Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 10, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 FRIDAY JANUARY 10, 2025 Ideas, Issues, Insights Scenes from the apocalypse in Los Angeles H ERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — Scenes from the worst 24 hours in the history of Los Angeles. Four fires transform into massive flamethrow- ers, fuelled by 99 m.p.h. Santa Ana winds. They engulf three football fields every minute, swal- lowing trees, cars and lives in their paths. A man shoots video on his phone from inside his mostly glass house, flames raging on three of four sides. He tilts the camera down to his dog, whose eyes are huge. A local TV station cameraman in Pacific Palisades shoots live with one hand and holds a garden hose on a burning house with the other. You do what you can. My buddy in the Palisades texts: “There’s whole blocks on fire up here and no firefighters in sight.” Firefighters, grimy with ash, hook up to hy- drants only to find the water has run out. Panicked people run for their lives — literally. They hold dogs, photos, whatever they can carry. A young man in Altadena comes out his front door with a groaning backpack over his shoul- ders, eschewing his car and climbing instead onto his bicycle, knowing he’ll have to navigate roads clogged with abandoned cars, felled trees and fire trucks. A fire department bulldozer smashes aside abandoned Teslas, BMWs and Porsches at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Palisades Drive, shoving them to the side of the road like Hot Wheels, making a path for emergency vehi- cles. These people heard the warning “Get out of your cars if you want to live” and did. Their mistake? They didn’t leave their keys. An entire fleet of air tankers and fire chop- pers sit on the LAX tarmac, their bellies full of fire-retardant chemicals, rendered useless by a sky choked thick black. A 60-something father and his grown son set up a ladder against the gutter of a neighbor’s roof in Altadena while flames treat the house next door like kindling. The ladder falls, a third neighbour picks it up and holds it. The two climb up and begin spraying the shingles with their tiny hoses, while flames 20 feet away and 20 feet high rage, thirsty for more. The father turns his hose on the son for a full minute. “I asked him to,” the soaked son says. “The radiant heat was so bad I thought I was going to burst into flames.” A TV reporter stands in front of a burning home, begging a fire-tender to stop. A palm tree, its 50-foot trunk still adorned in glittering white Christmas lights, wears a crown of flames. A Malibu beach lifeguard tower dissolves into ashes, no help in sight, 100 feet from the limitless blue waters of the Pacific. Stunning beach-tickling Malibu homes — the properties of movie stars and TV directors — try on an entirely new interior decor: unquenchable fire, an element that doesn’t seem to care how many Oscars they’ve won. Seventy-seven-year-old actor James Woods breaks down in tears on live TV, grieving his Palisades home and his neighbourhood. “One day you’re swimming in the pool,” he says, “and the next day it’s all gone.” A film score composer checks his phone and finds his neighbour has sent a video. It tells the composer his three-month-old Palisades home, his two Steinways and all his sheet music are in ashes. Nothing left. Not every tragedy is on the screen. Propane tanks explode, glass doors on ovens shatter, metal street signs bang a dirge against parking lot rails, dogs bark, and ever, always, the relentless gales howl. A man leads two horses down a street, leaning against the hurricane-force winds. He wears goggles against the embers that are flying like sideways rain, hungry to start the next devasta - tion. The horses can only squint and toss their heads to and fro, itching to run. A writer thinks back on his 45 years spent in Los Angeles, off and on. He remembers the L.A. riots, the Northridge earthquake, the massive Mendocino fire, all of them paling compared with this. He’s never seen annihilation like this. These fires burn from the beach to the mountains, from Pasadena to the Palisades, from the Malibu trail- ers to Pasadena mansions. Some fully immolate in the time it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer. The dawn blinks awake in the black smoke, slowly revealing a hellscape too cruel for any Hollywood director to imagine. — The Washington Post History teaches us how to handle Trump DONALD Trump’s threat of 25 per cent tariffs against Canada — combined with his ongoing den- igration of Canadian sovereignty, including his recent threat to take the country “by economic force” — have Canadians rightly concerned about the immediate future. Unfortunately, the federal government’s initial reaction to Trump 2.0 has not inspired confidence. The tone was set with what longtime Liberal strategist Peter Donolo called outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “panicked — and de- grading — pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago.” The government’s $1.3 billion in border measures are, in a sense, even worse: answers to problems that exist only in Trump’s fevered imagination. As Canadian officials certainly know, Trump’s unhinged portrayals of illegal migration (up in recent years but far below the levels seen at the U.S.