“What happened is an orchestrated coup by factions inside and outside the armed forces,” he said. Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok blamed remnants of al-Bashir’s government for the coup attempt, describing it as an effort to undermine Sudan’s democratic transition. Later, in a statement read on the state-run TV, Culture and Information Minister Hamza Baloul said security forces have arrested civilian and military leaders behind the coup attempt, and that they have been interrogated after the military managed to get the armored corps’ camp south of Khartoum under control.īaloul, who is also the government spokesman, said authorities were chasing others “from the remnants” of al-Bashir’s regime who were suspects in orchestrated the attempted coup. “The path towards democratic transition and securing the country’s political future and unity remains one option.” “The option of military coups has left us only a failed and weak country,” he wrote on Twitter. Mohammed Hassan al-Taishi, a member of the sovereign council, called the attempt a “foolish and bad choice.” Security was also boosted at the military headquarters and other government buildings in the city. Al-Tahir Abu Haja, a media consultant for the military’s chief, said in a televised statement that at least 21 suspected officers and some troops were arrested and that authorities were searching for other suspects in the failed attempt.įootage circulated online showing troops and armored vehicles deployed to main roads and intersections in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. “Self-righteous totalitarian tinkering” is a phrase that these days echoes familiarly in Canada.Brig. But she could have been writing about this country or indeed any western democracy, in all of which officials seem firmly in control and voters essentially powerless. She was writing about Britain and in particular London’s “ultra-low emissions zone,” in which non-complying cars pay a charge of £12.50 a day. Quebec’s new honour system for French won’t last 3 weeks.Yet while my opinion on the arena is being sought and respected nobody ever asked my opinion about whether or not to ban gas cars.Īs Lionel Shriver, one of my favourite columnists, put it in London’s Spectator magazine last week: “We’ve entered an era of unaccountable bureaucratic imposition that’s only going to get worse … Bans on the sale of new petrol cars by 2030 and gas boilers in new homes by 2025 that no one voted for are just the beginning of a self-righteous totalitarian tinkering with our daily lives that makes a mockery of the notion that democracies are governed by consent.” Whether or not my town gets a new arena will in fact have much less impact on my life than whether in 12 years we Canadians will be forbidden from acquiring a newly produced internal combustion engine car. What contortions will the car industry, not to mention the economy, have to be put through so that in those 12 short years all new cars are net-zero? The hubris of people willing to impose such contortions is breathtaking. And we’re now in 2023, which means 2035 is just 12 years away. Except that net-zero absolutists really don’t like hybrid vehicles, which run part of the time on fossil fuels, so the true proportion of elite-acceptable net-zero vehicles was under one per cent. Of those 26.2 million registered motor vehicles, 303,073 were hybrid-electric, 152,685 battery-electric and 95,896 plug-in electric - so some 551,000 in total, or a little over two per cent, were low or no emissions. In 2021, Statistics Canada tells us, more than 26.2 million “road motor vehicles” were registered in this country, which works out to not quite one car per adult Canadian (depending where you draw the age line for adult, of course). It has also over the decades undergone continuous and considerable refinement in terms of efficiency, noise and exhaust, so that modern combustion engines are barely recognizable compared to early versions. Thus will end, in this country at least, the widespread use of the internal-combustion engine for personal transportation, a technology that since its first commercially successful use in the 19th century, has brought unprecedented prosperity and freedom of movement to literally billions of people around the world and largely made possible the much-decried suburban lifestyle that is currently under all-out attack from car-less urban sophisticates. By 2035, ministers Steven Guilbeault and Jonathan Wilkinson decreed in 2021, the “mandatory target,” i.e., the requirement, for all new “light-duty cars and passenger trucks” is that they be zero-emission. One that comes to mind immediately is Ottawa’s decision to do away with gasoline-powered cars. And it has left me feeling I’d like to have a direct say in other decisions that will have an important effect on my life. Whatever the outcome, it has been a great exercise in democracy. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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