In the coming days, Canada will see heightened activity in the nation’s ongoing gender identity politics debate. The “1 Million March 4 Children” protest against how gender identity is taught in schools, is set to occur on Wednesday, with synchronized events in more than 50 cities countrywide. Two days later, separate Toronto rally will spotlight two figures prominent in the gender-critical movement: Chris Elston, colloquially known as “Billboard Chris” for his distinctive method of protesting against childhood medical transition, and Josh Alexander, a Renfrew, Ontario student who was expelled earlier this year after objecting in class to his school’s transgender washroom policy.
Politics
Bill Richardson’s Love of the Game
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Every so often, someone asks me who my favorite politicians to write about over the years have been. I always place Bill Richardson, the longtime congressman and former governor of New Mexico, near the top of my list. I once mentioned this to Richardson himself.
“How high on the list?” he immediately wanted to know. “Top 10? Top three? I get competitive, you know.”
Richardson died in his sleep on Friday, at age 75. I will miss covering this man, the two-term Democratic governor, seven-term congressman, United Nations ambassador, energy secretary, crisis diplomat, occasional mischief magnet, and freelance hostage negotiator who even holds the Guinness World Record for the politician who’s shaken the most hands—13,392—in an eight-hour period.
“Make sure you mention that Guinness World Record thing,” Richardson urged me the first time I wrote about him, in 2003. “The handshake record is important to me.”
Why? I asked. “Because it shows that I love politics,” he replied. “And I do love politics. I love to campaign. I love parades. I don’t believe I’m pretentious. I’m very earthy.”
But why was the fact that he loved politics important?
“Because I’m sick of all these politicians these days who are always trying to convince you that they are not really politicians,” Richardson went on. I had noticed this phenomenon as well, and it holds up: that the slickest and most unctuous people you encounter in politics are often the ones who spend the most energy trying to convince you they hate politics and are in fact “not professional politicians.”
“I don’t mind being called a ‘professional politician,’” Richardson added. “It’s better than being an amateur, right?”
Richardson was an original. Born to a Mexican mother and an American businessman, he spent much of his childhood in Mexico City and identified strongly as Latino. He served as chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the 1980s and was the only Latino governor in America during his two terms in Santa Fe. Richardson spoke often about how his dual ethnic and cultural identities placed him in advantageous and sometimes awkward positions—“between worlds” (which he’d use as the title of his 2005 memoir).
His identities also placed Richardson in big demand as probably the most prominent Latino elected official in the country at the time. He absolutely loved being in big demand, and was milking his coveted status as much as possible when I first encountered him. That September, all of the 2004 Democratic candidates for president—John Kerry, Howard Dean, John Edwards, etc.—were straining to pay respects to Richardson after a debate in Albuquerque.
I was working for the Washington Post Style section at the time, and I found Richardson’s full-frontal “love of the game” quite winning. He was over-the-top and unabashed about the enjoyment he derived from the parade of candidates coming before him. “It’s fun to get your ring kissed,” Richardson told me that night, though he might not have said ring.
We were walking into a post-debate reception for another candidate, Senator Joe Lieberman. Like most of the Democratic VIPs in Albuquerque that night, Lieberman was an old friend of Richardson’s; they’d worked together on the 1992 Democratic Party platform committee.
“I wore this to curry favor with you,” Lieberman told Richardson, pointing to a New Mexico pin on his jacket. “You also saw that I spoke a little Spanish in [the debate].”
“I thought that was Yiddish,” Richardson said. Lieberman then got everyone’s attention and offered a toast to El Jefe.
Richardson let me ride around with him in the back of his SUV while he tried to hit post-debate receptions for all of the candidates. I noted that he’d instructed the state police driver to keep going faster and faster on Interstate 40—the vehicle hit 110 miles an hour at one point. When I mentioned the triple-digit speed in my story, it caused a bit of a controversy in New Mexico. Ralph Nader made a stink. (“If he will do this with a reporter in the car,” Nader said, according to the Associated Press, “what will they do when there’s no reporter in the car?”)
