The Line Podcast

In this week's The Line Podcast, Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney discuss claims that Israel blew up a hospital in Gaza — including the part where, as it turns out, that did not happen. Rather, a Palestinian rocket misfired. They talk about the desire to create a moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel, a desire that makes tweeters and news editors alike quick to forget beheaded babies, and even faster to accept Hamas' claims of Israeli atrocities.

Then, The Line also talks about the CBC's decision not to use the word "terrorism" to describe Hamas; and why they think that decision is both defensible, but also not the one The Line would make. It is also, sadly, one the CBC only seems to make some of the time.

To round it out, the pair discuss dark clothing — namely, an RCMP campaign to encourage pedestrians not to wear dark clothing at night. This roused the usual condemnation from those who don't want police to blame the victim of vehicular accident. To which The Line says: “Yes, you're absolutely right. And nobody will care about how right you are when you're dead. Don't wear black at night."

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The Line is entirely reader funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work and worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  [email protected].

Get full access to The Line at www.readtheline.ca/subscribe

The Line's Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson discuss the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel; Israel's response in the Gaza Strip — and North America's progressives, who have left their assess hanging in the wind by applauding and condoning acts of violence that include the murder of children and sexual assault of Israeli women. Progressives are doing incredible damage to their own causes by justifying the violence of Hamas — a genocidal and theocratic terrorist organization — under leftist jargon like "decolonization." 

In other news, Canada's Supreme Court has ruled the federal government's environmental impact legislation — also known as C-69, or the "no more pipelines" bill — as unconstitutional. To the shock and surprise of everyone who expected this court to rule in Justin Trudeau's favour, the SCC agreed with the Alberta Court of Appeal: that C-69 oversteps provincial jurisdiction, and undermines the constitutional right of provinces to develop and manage their own natural resources. 

All this, and more, in the latest episode of The Line Podcast. And we warn our listeners, this is a hard one. Lot of emotion and not nice things to discuss.

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Plenty of other options here, too, if you’re not into the ones above.

Please subscribe and leave us a glowing review. This is an important part of trying to master the algorithms that now rule all our lives. If you really like us, help pay for our terrific new podcasting editors by hitting the little blue buttons below.

The Line is entirely reader funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work and worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  [email protected].

Get full access to The Line at www.readtheline.ca/subscribe

Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson on why the podcast proposals aren't as benign as the government makes them sound (and might believe). On the pending Google disaster. And why Canadians aren't as smart as we think we are (with all due respect to David Dodge). Plus: is the NDP bargaining with the Liberals, or we are seeing the first moves in their conscious uncoupling?

Enjoying The Line Podcast? Want other options for listening? No problem!

We’ve got plenty of options for you, and we’re pleased to report that the big three podcasting apps are all set up:

Spotify!

Apple!

Google!

Plenty of other options here, too, if you’re not into the ones above.

However you want to listen, please subscribe and leave us a glowing review. And share with everyone you know! And if you really like us, help pay for our terrific new podcasting editors by hitting that little blue button below. Either of the blue buttons, actually!

The Line is entirely reader funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work and worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  [email protected].

Get full access to The Line at www.readtheline.ca/subscribe

Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson on Canada humiliating itself by giving a Nazi a standing O, insulting our allies by promising to spend more on the military right before we announce we are going to spend less on the military, and, oh, God, we guess we’re debating the notwithstanding clause again. And more!

Enjoying The Line Podcast? Want other options for listening? No problem!

We’ve got plenty of options for you, and we’re pleased to report that the big three podcasting apps are all set up:

Spotify!

Apple!

Google!

Plenty of other options here, too, if you’re not into the ones above.

However you want to listen, please subscribe and leave us a glowing review. And share with everyone you know! And if you really like us, help pay for our terrific new podcasting editors by hitting that little blue button below. Either of the blue buttons, actually!

The Line is entirely reader funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work and worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  [email protected].

Get full access to The Line at www.readtheline.ca/subscribe

Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson bring you the first episode of The Line Podcast. And gosh, this week didn’t go the way we thought it would. Canada finds itself in a major dispute with a global superpower, again. Trudeau and his comms obsession is causing us problems, again. Doug Ford has to make a full retreat, again, this time on the Greenbelt. And Alberta picks a dumb fight with Canada, again, this time over pensions. 

Be sure to subscribe to us on YouTube or the podcast app of your choice — since this is brand new, it may take the players a few more days to find us in the vast, twisting labyrinth of the interweb’s many tubes, but we are already live on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and many others. You can find them all here.

