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Here is your checklist. Do these 12 things and you will achieve the smallest waist your genetics will be capable of. These are the most cutting edge tips you will ever find in a single place hands down. Before delving into this checklist, you need to understand some guidelines in how to apply the checklist. PLEASE READ THIS PARAGRAPH, VERY HELPFUL ADVICE/THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND a.) Consistency is key to making these points work for you, it is not enough to only follow this advice sometimes or whenever you feel like it. b.) Don’t expect to achieve your ideal body in a month. Things take time to mold themselves. Unless you’ve been skinny before, losing body fat will be a real struggle no matter what approach you use. c.) Don’t be discouraged if aren’t seeing enough progress, these approaches will work and have worked on people with the worst genetics imaginable. If you are a genetically “large” person, the culmination of these approaches will work for you. d.) Don’t do too many of these steps right off the bat. If you do all of these steps at once, you will get great results the first month and then get mentally burned out and stall. When this happens, you will have no other tool in your bag of tricks to keep making progress. And you will be forced to take steps in the wrong direction, perhaps becoming demotivated to continue. The key is to do the least amount while still making progress. e.) Generally speaking, you should get your diet in check first and make training a priority, then you can cut calories, adjust macros, add cardio, supplements, etc, etc. f.) the fewer changes you implement at one time, the better because it will prolong progress and it will allow you to see what works for your body and what doesn’t. g.) some bodies are stubborn. A stubborn body does not necessarily need more cardio or further reduction in calories. Your body may simply need time to recognize the reduction or addition before it responds. Its like lighting a match. Once a metabolism gets roaring, it could roar so fast that you burn too much. h.) More could be said about every topic mentioned below, this is not a complete guide but will push you in the right direction. I.) Have fun and enjoy the process, don’t be solemn and think about the “sacrifice”. Be happy, this is your life, make the best of it.1.) Do stomach vacuums. This one is very old school and often considered a lost art in bodybuilding but it is immensely effective for bringing in the waist. They feel weird when you first do them but the more you do them, the smaller your waist will get. This movement will not burn fat but it will strengthen the transverse abdominis which keep your waist tight and in even when resting. They must also be done every day to be maximally effective. 10 sets of 10–15 seconds spread out throughout the day is a fantastic approach to see quick results with this method. Go on Youtube for learning the proper techniques.2.) Diet. Losing body fat is crucial for a smaller waist and a proper diet is crucial for reducing body fat. Most diets work if done consistently. Whatever diet you decide on, choose one that has high protein. Protein is filling and thermogenic and will assist in muscular and cell repair. Your entire body is made up of proteins, remember that. But avoid fad diets or detox’s or anything that alludes to “lose 30lbs in 30 days”. You will lose weight doing them but they are miserable, unhealthy, and you will get a rebound from hell too. Diets that are lower in carbohydrates however will give you quicker/more immediate results despite them being equally as effective as restrictive diets with carbohydrates in the long run. Every body is different so what works for one person may not work for you. (Note: if you are following a ketogenic style diet and your progress stops, usually this is a sign that your thyroid is depressed. To fix this add small amounts (8–12g) of fructose throughout the day to stimulate the liver to produce more T3 from the T4. If this doesn't work, try a cheat meal once a week at the end of the day or in dire cases a refeed week where you keep the fats ultra low and carbs high). Remember to consume enough fiber 20–35 grams a day for proper elimination. If you plan on making the most amount of progress in the long term and want to look consistently better and better, its important to establish for yourself a baseline diet with only clean foods before doing something dramatic like cutting carbs or fats out entirely. Eating only healthy meats, whole eggs, fruits, veggies, oats/rice, plain yogurt, etc and avoiding excessive fats, sugar, processed food. And record what you eat and your weight every day. By doing this, you will lose weight and eventually stall. This stall is your baseline maintenance for your current weight and body composition given your activity level. Track the calories and macronutrient breakdown when you arrive at the stall and decide what you would like to cut out of add. This will give you a good understanding of how your body works and solid foundation before delving into crazy stuff and give you an idea about what your reverse diet should eventually amount to when you’re finished with an extreme protocol.3.) Avoid training the obliques directly. MANY people do this at the gym in hopes of “trimming” their waist. Nothing could be further from the truth. You will tear down the tissue in that area and it will grow bigger giving you the illusion of a wider “refrigerator-like” waist. Many physiques have been either ruined or undermined from this alone. Unless you have an already lean midsection and seem deficient in that area from an aesthetic point of view (this is exceptionally rare) and know for a fact that your adonis belt will not stickout past your hip bones, then you should do it but only small amounts. Once you build muscle in this area, it will be almost impossible to burn it off. NEVER EVER DO SIDE BENDS. As a side note, you should train your abs, but know that if you have excessive body fat, your waist will stick out more slightly because you are hypertrophying the abdominal wall. This effect looks great if you are lean but if there is a layer of fat covering your abs, the development of muscle in your abs will look like you gained weight. This effect however is small and minor and not worth neglecting ab training.4.) Use a waist squeem. For the truly dedicated, wearing a heavy duty waist trainer for 10+ hrs a day may be an option. The waist trainer, for it to be truly effective, needs to be heavy duty, tight, and durable. Most waist trainers are not like this, but the weaker/cheaper waist trainers can be used instead to make you more aware of your stomach throughout the day and to consciously keep your stomach in which strengthens the transverse. If you are female, you should avoid the corset as this can cause damage to your organs and permanently shift your innards around in an unnatural way. Waist trainers will not do this however. The mechanism of action for why a waist trainer works is similar to how stomach vacuums work.5.) Supplements. While all micronutrients, in virtue of making your body more healthy, will assist in your pursuit of a smaller waist, some supplements will help more than others. Iodine/selenium/ B complex vitamins directly increases thyroid production and increases metabolism, most people have deficiencies in these so you should consider supplementing these before you get a doc to prescribe T3 for a bad thyroid. Yohimbine will work to get rid of fat in stubborn areas, often the love handle region. This supplement is a stimulant and works through antagonism (inactivation) of a class of receptors known as Alpha-2-Adrenergic receptors. Some people feel weird on this drug however. 10–15mg/day is sufficient for these purposes (though doseages can vary up to a 150% from what the label says so experiment and start low.) Supplements like fish oil, calcium, vitamin D3, choline/inosol (only in high dosages), chromium picolinate, CLA, iron, magnesium (note: effective dose is 700mg per day but can only absorb about 300mg at a time) are also effective for some people.6.) Water. Drinking water, especially cold water, will increase your metabolism and make your body run more efficiently. You’ll also feel “healthy” when you are hydrated and your voice will sound smoother. From an appearance standpoint, drinking lots of water will reduce water retention significantly making your face appear more attractive and your waist should go down too because you are no longer holding excessive water in your fat cells. Its important to note that water retention on the human body looks worse than body fat so eliminating this will dramatically improve your appearance. Traditional recommendations suggest 8 glasses a day. More informed authorities say you should drink half your body weight in ounces in water. I think both of these figures are too low. 1–3 gallons of water a day, depending on activity level and prior water drinking experience (don’t go from 2 glasses of water a day to 2 gallons a day overnight, build up to it)7.) Cardio. Whether you decide steady state, long cardio (SSC) OR High intensity interval training (HIIT), cardio will assist in helping you burn more body fat and in turn make your waist smaller. Keep in mind however that long slow cardio will burn off a greater percentage of body fat at the expense of burning fewer calories per minute. HIIT will burn more calories, burning primarily glycogen or amino acids for fuel during the activity, and give you a good metabolism boost long after the session is over with. HIIT however probably shouldn't be done while doing a ketogenic diet because the ketones in your blood cannot be mobilized for energy fast enough and you end up burning more muscle than you should. You should also consider your personality when deciding between the two (or doing both). Some people like painful sessions that question their soul and others prefer a more leisurely and enjoyable workout where they can be on their phone, talk, observe nature, etc. You know yourself better than I and know what youre likely to stick for the long term.8.) Lift weights. Lifting weights is another crucial thing you should do for your quest for a smaller waist. Weight lifting will build muscle, improve metabolism, and make you look more attractive generally. However, since your goal is specifically for having a goal of a smaller waist. More needs to be said on how to achieve that with weights. When training, you should train the whole body but emphasize with extra volume or intensity back width (rows/pulldowns/pullups) and side delts (side laterals, upright rows, presses) to give yourself the illusion of the ‘V’ taper. The wider your lats and shoulders are, the smaller your waist appears. If you are a female, you ought to also focus heavily on your legs and glutes. The bigger these body parts are, the smaller your waist will appear. Heavy deadlifts, squats, front squats, stiff legged deadlifts, leg press, hamstring curls, lunges, hip thrusts, ect should be sufficient for making the lower half bigger. Don’t be afraid to try out different rep/set schemes or body part splits or different intensity techniques. While it may be true that heavy compound lifts will thicken the waist, the effect is not as pronounced as some make it seem. It will generally firm up your entire section, not give you