism as a non-European ‘hiatus’ in Russian

history. Central to this process is the ethnic othering of communism through its

representation as an Asian contamination of western tradition.


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Slavoj Žižek: We Need a Socialist Reset, Not a Corporate “Great Reset”

BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK JACOBIN

Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin today that we've been given a choice between a return to the old exploitative normality and a post-COVID corporate "Great Reset" that promises to be even worse. We need a real alternative, a socialist reset that can win justice for all and save the planet from climate apocalypse.  


Back in April 2020, reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic, Jürgen Habermas pointed out that “existential uncertainty is now spreading globally and simultaneously, in the heads of medially-wired individuals themselves.” He continued, “There never was so much knowing about our not-knowing and about the constraint to act and live in uncertainty.”

Habermas is right to claim that this not-knowing does not concern only the pandemic itself — we at least have experts there — but even more its economic, social, and psychic consequences. Note his precise formulation: it is not simply that we don’t know what goes on, we know that we don’t know, and this not-knowing is itself a social fact, inscribed into how our institutions act.

We now know that in, say, medieval times or early modernity they knew much less — but they didn’t know this because they relied on some stable ideological foundation which guaranteed that our universe is a meaningful totality. The same holds for some visions of Communism, even for Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the end of history — they all assumed to know where history is moving. Plus, Habermas is right to locate the uncertainty into “the heads of medially-wired individuals”: our link to the wired universe tremendously expands our knowledge, but at the same time it throws us into radical uncertainty (Are we hacked? Who controls our access? Is what we’re reading there fake news?). Viruses strike in both meanings of the term, biological and digital.

When we try to guess how our societies will look after the pandemic will be over, the trap to avoid is futurology — futurology by definition ignores our not-knowing. Futurology is defined as a systematic forecasting of the future from the present trends in society. And therein resides the problem — futurology mostly extrapolates what will come from the present tendencies. However, what futurology doesn’t take into account are historical “miracles,” radical breaks which can only be explained retroactively, once they happen.

We should perhaps mobilize here the distinction that works in French between futur and avenir: “Futur” is whatever will come after the present while “avenir” points toward a radical change. When a president wins reelection, he is “the present and future president,” but he is not the president “to come” — the president to come is a different president. So will the post-corona universe be just another future or something new “to come”?

It depends not only on science but on our political decisions. Now the time has come to say that we should have no illusions about the “happy” outcome of the US elections, which brought such a relief among the liberals all around the world. John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), one of the neglected masterpieces of the Hollywood left, tells the story of John Nada — Spanish for “nothing” — a homeless laborer who accidentally stumbles upon a pile of boxes full of sunglasses in an abandoned church. When he puts on a pair of these glasses while walking on a street, he notices that a colorful publicity billboard soliciting us to enjoy chocolate bars now simply displays the word “OBEY,” while another billboard with a glamorous couple in a tight embrace, seen through the glasses, orders the viewer to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.”

He also sees that paper money bears the words “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” Additionally, he soon discovers that many people who look charming are actually monstrous aliens with metal heads… What circulates now on the web is an image which restages the scene from They Live apropos Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: seen directly, the image shows the two of them smiling with the message “TIME TO HEAL”; seen through the glasses, they are two alien monsters and the message is “TIME TO HEEL”…

This is, of course, part of the Trump propaganda to discredit Biden and Harris as masks of anonymous corporate machines which control our lives. However, there is (more than) a grain of truth in it. Biden’s victory means “future” as the continuation of the pre-Trump “normality” — that’s why there was such a sigh of relief after his victory. But this “normality” means the rule of anonymous global capital which is the true alien in our midst.



I remember from my youth the desire for “socialism with a human face” against Soviet-type “bureaucratic” socialism. Biden newly promises global capitalism with a human face, while behind the face the same reality will remain. In education, this “human face” assumed the form of our obsession with “well-being”: pupils and students should live in bubbles that will save them from the horrors of external reality, protected by Politically Correct rules.

Education is no longer intended to have a sobering effect of allowing us to confront social reality — and when we are told that this safety will prevent mental breakdowns, we should counter it with exactly the opposite claim: such false safety opens us up to mental crises when we have to confront our social reality. What “well-being activity” does is that it merely provides a false “human face” to our reality instead of enabling us to change this reality itself. Biden is the ultimate “well-being” president.

So why is Biden still better than Trump? Critics point out that Biden also lies and represents big capital, only in a more polite form — but, unfortunately, this form matters. With his vulgarization of public speech, Trump was corroding the ethical substance of our lives, what Hegel called Sitten (as opposed to individual morality).

This vulgarization is a worldwide process. Take the European case of Szilárd Demeter, a ministerial commissioner and head of the Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest. Demeter wrote in an op-ed in November 2020, “Europe is George Soros’ gas chamber. Poison gas flows from the capsule of a multicultural open society, which is deadly to the European way of life.” He went on to characterize Soros as “the liberal Fuhrer,” insisting that his “liber-aryan army deifies him more than did Hitler’s own.”

If asked, Demeter would probably dismiss these statements as rhetorical exaggeration; this, however, in no way dismisses their terrifying implications. The comparison between Soros and Hitler is deeply antisemitic: it puts Soros on a level with Hitler, claiming that the multicultural open society promoted by Soros is not only as perilous as the Holocaust and the Aryan racism that sustained it (“liber-aryan”) but even worse, more perilous to the “European way of life.”

So is there an alternative to this terrifying vision, other than Biden’s “human face”? Climate activist Greta Thunberg recently offered three positive lessons of the pandemic: “It is possible to treat a crisis like a crisis, it is possible to put people’s health above economic interests, and it is possible to listen to the science.”