The next time I saw Richardson, a few months later, he shook his head at me and tried to deny that the vehicle was going 110. I held my ground.
“Oh, whatever. Fuck it,” Richardson said. “That was fun, wasn’t it?”
Richardson ran for president in 2008, but he quit after finishing fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire. I had since moved on to The New York Times and used to run into him on the campaign circuit. A few weeks after he dropped out, I went down to Santa Fe to interview him about the lengths that the two remaining Democratic candidates—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—were going to in an attempt to win his endorsement. Another Bill Richardson primary! What could be more fun?
“Oh, the full-court press is on like you wouldn’t believe,” he told me. The “political anthropology” of this was quite interesting too, he added. “Barack is very precise,” like a “surgical bomb,” Richardson said. “The Clintons are more like a carpet bomb.” He relished my interest in the pursuit of him.
“I want to make it clear that I’m not annoyed by any of this,” Richardson said of the repeated overtures he was getting from the candidates and their various emissaries. I quoted him saying this in the Times, but not what I said in response to him in the moment: “No shit, governor.”
I’ll admit that the notion of a pol who loves the game seems quite at odds with the tenor of politics today. People now routinely toss out phrases like our democracy is at stake and existential threat to America, and it’s not necessarily overheated. Fun? Not so much.
But thinking about Richardson makes me nostalgic for campaigns and election nights that did not feel so much like political Russian roulette. Presidency or prison? Suspend the Constitution or preserve it? Let’s face it: Death threats, mug shots, insurrections, and white supremacists are supreme buzzkills.
Richardson made it clear to me that he’d loved running for president—it was one of the best times of his life, he said—and he missed the experience of it almost as soon as he got out. But what he really wanted was, you know, the job. “I would have been a good president,” he said in Santa Fe in 2008. “I still believe that. Please put that in there, okay?”
If nothing else, the Clinton-Obama courtship was a nice cushion for Richardson as he tried to ease back into life in the relative quiet of his governor’s office. It also, he said, might get him a gig in the next administration. Richardson was 60 at the time and said he envisioned “a few more chapters” for himself in public life. Richardson told me he would have loved to be someone’s running mate or secretary of state.
“I’m not pining for it, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ve had a great life,” he told me. “I’m at peace with myself.”
He wound up endorsing Obama, who, after he was elected, nominated Richardson to be his secretary of commerce—only to have Richardson withdraw over allegations of improper business dealings as governor (no charges were filed).
Richardson devoted the last stage of his career to his work as a troubleshooting diplomat and crisis negotiator. He would speak to thugs or warlords, drop into the most treacherous sectors of the globe—North Korea, Myanmar—if he thought it might help secure the release of a hostage. Among the many tributes to Richardson this past weekend from the highest levels (Joe Biden, Obama, the Clintons), I was struck most by the ones from some of the people who knew directly the ordeals he worked to end: the basketball star Brittney Griner and the Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, who called Richardson “a giant—the first giant—in American hostage diplomacy.”
The last time I saw Richardson was a few years ago, in the pre-pandemic Donald Trump years—maybe 2018 or 2019. We had breakfast at the Hay-Adams hotel, near the White House. I remember asking him what he called himself those days, what he considered his current job title to be.
Richardson shrugged. “‘Humanitarian,’ maybe?” he said. But he worried that it sounded pretentious.
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The core issue at hand is preserving their agency and autonomy over the ideological content of their children’s education
As parents’ voices grow louder, there’s a perception in the progressive left that all of these emerging movements are rooted and inspired by “far-right” extremism. Many in leftist circles suggest that parental rights advocacy is a dog-whistle: a veiled attempt to advance anti-transgender policies. A recently leaked video from an Ontario Federation of Labour meeting offers a glimpse into how some of the province’s most influential union members perceive these protests. As one member notably stated during the meeting: “The fascists are organizing in the streets … . This is far more than a far-right transphobic protest. They’re fundamentally racist, they’re fundamentally anti-union, they are fundamentally transphobic, and it’s just a matter of time before they come for us.”