the Eddie Hall look.9.) Drugs. (PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T GO DOWN THIS ROUTE. ITS NOT A CRUTCH AND WILL NOT WORK UNLESS YOU ALSO TRAIN AND DIET> FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY). Though I am hesitant to mention this check point, it is in response to your question so i will mention it here. To begin, caffeine is a mild fat burner, just as nicotine and amphetamines are, ECA (ephedrine, asprin, caffiene) should also be included in this category. These drugs decrease hunger, release adrenal chemicals, and assist in fat burning. (It may not be a good idea to take up nicotine because it is extremely addictive and will negatively affect your performance in the gym, and it will negatively affect your baseline degree of well being. Moreover, it will also increase cortisol which can cause the breakdown of tissues including muscle.). With respect to bodybuilding drugs, I will only mention the ones that burn bodyfat, not diuretics. T3 and clenbuterol are the most common bodybuilding drugs for fat loss. It is strongly advised you do not do them however. Taking a T3/cytomil may blow out your thyroid and make your body dependent on it and require you take it for the rest of your life. Even if it doesnt blow out the thyroid, it will cause you to have a rebound in weight when you stop taking it. No amount of diet or training will prevent this from happening. If you do take it, dont exceed 50mcg/day and only do it for short spurts like a week or two. Clenbuterol can be really bad for your heart and like T3 can only be taken for short periods of time. It will also cause a rebound effect when you stop though not as severe as T3. Dosages should not ever exceed 60mg/day and taken for two weeks on, two weeks off. Other approaches on how to take clen would be cycling the dose up over a 4 day period, then coming off for 3 days, then repeating. Another option that is semi-popular is the use of the research chemical GW- 501516. Low moderate amounts of fat loss can be expected from this however, not enough research has been put into the safety of this drug for humans with long term use. Proper dosages for humans are unknown although anecdotal evidence suggests 10–30mg to be effective. Growth hormone (GH) and their peptide/research chemical counterparts is an option used by many as well. Much research on GH and how it affects weight loss is available online as well as dosages (they vary greatly depending on goals, sometimes up to 20IU per day!). Next, I will talk about the infamous 2, 4 Dinitophenol (DNP). This drug is famous for having a reputation that it causes an easy overdose resulting in death. This drug is used as an industrial chemical to make bombs and used as fertilizer for big farms and was the very first weight loss drug created by pharmacies (it was discontinued shortly after). It can come in either crystalline (fast acting) or non-crystalline form (Longer acting and more common. There are variations within this category but its not necessary to delve into chemistry here.). This drug works by restricting cell respiration which causes a build up of heat in the body and fat cells die through a process called autophagy. It is considered as the most effective fat burner on the planet and extremely difficult to find nowadays online. The reason it is considered so dangerous is the fact that the lethal dose (as low as 800–1800mg depending on the person) and effective dose (100–1200mgs) are so close together and the long half life can give the user the illusion that it is safe to increase the dose (not realizing it takes about 5 days for DNP to fully build up in the body). Moreover, the user will feel lethargic and very very warm which psychologically makes people think it is dangerous. Death by DNP means you are essentially being cooked in your own body. There is no antidote to an overdose, but being placed in a cold shower or on ice may prolong your life and be enough to save a life. All that said, I believe it should be preferred over T3 and clen. T3 and clen can cause major health side effects that can last years or perhaps the rest of your life and they both cause a rebound in body fat when you stop taking it. DNP causes no rebound at all and although the short term side effects may be severe for some users, long term damage does not occur. All of your organs should unscathed and your thyroid intact. Though more extreme fat loss may occur with higher amounts, the risk to benefit ratio is not worth it. It is not necessary to ever go over 400mg on this drug. If you still desire the extreme weight loss, just take it longer, maybe up to a month. This will reduce side effects and guarantee you don’t die. Note however that if you finish a DNP cycle, it will take about 5 days for you to know how much weight you’ve actually lost because of the water retention you will get from the drug. Keep in mind, this orangy substance will stain everything it touches and permeate even latex gloves. It takes a few days for stains to go away. DNP, although having a reputation for being the most effective fat burner, still might not be nearly as effective as PGF2. This drug is really only used by the bodybuilding elite and is almost impossible to find. Its used by vets to cause animals to be pregnant easier and to cause them to grow. It requires many painful daily injections (up to 5 per day) and produces simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain, especially in the area you inject. It is not a steroid but works through taking advantage of the growth factor prostagladins which is a cholestrol based quasi-hormone which responds to local muscle and increases thyroid. Not much is known about its long term side effects or dosage or