Yes, but these are possibilities — it’s also possible to treat a crisis in such a way that one uses it to obfuscate other crises (like: because of the pandemic we should forget about global warming); it’s also possible to use the crisis to make the rich richer and the poor poorer (which effectively happened in 2020 with an unprecedented speed); and it’s also possible to ignore or compartmentalize science (just recall those who refuse to take vaccines, the explosive rise of conspiracy theories, etc.). Scott Galloway gives a more or less accurate image of things in our corona time:


We are barrelling towards a nation with three million lords being served by 350 million serfs. We don’t like to say this out loud, but I feel as if this pandemic has largely been invented for taking the top 10% into the top 1%, and taking the rest of the 90% downward. We’ve decided to protect corporations, not people. Capitalism is literally collapsing on itself unless it rebuilds that pillar of empathy. We’ve decided that capitalism means being loving and empathetic to corporations, and Darwinist and harsh towards individuals.

So which is Galloway’s way out, how should we prevent social collapse? His answer is that “capitalism will collapse on itself without more empathy and love”: “We’re entering the Great Reset, and it’s happening quickly. Many companies will tragically be lost to the economic fallout of the pandemic, and those that do survive will exist in a different form. Organizations will be far more adaptable and resilient. Distributed teams currently thriving with less oversight will crave that same autonomy going forward. Employees will expect executives to continue leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity.”

But, again, how will this be done? Galloway proposes creative destruction that lets failing business fail while protecting people who lose jobs: “We let people get fired so that Apple can emerge and put Sun Microsystems out of business, and then we take that incredible prosperity and we’re more empathetic with people.”


The problem is, of course, who is the mysterious “we” in the last quoted sentence, i.e., how, exactly, is the redistribution done? Do we just tax the winners (Apple, in this case) more while allowing them to maintain their monopolist position? Galloway’s idea has a certain dialectical flair: the only way to reduce inequality and poverty is to allow the market competition to do its cruel job (we let people get fired), and then… what? Do we expect market mechanisms themselves to create new jobs? Or the state? How are “love” and “empathy” operationalized? Or do we count on the winners’ empathy and expect they will all behave like Gates and Buffett?

I find this supplementation of market mechanisms by morality, love, and empathy utterly problematic. Instead of enabling us to get the best of both worlds (market egotism and moral empathy), it is much more probable that we’ll get the worst of both worlds.

The human face of this “leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity” are Gates, Bezos, Zuckenberg, the faces of authoritarian corporate capitalism who all pose as humanitarian heroes, as our new aristocracy celebrated in our media and quoted as wise humanitarians. Gates gives billions to charities, but we should remember how he opposed Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a small rise in taxes. He praised Piketty and once almost proclaimed himself a socialist — true, but in a very specific twisted sense: his wealth comes from privatizing what Marx called our “commons,” our shared social space in which we move and communicate.

Gates’s wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of the products Microsoft is selling (one can even argue that Microsoft is paying its intellectual workers a relatively high salary), i.e., Gates’s wealth is not the result of his success in producing good software for lower prices than his competitors, or in higher “exploitation” of his hired intellectual workers. Gates became one of the richest men in the world through appropriating the rent for allowing millions of us to communicate through the medium that he privatized and controls. And in the same way that Microsoft privatized the software most of us use, personal contacts are privatized by our Facebook networking, Amazon book buying, or Google searching.

There is thus a grain of truth in Trump’s “rebellion” against digital corporate powers. It is worth watching the War Room podcasts of Steve Bannon, the greatest ideologist of Trump’s populism: one cannot but be fascinated by how many partial truths he combines into an overall lie. Yes, under Obama the gap that separates wealthy from poor grew immensely, big corporations grew stronger… but under Trump this process just went on, plus Trump lowered taxes, printed money mostly to save big companies, etc. We are thus facing a horrible false alternative: a big corporate reset or nationalist populism, which turns out to be the same. “The great reset” is the formula of how to change some things (even many things) so that things will basically remain the same.

So is there a third way, outside the space of the two extremes of restoring the old normality and a Great Reset? Yes, a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done — Greta Thunberg made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis as what it is, part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over economy. Third, we should rely on science — rely on but not simply accept it as the agency which makes decisions.

Why not? Let’s return to Habermas with whom we began: our predicament is that we are compelled to act while we know we don’t know the full coordinates of the situation we are in, and non-acting would itself function as an act. But is this not the basic situation of every acting? Our great advantage is that we know how much we don’t know, and this knowing about our not-knowing opens up the space of freedom. We act when we don’t know the whole situation, but this is not simply our limitation: what gives us freedom is that the situation — in our social sphere, at least — is in itself open, not fully (pre)determined. And our situation in the pandemic is certainly open.

We learned the first lesson now: “shutdown light” is not enough. They tell us “we” (our economy) cannot afford another hard lockdown — so let’s change the economy. Lockdown is the most radical negative gesture within the existing order. The way beyond, to a new positive order, leads through politics, not science. What has to be done is changing our economic life so that it will be able to survive lockdowns and emergencies that are for sure awaiting us, in the same way that a war compels us to ignore market limitations and find a way to do what is “impossible” in a free market economy.

Back in March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, then the US Secretary of Defense, engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” things we don’t know that we know — which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

If Rumsfeld thought that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” the threats from Saddam Hussein about which we do not even suspect what they may be, what we should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the “unknown knowns,” the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves.