It’s a grave mistake to deride the parental collective pushing back against the status-quo as fascist sympathizers motivated by transgender hate. A glance past such alarmist rhetoric reveals that — while a fringe group of hate has always existed — the concerns many parents are championing are much more moderate than a “far-right” moniker suggests.
For many parents, the core issue at hand is preserving their agency and autonomy over the ideological content of their children’s education. They want transparency about what is being taught, the option to excuse their child from content they believe doesn’t align with their values, and the discretion to determine age-appropriateness for activities, such as certain reading material or events like drag queen performances at schools. Perhaps least surprisingly, parents want to be involved in the key decisions of their own child undergoing a social transition in the classroom.
The matter of social transition behind parents’ backs in particular is so condemning of their role in upbringing that it has thrust the entire gamut of gender identity matters into the national spotlight, revealing just how out of balance transgender accommodation has become. The manner in which the left has responded — by doubling down in their rhetoric and deriding parents as militant zealots, has played powerfully into the rapid growth of this grassroots movement.
Many parents, even amid those who will stand in protest, have little desire to limit other families’ decisions regarding gender teachings and expression for their children. They realize that their objective of ensuring their own parental autonomy is intertwined with safeguarding those same freedoms for other families as well.
So where do we go from here? What might a balanced approach to parental rights look like within the nuanced landscape of gender identity politics? Fortunately, we need not start from scratch; history offers us a model for the coexistence of diverse ideologies within our educational institutions. Look no further than religion.
Amid religious diversity, we teach acceptance. Students are taught to make space for varied faith expression among their peers, whether through clothing or other customs, and with a strong desire to maintain neutral, religious symbols are not adorned by the institution. The lesson for students is to embrace and include, even where personal beliefs diverge; Meanwhile, the guiding principle for the institution is to avoid actions that display favouritism toward any specific religious doctrine.
Such a solution could address a significant portion of the concerns fuelling the rising parental unrest. Moderate parents would applaud such an education system, and this would still be inclusive of transgender students. But in order for this to be realized, the two factions moving ever further apart will first need to come to the table and talk. Given the recent rhetoric from progressive quarters, the prospect of this dialogue anytime soon appears distant.
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A month after Global Affairs Canada told CBC News it was looking into claims that the Polish government asked one of its diplomats in Canada to gather information on a former Alberta cabinet minister, the dismissed consul general at the centre of the affair says he still hasn’t heard from the department on the matter.
Andrzej Mańkowski told CBC News the only official he has heard from is a B.C. bureaucrat who asked him to return his diplomatic licence plates and identification.
“[Officials with Global Affairs] haven’t tried talking to me,” he said.
Mańkowski showed CBC News a copy of a letter dated Aug. 31 he received from B.C.’s Chief of Protocol for Intergovernmental Relations Lucy Lobmeier asking him to turn in his identity card and to return his diplomatic plates “within 30 days of this letter.” She also thanked him for his service.
Mańkowski alleges he was dismissed from his post in late July after he refused to carry out orders from the Polish government to gather information about Thomas Lukaszuk, a former deputy premier of Alberta who often provides commentary to CBC News about the province’s politics.
“It’s clear that Polish diplomacy during Communist times, the main responsibility was to collect information, to gather information on some Polish representatives abroad,” Mańkowski said, adding he felt as if the request was a throwback to that time.
“The analogy’s extremely evident.”
Last month, Global Affairs Canada said it was taking the allegations seriously.
Spying allegations ‘out of this world’: ambassador
In August, Lukaszuk said he believed he had been targeted by Poland’s department of foreign affairs over his activism against a controversial Polish pastor, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, who has private radio and television stations in Poland.
