COOPER: Toronto swapping one 'slave trader's' name for another... seriously

Over the Christmas break I was reading a new book by Harvey Mansfield called Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth. I mentioned Mansfield in an earlier piece as having recently resigned, in his tenth decade, from Harvard, an inspiration to all of us senior profs. Another inspiration: this is one of his finest books.The term “effectual truth” was invented by Machiavelli and used only once by him, in chapter 15 of The Prince, where he contrasted it with what he called imaginative truth. Effectual truth considers the actual effect of political action rather than what the actor or his or her spokesperson imagines can be anticipated to result from a political initiative. Effectual truth deals with results, where imaginative truth deals with occasional justifications that may have nothing to do with what actually happened. On occasion however, effectual truth may be just what a political actor intended, whereas the imaginative truth advanced to justify it is really intended to mislead. Shocking, I know: sometimes politicians tell fibs.This is why, as I noted in an earlier column, what is often described as a bug is, in reality — or effectually — a feature. Sometimes what look to be mistakes are deliberate, which means, from the point of view of the political actor, they are not really mistakes.A familiar example, much beloved of economists, concerns the generous welfare schemes that are always justified in terms of humanitarianism, generosity, human dignity and sometimes human rights. Thus do $10-a-day childcare and “free” dental care become newly discovered human rights.However, the effective truth of comprehensive welfare, gimlet-eyed economists point out, is to increase the dependence of erstwhile citizens on the state. Perhaps that effectual truth was intended from the start, though welfare advocates can never admit it.Such a wider Machiavellian understanding of what seem to be egregiously foolish actions by the Government of Canada has been reinforced by many end-of-year observations in the legacy media.Some of these stories have been familiar for some time. For example, about a mile and a half (2.3 km.) of the 700-mile (1,150 km.) Trans Mountain pipeline, a $30 billion construction project, is being held up by the Canadian Energy Regulator (CER) because Trans Mountain wanted to install some 30-inch pipe (down from 36-inch pipe) along the Fraser River between Hope and Chilliwack B.C. Everyone involved, from Premier Smith to the oil sands producers, deplored the CER decision, particularly when the reason given was, as usual, the care of the environment, which was precisely Trans Mountain’s reason for reducing the pipe diameter.But what if stopping the pipeline or hugely increasing costs was the effectual truth of the original purchase of Trans Mountain from Kinder Morgan in 2018? Then the difference between the original purchase price ($4.4 billion) and the current cost is irrelevant. The mile-and-a-half yet to be completed pipeline is as good as 700 miles of non-construction.In the area of foreign policy, critics have made the same kind of observations. China and India are geostrategic rivals and not the best of friends. The Canadian government has managed to irritate them both. Why?And this achievement was followed by a vote in the United Nations where Canada supported the anti-Israel call for a ceasefire in Gaza. In return, one of the Hamas leaders publicly thanked Canada for supporting the terrorist outfit. Again, why?Remember 2015? That was when, flushed with victory and giddy with joy, Justin Trudeau proclaimed “Canada is back.” Now we know what he effectually meant: Canada is not a country that needs a coherent foreign policy. Indeed, we don’t need a foreign policy at all because, within Trudeau’s imaginative truth, Canada is not a country. In his words (plagiarized from John Ibbitson) we are a “post-national” state with a “pan-cultural heritage.”To common sense, such post-national and pan-cultural language is gibberish, but it does deflect attention from the effectual truth of Trudeau’s politics, endless Liberal rule, which is the whole Machiavellian point. That is, when journalists and citizens observe what Joe Oliver, a former Conservative minister and now a regular columnist in the Financial Post, called “Liberal contradictions that defy common sense,” such observations are not wrong. They are, however, beside the point..Here is one final example: the City Council of Toronto (where else ?) decided behind closed doors to rename Yonge-Dundas Square in downtown Toronto Sankofa Square.Two reasons have been offered for the curious name change.“Sankofa,” as every Calgarian surely knows, is an Akan word meaning “go back and get it.” Occasionally Sankofa is interpreted to mean “looking to the past to inform the future.” Toronto mayor Olivia Chow, who is clearly steeped in Akan culture, observed: “I couldn’t think of a better name for a gathering place at the heart of our city.” Call that the positive reason.Dundas supplied a negative reason. The sankofaphiles claimed that Henry Dundas (1742-1811) was (you guessed it) a racist who was connected to the Atlantic slave trade. According to the Toronto know-it-all and poseur, John Ralston Saul, Dundas was a “major slave baron.”Dundas was indeed connected to the Atlantic slave trade.He was an abolitionist.Now consider the Akan people. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and so contemporary with Dundas, they controlled the Ashanti empire in what is present-day Ghana. At its height the Ashanti ran both the largest slave-trading operation on the continent and was the largest slave-owning organization in Africa.As Patrick Dutil wrote recently in the Dorchester Review, “that leaves doddering old Toronto in the pickle into which John Tory has tipped it,” by his original 2020 plan to rename all thing Dundas in honour of George Floyd.The rest of the country can smile, as Machiavelli would have done, at the effective truth of cancelling Dundas.As with the other examples discussed here, the Dundas affair has an aspect more sinister than amusement. On the surface it is just a combination of ignorance and stupidity. The two, however, are connected. Even Olivia Chow, clearly an ignoramus, must be aware that she knows nothing of Dundas, the Akam, or Sankofa. But she cannot be ignorant of her ignorance, which makes such remarks and acts of hers so stupid.Likewise, we have known for a decade that the government of Laurentian Canada opposed the expansion of Trans Mountain. Now we see the effectual truth of that opposition, near endless delay, which will require higher tolls and lower through-put. This may not be the effective truth of pipeline cancellation, but it is, for the Laurentians in their undeclared war on Alberta, a good start.The superciliousness of a post-national state with a pan-cultural heritage that is at home with Sankofa and other cultural appropriations has its effectual truth as well: there is nothing that cannot be changed because there are no limits to woke power.If it were in wider circulation, Machiavelli’s terminology would bring a much-needed clarity to our political discussions, not least of all by exposing its damnable stupidity.

COOPER: Toronto swapping one 'slave trader's' name for another... seriously

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