We should read Habermas’s claim that we never knew so much about what we don’t know through these four categories: the pandemic shook what we (thought we) knew that we knew, it made us aware of what we didn’t know that we didn’t know, and, in the way we confronted it, we relied on what we didn’t know that we know (all our presumptions and prejudices which determine our acting although we are not even aware of them). We are not dealing here with the simple passage from not-knowing to knowing but with the much more subtle passage from not-knowing to knowing what we don’t know — our positive knowing remain the same in this passage, but we gain a free space for action.

It is with regard to what we don’t know that we know, our presumptions and prejudices, that China (and Taiwan and Vietnam) did so much better than Europe and the United States. I am getting tired of the eternally repeated claim “Yes, the Chinese contained the virus, but at what price…” I agree that we need a Julian Assange to let us know what really went on there, the whole story, but the fact is that, when the epidemic exploded in Wuhan, they immediately imposed lockdown and put on a standstill the majority of production in the entire country, clearly giving priority to human lives over economy — with some delay, true, they took the crisis extremely seriously.

Now they are reaping the reward, even in economy. And — let’s be clear — this was only possible because the Communist Party is still able to control and regulate economy: there is social control over market mechanisms, although a “totalitarian” one. However, again, the question is not how they did it in China but how should we do it. The Chinese way is not the only effective way, it is not “objectively necessary” in the sense that, if you analyze all the data, you have to do it the Chinese way. The epidemic is not just a viral process, it is a process that takes place within certain economic, social, and ideological coordinates which are open to change.

Now, at the very end of 2020, we live in a crazy time in which the hope that vaccines will work is mixed by the growing depression, despair even, due to the growing number of infections and the almost daily discoveries of the new unknowns about the virus. In principle the answer to “What is to be done?” is easy ­here: we have the means and resources to restructure health care so that it serves the needs of the people in a time of crisis, etc. However, to quote the last line of Brecht’s “In Praise of Communism” from his play Mother, “It is the simple thing, that is so hard to do.”

There are many obstacles that make it so hard to do, above all the global capitalist order and its ideological hegemony. Do we then need a new Communism? Yes, but what I am tempted to call a moderately conservative Communism: all the steps that are necessary, from global mobilization against viral and other threats to establishing procedures which will constrain market mechanisms and socialize economy, but done in a way which is conservative (in the sense of an effort to conserve the conditions of human life — and the paradox is that we will have to change things precisely to maintain these conditions) and moderate (in the sense of carefully taking into account unpredictable side effects of our measures).

As Emmanuel Renault pointed out, the key Marxian category that introduces class struggle into the very heart of the critique of political economy is that of the so-called “tendential laws,” the laws which describe a necessary tendency in capitalist development, like the tendency of the falling profit rate. (As Renault noted, it was already Adorno who has insisted on these dimensions of Marx’s concept of “Tendenz” that makes it irreducible to a simple “trend.”) Describing this “tendency,” Marx himself uses the term antagonism: the falling rate of profit is a tendency which pushes capitalists to strengthen workers’ exploitation, and workers to resist it, so that the outcome is not predetermined but depends on the struggle — say, in some welfare-states, organized workers forcing the capitalists to make considerable concessions.

The Communism I am speaking about is exactly such a tendency: reasons for it are obvious (we need global action to fight health and environmental threats, economy will have to be somehow socialized…), and we should read the way global capitalism is reacting to the pandemic precisely as a set of reactions to the Communist tendency: the fake Great Reset, nationalist populism, solidarity reduced to empathy.

So how — if — will the Communist tendency prevail? A sad answer: through more repeated crises. Let’s put it clearly: the virus is atheist in the strongest sense of the term. Yes, it should be analyzed how the pandemic is socially conditioned, but it is basically a product of meaningless contingency, there is no “deeper message” in it (as they interpreted plague as a god’s punishment in the Medieval times). Before choosing the famous Virgil’s line on “acheronta movebo” as the motto of his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud considered another candidate, Satan’s words from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “What reinforcement we may gain from Hope, / If not what resolution from despair.”

If we cannot get any reinforcement from hope, if we are compelled to admit that our situation is hopeless, we should gain resolution from despair. This is how we, contemporary Satans who are destroying our earth, should react to the viral and ecological threats: instead of looking vainly for reinforcement in some hope, we should accept that our situation is desperate, and act resolutely upon it. To quote Greta Thunberg again: “Doing our best is no longer good enough. Now we need to do the seemingly impossible.”

Futurology deals with what is possible, we need to do what is (from the standpoint of the existing global order) impossible.

Slavoj Žižek is the author of over thirty books and has been called the "most dangerous philosopher in the West."  BY WHO 



Guattari and Negri, (2010) New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty. Autonomedia.
Origianlly published in French (1985) as Les Nouveaux Espaces de Liberte, and then in English (1990) as Communists Like Us. 
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ALBERTA 9 UCP MLA'S & STAFF FLEW THE COOP* FOR XMAS

Seriously? Defiant Kenney Defends Holiday Travels by MLAs, Ministers, Staff

As criticism over politicos’ flouting of COVID-19 guidelines grows, Alberta premier refuses to penalize offenders.

David Climenhaga Today | TheTyee.

Some constituents welcomed Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Tracy Allard back from her Hawaiian vacation with a banner at her Grande Prairie constituency office. Photo from MyGrandePrairieNow.com via Twitter.


Aloha, Alberta! Jason Kenney doesn’t give a hoot* what you think.