-Mexico border) and fentanyl imports (less than 20 kilograms of fentanyl in 2023 intercepted by the United States at its northern border) are ridiculous. Trump’s actual problem is reportedly the U.S. trade deficit with Canada (also a manufactured problem that’s actually a sign of American eco- nomic strength). These border policies are troublesome on their own. But they also won’t buy peace because this isn’t a policy discussion; it’s an exercise in domi- nation for domination’s sake. Appeasement — figuring out Trump’s price and paying it — will not work. It risks giving away the store. What will a Liberal or Conservative govern- ment sacrifice in the name of keeping the border open to commerce? How far is too far? This is Canada’s unenviable policy dilemma for at least the next four years: how to deal with an increasingly hostile U.S. while acting, and being seen to act, in Canada’s best interests. Canadian policymakers need to figure out how to draw, and how to recognize, the lines between actions in the national interest and sovereign- ty-extinguishing appeasement. Fortunately, history does provide some guid- ance. This isn’t the first time the U.S. has posed an existential economic threat to Canada. Two crises in particular, 136 years apart, offer import- ant lessons for navigating the next four years and even beyond. Our first lesson: Have many pre-existing plans. The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the U.S. permanently reoriented American views on their two borders. Almost overnight, security became a paramount concern, displacing the then-prevailing ideology favouring open borders and cross-border trade. The threat to the Canadian economy was as clear then as it is now. All of a sudden, the U.S. was demanding that its two neighbours do some- thing about the border. The only problem: the Americans didn’t have a plan because, ironically, they hadn’t previously paid much attention to border infrastructure. Fortunately for Canada, Canadian officials had been thinking a lot about how to modernize the border and had been pushing the U.S. to take border security seriously for a long while. As a result, when the U.S. rediscovered its northern border, Canada had a policy ready to go. The resulting agreement, the December 2001 Smart Border Accord, addressed both Canadian economic and U.S. security interests. Key ele- ments of the agreement were based on proposals that Canada had been promoting for years. The Canadian and U.S. economies remain at least as entwined as they were in 2001. That means Canadian federal and provincial govern- ments must arm themselves with non-improvised, made-in-Canada policies that will help ensure Canadian responses to imminent U.S. demands are done in the country’s best interests. The second lesson: Look east, west and north, not south. As I’ve argued previously, Canada-U.S. inter- dependence, once our greatest strength, is now a gaping vulnerability. But, again, we’ve been here before. In 1866, the U.S. abrogated the Canadian-Amer- ican Reciprocity Treaty with British North Amer- ica. Then, as now, the American economy exerted a strong gravitational pull on the northern British colonies. But that pull isn’t a natural phenomenon; it’s regulated by laws and treaties. Trade flows can be interrupted and laced with uncertainty. It was just such an interruption that in part spurred Ca- nadian political leaders to unite in Confederation, leading to the birth of Canada in 1867. Trump’s tariff threat, like the events of 1866, should remind Canadians that access to the American market can be impaired or cut off; it can never be 100 per cent guaranteed. Now, as Canada did more than 150 years ago, the country must reinvest in building cross-Canada economic, political and cultural bonds. For Canadian leaders, these history lessons offer a productive path forward. For citizens, they offer us a benchmark against which to judge our governments’ dealings with the U.S. Following both lessons will require a degree of nation-building that Canadians haven’t seen since the 1960s, significant state capacity-building and thoughtful, mature debates about what Canadians want their country to be. They also imply a degree of strategic thought that is currently hard to find in Canada’s federal and provincial capitals. But they also have the benefit of being pro- active, not reactive — of taking a situation not of Canada’s own choosing and deciding what to make of it. Blayne Haggart is an associate professor of political science at Brock University. This article was first published at The Conversation Can- ada: theconversation.com/ca. This article has been edited for length; the full text can be found online at winnipegfreepress.com. Forging