The rest are coming — we are now at the mercy of the algorithms. Google Podcasts is taking its sweet time to connect with us — it’s working on the backend, but not yet publicly — but for those into Spotify and Apple, good news! Those are workin’ fine!

Spotify!

Apple!

Also, please subscribe to us on YouTube! That helps, too!

Even though this is no longer an experimental podcast, there might be a few bugs we still have to work out as we step into the future here. Please be patient, and please, please, please share our work, tell your friends, tell your enemies, tell total strangers, tell everyone. Spread the word of The Line!

But for now, enjoy the first episode of The Line Podcast.

The Line is entirely reader funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work and worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  [email protected].

Get full access to The Line at www.readtheline.ca/subscribe

Welcome to what is the final — we think? — edition of The Line’s experimental podcast. We started these 60 episodes ago just out of curiosity. Would people be interested? Would we enjoy doing it?

The answer to both questions is yes — we enjoy doing it, and thousands of you loveable weirdos listen to us every week. We’ve decided it’s time to punch things up a notch here, which is why we’re going to finally grow up, change into real pants and do a proper, edited podcast. That should start next week — the week after that, at the latest.

And yes, for those who keep asking, it will be available on all the usual platforms. But we’ll also offer it here, for those among you who are creatures of habit. And, yeah, we’ll keep swearing.

Many thanks to all of you who came along with us on this fun, weird experiment. We hope you like what’s coming next.

But for now, enjoy the latest, and probably last, experimental podcast.

The Line is entirely reader funded. If you value our work and worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  [email protected].

Get full access to The Line at www.readtheline.ca/subscribe

Your Line editors talk about the news that was, and will be, as the CPC convention gets underway in Quebec City. And also: the Ford government just needs to zip it. STOP TALKING.

The Line is entirely reader funded. If you value our work and worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  [email protected].

Get full access to The Line at www.readtheline.ca/subscribe

Your Line editors generally avoid culture war issues. There’s two big reasons for this. There are media personalities and entire outlets that devote their whole careers and output to rage-farming, and we decided early that those waters were being fished enough already. We wanted to do something different. But also, to be blunt, we think culture wars are traps. They’re like nuclear wars — no one wins them, and everyone loses when someone tries to.

We understand they’re great business, and that we might be richer if we’d simply declared for one side or another and then hammered away at that without pause. But that’s no way to live, and we think would leave the country worse off. We don’t want that. In our own way, we are trying to do some good here. Good for ourselves, certainly, but also good for Canada. We want this place to work.

Sometimes, though, you can’t avoid the culture wars. Legislation (real or proposed) by right-wing premiers has brought some of the kind of culture-war combat that we’d been watching in the United States north of the border. We wish they hadn’t done that. We also think that our federal Liberals, desperate to turn around their lousy poll numbers, are going to sink their teeth into this and run with it, ramping up the rhetoric in an attempt to wedge the rising CPC and portray them as fanatics — in fact, they already are. We wish they wouldn’t do that.

But hey, if wishes were horses, right? We truly believe there is a position on trans rights that would be not only humane and decent, but broadly supported. Full legal protections and an expectation of dignity for trans Canadians, and safeguards for minors considering transitioning and reasonable policies on shared spaces and athletics, would win over most Canadians — we are, in the main, reasonable people.

We wish the political incentives would lead us to that outcome, but we doubt it will — we think the opposite will happen. So in this podcast, with reluctance and somewhat against our better judgment, we jump in. We hope you enjoy it, or at least that it makes you think.

The Line is entirely reader funded. If you value our work and worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  [email protected].

Get full access to The Line at www.readtheline.ca/subscribe

We really run through a lot of topics this time — bad Liberal polls, Jordan Peterson, where and how we think the LPC will try to wedge the CPC, why we think it might work, and lots, lots more.

Have you been humming and hawwing about subscribing? Well, we’re raising our rates in a few weeks. Lock in now, or else! (Or else just like pay the higher rate later. Not that big a deal. But still.)

The Line is entirely reader funded. If you value our work and worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  [email protected].

Get full access to The Line at www.readtheline.ca/subscribe

Gee, wonder what we’re going to talk about — extremely carefully — this week, eh?

Don’t worry, we talk about a lot of other stuff. It’s guaranteed to lift your spirits. (No, no, it’s not.)

The Line is entirely reader funded. If you value our work and worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something:  [email protected].

Get full access to The Line at www.readtheline.ca/subscribe