That’s the key takeaway from the premier’s defiant New Year’s Day news conference about the cabinet minister who jetted off for a Hawaiian vacation while she was supposedly responsible for the province’s emergency management and boss of the civil servant running Alberta’s leisurely COVID-19 vaccine rollout, not to mention other vacationing United Conservative Party MLAs and political staffers.

There will be no consequences.

Not for Municipal Affairs Minister Tracy Allard.

Not for any of the missing MLAs, if we could even find out which ones were missing. Not for the government press secretaries sunning themselves on the beaches of Hawaii or visiting relatives in the United Kingdom. (By Sunday, the list included two other UCP cabinet ministers, two other MLAs and four UCP political staffers.)
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Kenney’s reasoning can be summarized as follows:

I didn’t actually tell them they shouldn’t be travelling during a pandemic. My bad.

Air travel is safer than visiting your granny.

“There is no public health order or legal barrier,” so no rules were broken.

When I told my ministers, MLAs and flunkies to come home, they all did.

WestJet, which is based in Calgary, ya know, needs the money or they’ll go broke.

There will be apologies, and there’s a new no-travel rule, so we can all just move along, please?

Kenney’s justification, if you can call it that, was as follows: “I don’t think it’s reasonable for me as a leader to sanction people who very carefully followed the public health orders and the legal requirements.”

And how do we know they followed the rules? Well, I guess that’s for them to know and us to find out.

The premier claimed the province is encouraging travel. Meanwhile, the Alberta government’s COVID-19 travel restrictions page continues to state “Avoid non-essential travel outside Canada until further notice. The Canada/U.S. border remains closed to non-essential travel.”

You just can’t make this stuff up. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who fired Finance Minister Rod Phillips for doing the same thing, looks like a statesman by comparison. And the NDP removed Manitoba MP Niki Ashton from her shadow cabinet posts for travelling to Greece to visit a sick relative without informing party Leader Jagmeet Singh.

Social media commentators called Kenney’s news conference the most outrageous event in Alberta political memory since Ralph Klein got drunk and threw pocket change at the residents of an Edmonton men’s shelter.


Arguably, though, this is worse. We’re talking about putting people’s lives in danger, and undermining the whole fight against COVID-19, not just acting like a drunken jackass. Remember, Klein had a driver, and he even made a stab at quitting drinking.

You have to give Kenney credit for his sheer brass. The man has no shame. There will be one set of rules for insiders, another for the rest of us, and if you don’t like it, I guess you can move. All done in the unshakable conviction the UCP will win the next election no matter what anyone says.

The premier claimed he was unaware until Tuesday that Allard was in Hawaii. As former NDP and Progressive Conservative cabinet ministers explained, that’s not the way it works.

“Any minister who is out of the province is covered by another minister,” tweeted former Alberta NDP leader and cabinet member Brian Mason. “The Premier’s office and the bureaucracy ensure it. Papers are signed, etc. It’s all very official. If @Jkenney says he didn’t know that @TracyAllardUCP was in Hawaii, then he’s lying.”



What If Jason Kenney Did Take Responsibility? READ MORE

Kenney did admit one thing everyone already knew: that Jamie Huckabay, his chief of staff, had been vacationing in England when Canada closed its borders to flights from the U.K. because of the new, more highly infectious variant of the coronavirus.

No problem, though. Huckabay just flew to the United States and came home from there. All right then! No rules were broken.

For her part, Allard is very, very sorry. And very, very relieved, as well, I’m sure.

At a late afternoon newser of her own, she explained that visits to Hawaii are a family tradition, but now that she’s thought about it she’s “truly and deeply sorry.” Luckily, family gatherings are only prohibited if you can’t afford to travel overseas. Like I said, you can’t make this stuff up.Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Tracy Allard’s Christmas post on Twitter made it appear she was in the legislature. She was in Hawaii. Photo via Twitter.

Allard was out of the country from Dec. 19 to Dec. 28, so that means she was in Hawaii when she posted a photo of herself by the Christmas tree in the legislature’s rotunda on Instagram. Obviously this was intended to give the impression she was here in Alberta.



Kenney Dithers as the Coronavirus Crushes Alberta  READ MORE

The premier spent lots of time at his media conference blaming the federal government for Alberta’s vaccination program, which is as slow as molasses in springtime. Of course there was no acknowledgment of the fact other provinces are doing better despite having the same federal government.

Now that the horses are gone, Kenney has ordered the barn door slammed shut. That is to say, now that the holiday season is almost over, he has issued a directive telling staffers and elected officials to stay home.

Even Postmedia’s Rick Bell, normally the most loyal of Kenney loyalists in media, said he was “gobsmacked” by what Premier Kenney had to say.

It’s hard to take issue with that.

But then, look at it from Kenney’s point of view. If he fired Allard for this, he might end up having to fire a lot more of his cabinet when it starts leaking out who else was enjoying a privileged winter holiday abroad.

Entitlement: It ought to be in the UCP’s name.

*No profanity was used in the composition of this column. That was a challenge.


David J. Climenhaga is an award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet and trade union communicator. He blogs at AlbertaPolitics.ca, where this column first appeared. Follow him on Twitter at @djclimenhaga.

*ANY DAY NOW IT MAY BECOME 10

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BC AND INDIA
India’s Farmer Movement, Indigenous Land Defenders and Hidden Histories

The protests may be half-a-world apart. But they’re both based on a spiritual connection to the land.


Bal Dhillon Today | TheTyee.ca


A mural in East Vancouver depicts Indigenous people paddling out 
to the Komagata Maru in 1914 to provide food for those onboard. Photo submitted.