Rydzyk, who has ties to the Polish government, has been criticized for delivering sermons featuring homophobic and anti-Semitic views and for preaching against the European Union.
Lukaszuk also shared what he said were encrypted messages Polish government officials sent to Mańkowski asking him over the course of a year to prepare notes on the former Alberta politician.
CBC News has not independently verified these messages were official government communications. Mańkowski did not dispute their veracity in his interview.
“Asking for my opinion about Lukaszuk was just a kind of trap, was just a political test of my loyalty,” he said.
Poland’s Ambassador to Canada Witold Dzielski called the allegation “totally absurd.”
“The idea of Polish diplomacy spying on a former provincial politician … it’s really out of this world,” Dzielski said.
He said he has never met Lukaszuk and did not know of his previous career in politics before Lukaszuk emailed him about an unrelated consular matter long before the reports about Mańkowski came out.
Dzielski said that if the notes cited by Lukaszuk are real, they were leaked illegally because they would constitute private diplomatic communications.
The affair has captured attention in Polish media, where the story first broke.
In July, Polish opposition politicians cited the messages released by Lukaszuk when they asked Piotr Wawrzyk, a secretary of state in the government’s foreign affairs department, whether Mańkowski was dismissed because he refused to spy on Lukaszuk.
In reply, Wawrzyk said the government could recall a diplomat who refused to carry out an assignment.
Wawrzyk, who was also a deputy foreign minister, has since been fired himself over an unrelated matter both local media outlets and Reuters have linked to a clandestine scheme awarding migrants visas in exchange for cash.
On Saturday, The Associated Press noted he had been hospitalized following an apparent sucide attempt.
“The minister, Wawrzyk, was laid off because of a totally different subject,” Dzielski said.
He pointed out that those documents were cited by opposition politicians in the context of a heated election campaign.
Dzielski� also said it’s normal for diplomats to be asked to gather information on notable members of diaspora communities.
‘A very marginal conversation’
“We are working very closely with them,” he said. “It is obvious and natural, and it is an element of diplomatic workshops, that we provide and we build ourselves opinions about the quality of cooperation with particular actors.”
He said Global Affairs has spoken to him about the allegations. “We had a very marginal conversation on this which reflects the level of seriousness of this topic,” he said.
A NATO member, Poland has worked closely with Canada to help out its neighbour Ukraine ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion last year.
Asked for comment, Global Affairs said in a media statement it “continues to work closely with security and intelligence community partners to assess the situation and identify next steps as appropriate.”
The department said last month it had contacted Lukaszuk and that it took the responsibility of protecting Canadians from “transnational repression” very seriously.
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The Current20:05Putting politics aside to tackle the housing crisis
Political leaders of all stripes must find a way to work together to solve the housing and climate crises impacting Canadians, says former Conservative MP Lisa Raitt.
“Toronto is the best example. NDP mayor, provincial premier who’s Conservative, federal Liberal who’s the prime minister,” said Raitt, co-lead of the new non-governmental Task Force for Housing and Climate, which launched Tuesday.
“And if they don’t figure this out, one voter is going to punish them all.”
The new task force is concerned with accelerating the construction of new homes, while ensuring that’s done in a sustainable way. In a press release, the group of former city mayors, planners, developers, economists and affordable housing advocates said it intends to convene until April 2024 to develop policy recommendations. The work is supported by the Clean Economy Fund, a charitable foundation.
Raitt held several senior cabinet posts under former prime minister Stephen Harper. But as co-lead of the task force, Raitt said she won’t engage in the political partisanship that she thinks “poisons the well” around these issues.
“Part of the reason why we’re coming together as the task force is to have a real pragmatic and practical conversation about these issues instead of weaponizing it into a political arena, and finger pointing back and forth,” she told The Current’s Matt Galloway.
