Flake news

One of the vital national tasks of a columnist is to regularly scan a rich diversity of mostly-liberal media in search of material that might be spun into a full-blown sarcasm-filled column. But there is also a regular flow of material that on its own does not justify a full-blown conniption or is technically outside my regular beat but still deserves to be derisively noted. In recent weeks, five such minor but irritating items cropped up.

Growth is cancer. A recent commentary in The New Yorker’s book-review briefs contained the following sentence from author David Pilling from his new book, The Growth Delusion: “Only in economics is endless expansion seen as a virtue. In biology it is called cancer.”

Now, critical assaults on policy-makers’ obsession with the statistical mess known as GDP have been circulating ever since the concept was implanted in economics by U.S. economist Simon Kuznets back in 1934. Even Kuznets said it would be folly to use GDP as a basis for measuring welfare and setting policy. But the economic-growth-equals-cancer equation is a little too much. Biology is not economics. People die. Peoplekind do not. Furthermore, focusing on growth is certainly a better alternative to the ideas touted by Pilling, which include pursing policies that will make us all “happy” and filled with a sense of “well being” rather than aiming for growth and letting people pursue their own happiness.

Wife beaters. In the latest issue of The Walrus, a glowing profile of Global Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland contained this quote of hers on the improved state of the world over the last century. “It’s important to remember that the arc of history is pretty positive,” Freeland said. How much more positive? “I’m a woman. I’m a wife. I’m a mother. One hundred years ago, I would’ve been beaten by my husband. That’s what happened to pretty much all women.

Look into that claim that pretty much all men beat their wives in 1917.

Fake public relations. The proposed $1.5-billion takeover of Canada’s largest construction company, Aecon, by China Communications Construction Co. Ltd. (CCCC) is making headlines. The risks associated with allowing a Communist state-owned enterprise into Canada were nicely laid out by Jack Mintz on this page in early January. “The last thing Canada should be doing is allowing foreign SOEs to renationalize our industry,” wrote Mintz.

But over at The Globe and Mail, the latest news on Aecon is the discovery that one of the prominent industry opponents of the deal, a man named Michael Beattie, seems to be a pretender who claimed to be a bigtime construction player. As the Globe’s Andy Willis writes, Beattie — with the help of Bay Street law firm Goodmans LLP and big-time PR agency Navigator Ltd. — opened doors and “made the rounds in Ottawa with politicians, media outlets (including The Globe and Mail) and the civil servants charged with reviewing the takeover under the Investment Canada Act.” Aecon says “We have been unable to find any evidence that Mr. Beattie is a ‘veteran construction industry executive.’” When it checked, the Globe couldn’t either.

Whether Beattie’s initiatives (he launched them back in August) helped prompt Ottawa’s decision to review the CCCC/Aecon deal isn’t known. But it sure would be nice to find out if the savvy pros at a famed Bay Street law firm and a major PR outfit — and many media — got hoodwinked by a no-name guy purveying fake news.

Trump the commie fascist: Back to The New Yorker, where no opportunity for Trump bashing is too small to be ignored. A recent review of a new Lenin biography by Victor Sebestyen noted that the first Soviet leader was a demagogic nutter. He scapegoated the vulnerable and evinced a particular animosity toward journalists, whom he lambasted for “sowing confusion by means of obviously defamatory distortion of the facts.” Lenin spewed obscenities. Adds The New Yorker with a wink, “He even had small, ugly hands.” Get it?

In 2016 the magazine ran the column “A Scholar of Fascism Sees a Lot That’s Familiar with Trump.” In Fascist Italy, “The film reel was to Mussolini as Twitter is to Trump.” And a couple of weeks ago, a short New Yorker feature declared Trump’s fixation on applause at his State of the Union speech to be identical to the applause mania that followed Josef Stalin.

Summing up: Trump is Lenin. And Stalin. Also Mussolini.

Too many men: Last week, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna introduced a 362-page omnibus bill to set up a new environmental regulatory regime for major energy projects. My plan is to read it soon, especially the new criteria evaluating projects for “gender impact.” In the meantime somebody sent in a transcript of her interview with Don Martin at CTV’s Power Play.

“Gender impact? How does that fit into a pipeline approval process?

“So I’m really glad you asked that, because people are like ‘well what is this gender thing?’ Well imagine that you have a huge number of people going to a remote community — many men. What is the impact on the community? What is the impact on women in the community? And actually, once again, smart proponents understand this, so they’re going to put measures in place. That’s all it is. It’s just taking a smart approach to thinking about … what’s going to be the impact of a major development in a particular area.”

“OK, that’s interesting.” Martin, a media veteran, was smart enough to know that when a feminist cabinet member in a feminist government talks about “many men,” it’s probably best just to say “that’s interesting.”