When 250 million workers joined the largest strike in human history last month to support the Indian Kisan Andolan, or Farmer Movement, the connection to Indigenous land protests in British Columbia might not have been instantly evident

And But the two struggles have much in common in their resistance against neoliberal nation states and the corporations that influence them. They also share a hidden history that aligns the struggles in a unique field of solidarity.

Indian farmers are fighting the central government over three bills that effectively hand the agricultural market to large corporations, letting them set prices, and turn formerly independent farmers into contractors under corporate control.

Punjabi farmers have taken their protests to the border of Delhi and created blockades on highways, while farmers from other parts of India are doing the same.

The majority of Punjabis in India follow the Sikh faith. Agriculture is central not just to Punjab’s economy, but also to its culture. During the march to Delhi, police brutalized the farmers with water cannons and batons. Despite this, the farmers practiced a central tenet of the Sikh faith, langar (free kitchen) and made food available to both protestors, bystanders and police.

In B.C., a different but connected battle is being waged. Hereditary Chiefs from the Wet’suwet’en Nation have opposed TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline across northern B.C. since it was proposed. This resistance has led to demonstrations and railway blockades across Canada.

Members of the Secwepemc Nation have been participating in blockades as well, including a group of land defenders called the Tiny House Warriors. They are resisting a project to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline, which is now owned by the federal government. The resistance continues, with rail disruptions and other protests. At each of these blockades, a Sacred Fire burns, a reminder to all present that this is a spiritual struggle.

Underlying these struggles is a little-known shared history between Indigenous peoples and Punjabi immigrants on the west coast, a history that won’t be found in official records or high school textbooks.

In 1914, 376 Indians on the Komagata Maru were refused entry into Canada based on the racist laws of the Canadian state. The ship sat in the Burrard Inlet for months before being forced to return to India.

Many of the passengers on the Komagata Maru were connected to South Asians already on the west coast through the Ghadar Movement, which was committed to achieving Indian independence from Britain and ending colonization around the world.

A century later, protesting farmers have invoked the names of Ghadar activists, including Bibi Gulab Kaur and Shaheed Kartar Singh Sarabha.

Oral history accounts from both Musqueam and Punjabi traditions share that while the Komagata Maru was in the Burrard Inlet, Indigenous people paddled out to the ship in canoes to provide food for the would-be immigrants. This history can be found on a mural in East Vancouver co-created and painted by Indigenous and Punjabi artists.

The mural includes the Musqueam and Punjabi words for “cousin.” The Punjabi word denotes a particular type of cousin — the children of an older brother of your father. In traditional Punjabi homes, brothers live together. Those born to the younger brother are born into a home with cousins already in it.

That’s the word Punjabis used for Indigenous people on the west coast. They recognized they had arrived in their cousins’ home. And that their new cousins’ parent was the land.

This history has been beautifully shared by the Nameless Collective Podcast hosted by three South Asian historians: Paneet Singh, Naveen Girn and Milan Singh. The Nameless Collective was also involved in curating the Komagata Maru mural.

Both resistance movements against corporate-backed neoliberal states have relied on the spirit of ancestral teachings, or “Soul Power.” While the material reality of colonialism has ended in India, but has not on Turtle Island, there are some commonalities in these struggles.

For farmers in India, resistance is about their livelihood. For many Indigenous peoples it is about decolonization. For both, it is about their spiritual beliefs and culture that are tied to land.

The founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak, was enlightened after bathing in the Kali Bein, a river that serves as a lifeline to farmers today. The Sikh faith teaches us to honour Divinity within land, air and water, to treat them as we would our mother and father.

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explored her spiritual traditions in her essay “Land is Pedagogy,” and found similar beliefs. She recounts the traditional story of Kwezens, who experiences “core Nishnaabeg values — love, compassion and understanding” at every turn.

“She learned to trust herself, her family and her community,” Simpson writes. “She learned how to interact with the spirit of the maple. She learned both from the land, and with the land.” Soul Power.

I invoke these spiritual beliefs and hidden histories in order to rediscover pathways of solidarity between global struggles against neoliberalism and corporate greed.

This is not an attempt to create a false equivalency between the two struggles, as settler colonialism continues to oppress Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island.

It is an attempt to discover and embrace what Indigenous communities and farmers in India may be able to teach us about our relationship to land.

Kanahus Manuel, one of the Tiny House Warriors protesting a pipeline on Secwepemc territory, spoke to me about the commonalities that these struggles share and the possibilities that solidarity can bring.

“We have to determine what solidarity looks like between our communities. Let’s start to build our solidarity how we wish to determine it. We don’t need to go by the old rules of the British crown. The spiritual connection between our fight is important — because the fight is never just physical. It’s a spiritual fight. It’s our spirit that drives us to fight. It takes a warrior spirit to stand up to the colonial state that is meant to kill us. It takes courage to stand up to an abuser — and that takes you to a higher state of enlightenment. We touch each other’s heart and soul by knowing each other’s movements and fighting against similar systems.”

“That’s one thing that’s in common — we have a history of resistance against the British crown. We both know struggle, because it’s in our blood,” Manuel said.

As the words of Indigenous Land Defenders resonate with me, I hear the words of the Punjabi poet Sant Ram Udasi, as his poems are being sung by protesters on the border of Delhi.