Justin Trudeau announced funding to build more housing in London, Ont., as he and Liberal MPs kicked off their caucus retreat. The agreement comes as the government faces growing pressure to help make housing more affordable.
Canada needs to build an extra 3.5 million new units by the end of the decade, over and above what’s already in the works, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. A report this week showed rental costs have increased 9.6 per cent from Aug. 2022 to 2023, to an average now of $2,117 a month.
This week, the federal government announced it would cut the federal goods and services tax (GST) from the construction of new rental apartments, in an effort to spur new development. The Liberal government also pledged $74 million to build thousands of homes in London, Ont., — the first in what it hopes will be a series of agreements to accelerate housing construction.
Speaking in London on Wednesday, Housing Minister Sean Fraser called on municipalities to “legalize housing,” urging them to remove “sluggish permit-approval processes” and zoning obstacles if they expect federal investment in housing construction.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre took aim at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s housing plans Thursday, saying the Liberal government’s ‘inflationary deficits’ and ‘taxes and bureaucracy’ are holding back construction of new homes.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre criticized the government’s plans as not going far enough, while pointing out it echoes some of his party’s proposals. He’s proposed measures that tie federal funding to the number of housing starts. Funding would be withheld from cities that fail to increase the number of homes built by 15 per cent, while cities that pass that threshold would receive bonuses.
Poilievre’s proposals also include a “NIMBY” fine on municipalities that block construction because of opposition from local residents, and the sale of 15 per cent of federally owned buildings so the land can be used to build affordable homes.
Don Iveson, former mayor of Edmonton and co-lead of the task force, said he understands why partisan politics can creep into the debate — but Canadians expect more.
He said the task force intends “to help all orders of government” understand what’s needed to tackle these problems from an economic, technical and planning perspective.
“We’re not going to be able to solve the housing crisis [by] building housing the way we built it for the last several generations,” said said Iveson, who was mayor of Edmonton from 2013 to 2021.
Your kids need a place to live: Raitt
Iveson said the challenge of scaling up housing construction will require some new ways of thinking.
That might mean a greater emphasis on automation and building houses from components prefabricated off-site, which he described as “essentially a more factory approach” that could also reduce construction costs.
Raitt said the task force will examine where houses are built, and in what kind of density, to ensure scaling up can “get the most bang for the buck.”
That might mean Canadians might need to have difficult conversations, including whether to build multi-storey buildings instead of single-family homes.
Raitt said older Canadians who already own their own homes might not like the idea of taller buildings going up around them, but they should speak to their kids about it.
CBC’s Sohrab Sandhu reports on an unorthodox strategy where some people are deciding to buy homes with strangers.
“They don’t care if it’s going to be four, six storeys in a residential neighbourhood. They just want a place that they know that they can purchase,” she said.
“Talk about whether or not our kids are going to have a place to live, let alone rent, let alone own, let alone a house in the communities where they were brought up, because right now it’s not looking so good.”
Counting the cost of climate change
When it comes to climate change and sustainability, the task force’s goals come down to a “very simple equation,” Raitt said.
“Whatever we’re building now is going to be here in 2050. So if it’s going to be part of the calculation of our net-zero aspirations, whatever they’re going to be,” she said.
She said the task force will work to formulate ways to build housing that take emissions into account, but don’t include prohibitive costs that slow down the rate of construction.
“It’s going to be a little bit more costly to build with climate indications built in … but you’ve got to make sure that there’s policies surrounding that to make sure it still makes it affordable,” she said.
Officials say the fire, which is burning out of control as of Monday morning, is expected to grow.
Iveson said wildfires, floods, heat domes and extreme weather events are already disrupting the economy, as well as posing huge financial burdens for the Canadians caught up in them.
“Climate change is already costing us a fortune,” he told Galloway.
Building without those climate considerations “maybe seems affordable in the short term, but it’s false economy when it comes to the real costs ahead of us,” he said.
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