another way forward IN Manitoba, as around the world, it has seemed that the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine is one of the most intractable, polarizing issues in recent polit- ical history. The options presented to us give us the impression that we must accept the totality of one position or the other — that solidarity with one community must come at the cost of empathy for another community. These camps are presented to us as a binary, and yet, there are many of us here in Manitoba, as there are in Palestine and Israel, whose loyalty is not with a camp or a side but to peace, to human rights, to justice, to hope. This does not mean we don’t have personal connections to these communities; on the contrary, we carry immense grief and fear for our family and friends in the region. But we also have room in our hearts to grieve and wish for safety for those with different last names or religions than ours and we know that there is another way, a better way, even in the face of such a devastating reality. Recently, in Manitoba, some of us who have been seeking another way to contend with the horrific violence in Palestine and Israel have begun to find each other. Those of us who refuse to accept the inevitability of mass killing, starvation, destruction, displacement and the dehumanization and fear used to justify it all. Those of us who cannot do nothing and yet have found it difficult to know what to do. Those of us who would rather have difficult conversations with each other — even when we don’t agree on everything — than sit comfortably in a social media echo chamber or bury our heads in the sand waiting for the horrors to end. Because we agree on what is important: the value of human life and dignity and an enduring hope for peace. Those of us who have been organizing these groups locally are inspired by peace activists on the ground in the region, who de - spite immense and ongoing trauma and loss, come together to fight for a better future in which Palestinians and Israelis can co-ex- ist in the land which they both call home. Two such groups in Manitoba are the local supporter chapters of Women Wage Peace and Friends of Standing Together. These are two of dozens of grassroots peace groups originating in Palestine-Israel, which are dedicated to coming together in broad coali- tions as a political alternative to the official leadership that has allowed the tragedy and injustice we see today to occur. Women Wage Peace (WWP) was co-found- ed by Vivian Silver, a Jewish Israeli peace activist from Winnipeg who was murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. WWP advocates for a political solution rather than a military one to the ongoing violence in Palestine-Isra- el, with significant participation by women. Together with its sister organization, Women of the Sun, WWP currently has more than 50,000 members of all religions and political stripes in Israel-Palestine. Here in Winni- peg, women who knew Silver or have been inspired by her legacy and WWP’s message have been meeting regularly. Among other initiatives, they are planning a workshop on compassionate listening that they hope will empower Manitobans to engage in difficult conversations and build bridges across com- munities in these polarized times. Standing Together is a grassroots social movement co-led by Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, who envision, and are com- mitted to building, “a society that chooses peace, justice, and independence for Israelis and Palestinians — Jews and Arabs.” Along- side other local peace groups, Standing To- gether has been organizing massive rallies in Israel, calling for a ceasefire agreement and hostage deal, sending aid to Gaza in the midst of the ongoing devastating bombard- ment from Israel and providing inspiring alternative political leadership where hope is in short supply. The Manitoba chapter of supporters, including Palestinians, Jews and others, meets regularly and recently hosted a storytelling event called Listening to Each Other, featuring Palestinian and Jewish stories of grief and hope. The local chapters of Standing Together and Women Wage Peace supporters are new, but determined. Despite the challenges inherent in our activism, the overwhelming response to us has been positive. Those who attend our meetings or events express their relief and gratitude in learning that they are not alone, that there are others who share their desire to create respectful peace and coexistence here at home and in Pales- tine-Israel. We have been honoured to learn from and collaborate with other groups with similar goals here in Manitoba. Emma Fineblit represents Manitoba Friends of Standing Together. Chana Thau represents the Canadian Supporters of Women Wage Peace, Winnipeg Chapter ETIENNE LAURENT / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Firefighters work from a deck as the Palisades fire burns a beachfront property Wednesday. RICK REILLY EMMA FINEBLIT AND CHANA THAU BLAYNE HAGGART ;