ਸਾਡੇ ਰਾਹਾਂ ਵਿੱਚ ਕੰਡੇ ਅਟਕਾਂਵਦਾ । Thorns stand in the way of our path
ਪੂੰਜੀਪਤੀ ਢਾਂਚਾ, ਨਾਗਾਂ ਤਾਈਂ ਪਾਲ, Capitalist structures grow giant snakes
ਇਹਨੇ ਕੀ ਕਦਰ ਸਾਡੀ ਜਾਨਣੀ । What value do we have?
ਕਾਹਦੀ ਏ ਆਜ਼ਾਦੀ ਅਸੀਂ ਮਾਨਣੀ । What kind of freedom is this to enjoy?
ਏਸ ਦੀ ਗ਼ਦਾਰੀ ਅਤੇ ਚਾਲ ਸਰਮਾਏਦਾਰੀ, Capitalists have betrayed us and tricked us
ਔਖੀ ਹੁਣ ਰਹੀ ਨਾ ਪਛਾਨਣੀ, It’s not hard to recognize now
ਕਾਹਦੀ ਏ ਆਜ਼ਾਦੀ ਅਸੀਂ ਮਾਨਣੀ । What kind of freedom is this to enjoy?


Bal Dhillon lives and works on the unceded traditional lands of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Coast Salish Peoples. He is a secondary school teacher and community school co-ordinator and enjoys coaching basketball.


Read more: Indigenous, Rights + Justice, Food
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ERICA LAGALISSE'S BLOG

The Conspiracy of Kings, Class War and the Coronavirus


By Dog Section Press

Erica Lagalisse interviews Spartacus Tonans, Supreme Magus of the Kitchen Garden 007˚, author of “Occult Features of Anarchism” (PM Press, 2019)

So, is the Coronavirus part of a great global conspiracy?

A conspiracy called capitalism. The virus doesn’t need to be manufactured by governments to serve elite interests. States intervene in pandemics not to mitigate human suffering but to consolidate their power, so it is no coincidence that governments are taking the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to amplify police power, outlaw protest, and remind you to fear your neighbor. Of course, we are encouraged to live in solitary isolation, scrolling through the apocalypse, breaking only to play digital war games or watch crap porn while making Jeff Bezos rich buying shit from Amazon; however, it is also true that physical distancing will slow down the rate of infection and allow more people to survive. In regard to the politics of this new “Crown Virus”, like so many other Conspiracies of Kings, both things are true. This is the line I walk in my book.

Occult Features of Anarchism is a feminist take on anarchism, a critique of posh lefties, and the “true history of the Illuminati” all in one. How would you sum it up?

It’s a historical essay that shows how what we call “the Left” developed in complement with occult philosophy and New Age spirituality. In the hands of power, “magic” is brought to support authoritarian projects – politicians and fascists know this well. Yet if it were not for early revolutionaries mixing what they understood to be “ancient magical wisdom” with new materialist science and social discontent in new ways, we may not have seen the rise of Left revolutionary movements: Occult knowledge is adaptable to a variety of projects – pyramid schemes, levelling schemes, and pyramid schemes for levelling – we’d best not ignore it.

Can you tell us a bit more about your approach to “conspiracy theory”?

The phrase “conspiracy theorist” is code for low-class. Otherwise, university lecturers that discuss the covert operations of the CIA would also be called “conspiracy theorists”. This is worth noticing, because we need coalition-building now more than ever, and just as lefties should not write off hippie New Agers, neither should they assume that the “conspiracy theorist” must be a fascist. Of course, precisely because things can veer in this direction, it’s even more important that lefties come up with an effective way of engaging “conspiracy theorists”. In the process, we might consider the extent to which “conspiracy theory” involves valid social commentary. Some “conspiracy theories” are bonkers or blame Jews for global poverty, in which case, arguing with a fan is an important anti-racist intervention; but sometimes calling someone a “conspiracy theorist” is just class prejudice disguised by another name. Academics make their knowledge inaccessible in a variety of ways, which means that the best way people have to investigate why the world seems stacked against them is to ask the internet, which means people are going to find a lot of seductive “conspiracy theories”. I don’t think we should make fun of anyone for that. Also, the ruling class really does seem to be trying to kill us – it should be considered a fair guess.

Can you elaborate on the idea of “conspiracy theory” as critical social commentary?

Many YouTube videos tell stories of the Knights Templar finding secret treasure under Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem during the Crusades, with Illuminati-controlled Freemasons later using it to collapse the great world religions into one big banking tradition in the name of Lucifer. Yes, this story sounds different than Polanyi’s in The Great Transformation (1944), which also explains how global elites forsake traditional allegiances in the project of modern capitalist banking – social scientists will always prefer to highlight “systemic forces” rather than the whimsy of a few knights. The pop culture version is too allegorical for academic tastes but, given that many “conspiracy” buffs think banks are so bad they must be Satanic, it should be easy to see how some could become interested in anti-capitalism instead of fascism. (For academic readers, my advice in a nutshell is: replace Foucault with Bourdieu.)

Ok, getting to the good stuff: who are the Illuminati?

Once upon a time, there was the French Revolution, and all the Kings and Queens of Europe were very upset, so they formed the Holy Alliance. Known as the “Conspiracy of Kings”, it was they who pledged to cooperate in international publication bans, transnational surveillance, and deportation of militants by any sovereign threatened by “revolutionary inroads”. The Illuminati, on the other hand, started before the French revolution, and considered state and church corrupt. They criticized landlords and private property. Started by a Bavarian professor in 1776, it grew from five students to 54 members 3 years later, including people like Mozart. Members shared provocative Enlightenment ideas that are now commonplace, such as the value of science, while contemplating how to make society more egalitarian. In 1783 a member tattled to his employer and a repressive campaign began. This is the first time we hear claims made that all Freemasons are “under control” of the Illuminati – but it was the government talking then.

How has the story gotten switched around?

Partly because propagandists in the early 20th century sought to vilify Jewish people by associating them with banking and Freemasonry. There are also people in power now who gain from us ignoring capitalism and the World Trade Organization by focusing on Jews or lizardmen. The classical Art of Memory, revamped as magical practice in the Renaissance, was further re-invented within psychoanalysis and modern psychology, and is now used in the media to (mis)guide us. In fact, both mainstream news outlets as well as bros pumping out “conspiracy theory” videos employ this long-developing art of using sensational images to inspire certain mental associations and manipulate memory. We really are being fucked over by magical mind control, just not in the way some “conspiracy theorists” suggest. This is where I would suggest those suspicious of COVID-19 place their attention, by the way – the virus is authentic, but so is the dark art of Public Relations.

You explain that you write about the cosmology of anarchism to challenge atheist anarchists who look down on religious or spiritual people despite claiming to be anticolonial at every turn. But there’s got to be another story: what’s the scoop?

Well, there’s the fact that I love math. Are mathematical forms the underlying structure of the universe? Or is mathematics a language applied to an ineffable reality that always exceeds representation? It’s no coincidence that I study the history of sacred geometry in this first book, and study how activists fuck up “intersectionality” with algebra in my upcoming one – mathematics is very seductive, and not just for me. Why does symmetry impress us? To what extent is statistical thinking cultural or cognitive? Why do people love YouTube videos about the “Golden Mean” so much? Why does the Art of Memory work? Is Aby Warburg’s theory of images a form of Lamarckian evolutionism? How many triangles can I find in Hegelian philosophy? This kinda stuff is my jam. I used to draw geometrical diagrams instead of writing outlines for my term papers – I lost marks for it and was told it’s because I have “synesthesia”, some kind of mental illness. Wizard sounds better, don’t you think? Just like splitting yourself into pen names for an interview sounds better than you talking to yourself.

Erica Lagalisse is a writer, anthropologist, and postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics. They are the author of Occult Features of Anarchism.

lagalisse.net

@ELagalisse

Illustration by Clifford Harper  
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 ERICA LAGALISSE'S BLOG

Occult Features of Anarchism— an Ignota Book of the Year

Ignota.org

Ignota friends and family choose their books of the year, Part 2! <3 Accompanying Part 1, we offer this list of books and pamphlets chosen by Ignota’s friends and family that have accompanied their journeys. MORE SELECTIONS TO COME! 

Intended also in support of the book trade, especially fellow indies, we’ve added links to Bookshop.org, which unites independent booksellers to provide an alternative to Am*zon, or directly to publishers’ websites.

I attended a lecture by Erica Lagalisse, organised by David Graeber—rest in power—at the LSE last year, and I was in awe at the rigour she applied to looking at some of the awkward questions of radical political organising. She started off with an interogation of the awkwardness of anarchists when encountering the spirituality of Indigenous groups whose struggles they had adopted, and how anarchist groups in Canada and Mexico invariably frame Indigenous struggles through a gendered distinction between the spiritual, which they would sideline as domestic, private and not politically relevant, and what could be read as secular aspects of their lives and organising, and therefore properly political. From there, she ventured into a deep investigation of the roots of anarchism in occult philosophies, which is what is covered in this fantastic but brief book. It traces the historical origins of anarchism through to the secret society of the Illuminati. It is a reminder of the true meaning of conspiracy—to conspire, breathing together—where secret societies become the brithplaces of organising and as practices of imagining new possible worlds. And this time, not described in the innocent yet arrogant terms of being the chosen ones (whether in religious or revolutionary terms), but with all the fraught and problematic historical detail of people trying to do things in relation to power.

Erica Lagalisse is an anthropologist and writer, a postdoctoral research fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE), editor of Solidarity and Care During the Covid-19 Pandemic at The Sociological Review, and author of Occult Features of Anarchism – With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples (2019). She can be found on Twitter at @ELagalisse. 

Back to Erica Lagalisse’s Author Page




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 LEO PANITCH IN MEMORIUM

PM PRESS BLOG

The convivial, practical road to socialism: a tribute to Leo Panitch

By Hilary Wainwright
Red Pepper Magazine
December 29th, 2020

December 29, 2020 · 7 min read

It is striking that the widespread grief at the untimely death of Leo Panitch is not simply for the passing of a brilliant socialist intellectual but also for the shared personal loss of a warm, kind and truly comradely human being. Leo’s influence has come as much from his spirit of generosity and conviviality as through his arguments. For him the two were inseparable.

Without implying that he was a saint, Leo lived and advocated a socialism whose appeal is exactly the conviviality and kindness that flows from mutual respect for the dignity and equality of all people, and for the social and economic conditions that can make this a universal condition. He prefigured socialism in his everyday comradeship and collaborative ways of working. It is for this reason that his many comrades now feel as though part of the foundations of our very being have been pulled from beneath us.

Leo’s characteristic ability to live his socialism was linked with his integration of theory and political practice. His recent thinking about strategy stressed the need ‘to start anew at creating the kinds of working-class political institutions which can rekindle the socialist imagination’.

It was an emphasis he reiterated in response to the defeat of the Corbyn-led Labour Party, which for Leo revealed a fundamental absence of organised forces behind the leadership’s radical socialist policies. His argument came from both a theoretical understanding of the unequal balance of power and from practical experience of the difficulties and necessities of rebuilding a politically conscious working-class organisation – as distinct from merely obtaining the official support of individual trade union leaders.

The development of Leo’s theoretical work was always combined with a practical immersion in socialist organising. This ranged from involvement in student and worker strikes at the University of Manitoba, Canada, where he first went to university, to his later work with Greg Albo, Sam Gindin and others in the Socialist Project in Toronto. The development of Leo’s theoretical work was always combined with a practical immersion in socialist organising

From these and many other experiences, Leo took a detailed understanding and intuitive ‘feel’ for the material realities of organising sustained working-class power and of the institutional and mental blockages such organising faces. This animated his writings and his editorial leadership, with Colin Leys and then Greg Albo, of the Socialist Register, an annual collection of writing on international issues confronting socialists. You can read Leo’s own Socialist Register essays 1979-2020, here.

Key to Leo’s vision of sustained and strategic working-class organisation is the development of political capacity. Recently, after analysing the failure of the Greek left party SYRIZA to realise its radically transformative promise when elected to government in January 2015, Panitch and Gindin concluded their book The Socialist Challenge Today by arguing that: ‘If a socialist government is not to be stymied by the inherited state apparatuses, decisive focus on developing the agency and capacity for state transformation will be required.’

Leo’s multiple engagements in developing practical political capacity ranged from his inspirational teaching as professor at York University, where many of his PhD students became writers for Socialist Register, to his supportive involvement with The World Transformed (TWT) political education network. At TWT events, not only were Leo’s talks tours de force, he would also work with TWT organisers on TWT’s own approach to political education.

He supported and wrote for Red Pepper (see below) and other socialist publications in a spirit of posing questions and providing analytic and historical resources for us to answer them in our own way. He was never dogmatic or sectarian, regarding such stances as obstacles to the consciousness-raising that is at the heart of political education.

Leo’s understanding of the idea of ‘agency’, then, was not simply as a theoretical concept but as a material process to be built – often with difficulty and scarce human resources of time and funds – and against hostile actors who were often far better resourced. This recognition enabled him to understand two levels of politics that are in perpetual tension and yet somehow had to be combined to be effective: on the one hand, the level of day-to-day material struggle for immediate improvements in the lives of those facing poverty, wage slavery and every other oppression; on the other hand, pursuing strategies for an entirely different, socialist society.

It is a dilemma summarised in this crucial reflection by Tony Benn:

‘[T]he usual problem of the reformer [is] that we have to run the economic system to protect our people who are now locked into it while we change the system. And if you run it without seeking to change it then you are locked in the decay of the system, but if you simply pass resolutions to change it without consulting those who are locked in the decaying system, then you become irrelevant to the people you seek to represent … We cannot content ourselves with speaking only to ourselves; we must raise these issues publicly and involve the community groups because we champion what they stand for. We must win the argument, broaden the base of membership, not only to win the election but to generate the public support to carry the policies through.’

Leo drew attention to this far-sighted remark again and again. He now leaves the task of finding answers to this dilemma with us, among many other unresolved questions. But he set us an example as to how to address these questions and an implicit imperative to do so. ‘Leo thought on a bigger scale. His death doesn’t stop that kind of a dream,’ insists Gindin, his close collaborator and long-time friend. ‘He saw himself as part of a longer-term process that other people are going to have to continue.’

Each of us has to recreate the foundations that Leo’s shocking death took from under us. In his writing and remembered conversations he has provided sturdy rocks with which to do so. We have to mix the cement to put them together with the solidarity, love and political passion that he exemplified.

Leo Panitch’s writing in Red Pepper

Leo Panitch, 1945-2020

Hilary Wainwright is a Red Pepper editor

Leo Panitch’s PM works include In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, coauthored with Sam Gindin and Greg Albo, and an excellent interview with Sasha Lilley in Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult.

Back to Leo Panitch’s Author Page.

https://www.pmpress.org/blog/2021/01/01/the-convivial-practical-road-to-socialism-a-tribute-to-leo-panitch/ 

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Canada surges from 500,000 to 600,000 COVID-19 cases in two weeks

JANUARY 4, 2021

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Canada surpassed the grim milestone of 600,000 coronavirus cases Sunday, two weeks after passing half a million, underscoring the pandemic's persistence in the country during the end-of-year holiday period.

On Sunday afternoon, Canada recorded 601,314 COVID-19 infections since the start of the pandemic and 15,860 deaths, according to data from provinces and territories reported by the public television station CBC.

Ontario, Canada's most populous province, recorded 2,964 new cases in 24 hours on Sunday, and Quebec registered 2,869, a new daily record for the French-speaking province, which also has the country's highest death toll.

There have been 4,650 COVID-19 deaths to date in Ontario and 8,347 in Quebec.

Canada, a country of about 38 million, did not reach its first 100,000 cases until mid-June, three months after it recorded its first COVID-19 diagnoses.

Certain provinces, including Ontario and Quebec, imposed lockdown measures in multiple regions during the end-of-year holidays.

Responding to widespread concerns about people traveling to sunny destinations in defiance of official guidance, the government announced last week that anyone arriving in Canada is required to test negative for the virus.

Canadian authorities are strongly advising against non-essential travel abroad in order to stem the spread of the disease—a recommendation that some elected officials have ignored.

Ontario finance minister Rod Phillips was forced to resign due to backlash over a vacation he took to the Caribbean.

Over the past few days, more than half a dozen members of Parliament and politicians have admitted to holiday trips abroad.

Some have apologized.  NOT ENOUGH 
HAVE RESIGNED ESPECIALLY IN ALBERTA 
WHERE 9 UCP GOVT MEMBERS HAVE TRAVELE
THAT EQUALS THE FEDS AND ONTARIO MP/MPP'S
#FIREKENNEY

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