whether if it also works systemically throughout the body.10.) Sleep, meditation, de-stressing, recovery from workouts. These are crucial factors in weight loss. For various reasons, it is well established that by getting adequate sleep (7–9hrs), your hormones (growth hormone for instance) are optimized and fat loss will result. Much research has been done linking weight loss to good sleep, feel free to look at the data. The act of de-stressing will allow you to lower stress hormones like cortisol which will in turn spare muscle tissue which will also in turn increase your metabolism (More muscle equals higher metabolism). Recovery will also allow your body to repair itself from the damage you’ve inflicted on it during a workout. This process requires calories to support so a net calorie decrease results. Some research even supports the idea that proper sleep is the most important factor in losing weight but this is usually so because you tend to make better food decisions when rested.11.) Activity. Be more active during the day. This can include things like gardening, going for a walk, using standing desks, even fidgeting. These mild movements done for an extended period of time amount to more calories being burned throughout the day.12.) Cold. Taking cold showers, ice baths, walking/running out in snow are examples. Cold exposure, especially if done for extended periods of time will cause you to convert some of the body fat already on your body to become converted into a substance known as brown fat. Brown fat is more metabolically active than its counterpart and will allow you to burn more calories via an increase in your basal metabolic rate.

Thanks for the A2A Alexej.It's a tall order you ask because over the years there have been a series of books that have purported to do just that, all of which have turned out to be wrong, but only in retrospect. At the time they seemed reasonable enough. To fully answer let me sort of lay out those ideas so you get a sense of what is out there, but now fully discredited.I'm not going to name the books because they are many in number. I'm going, instead, to explain the ideas briefly then explain the current state of thinking regarding those problems. Then I'll finish with my pick for the best book for now.So here are the ideas that have been thought to be relevant over time. Each of these, in their time, was considered state of the art. This list, with the exception of the last two, is put in pretty much a chronological order of the timeframe in which they were at their respective height of acceptance.Nutrition/Waste elimination optimization - The idea that cells are innately immortal, and healthy given good nutrition and good waste eliminationAnti-oxidants - The core idea here is that damage happens to DNA randomly resulting in mutations that accumulates over time. So the best hope is to minimize the damage rate. The proposed working concept is that this damage is largely caused by uncontrolled oxidative damage. So finding ways to stop the oxidative damage would slow the aging rate.Caloric Restriction - The idea that there's a biological clock that can be slowed by some genetic switch that gets activated under low calorie - high nutrition situationsHuman Growth Hormone (and hormone replacement) - The idea that the normal human process of optimal health is dominated by human growth hormones, that most of the signs of aging are caused by low HGH levels. Other hormones, particularly testosterone, are sometimes mingled in with this theory.Telomere management - The idea that the end cap telomeres are the main causative factor in aging, and that this causative factor is behind all the other factors. so if it is overcome, all the others are overcome as well.Primitive Living - This last is quasi scientific and has come under many names, and had the practical, but less research oriented scientists (mainly doctors) behind different forms of the idea which has come under many names, most recently paleo. The core of that idea is that modern living is the problem, and that there's a way to live that will fix all that, and it's to return to our primitive roots. These are diet fads that, whatever their individual merits, were never serious about truly stopping aging.Evolutionarily - This has been all over the map, and is not that useful, but I'll outline it when I go into details on the others.*** The latest on each (some overview where needed)Nutrition/Waste elimination: This had it's heyday when a widely reported researcher claimed to keep chicken heart cells viable for over 30 years. The mystery was that he had a "Secret Formula" We now know that part of the "secret nutrition formula" included eggs which meant that new chicken heart cells were being fed to the old chicken heart cells, and since these were just cells in a matrix, the knew could replace the old just fast enough to make it unclear if aging was being defeated, or if instead it was just new cells coming in and replacing the old ones. Nothing useful there, and it was never reproducible. It fits well into the logical fallacy of, "appeal to authority" because it's main proponent, Alexis Carrel , was highly respected and people wanted it to be true.Anti-Oxidants theory. Almost all vitamin based anti-aging stacks are based on this theory. The problem with the theory is that one of the largest constituents of the human body is something called Superoxide dismutase (SOD) which is a common large part of most long lived cells. It also exists in a balanced equilibrium due to fact that the cells sometimes use the oxidative free radicals in beneficial ways. So about the main thing the anti-oxidants were doing were telling the body to produce less SOD. Later research into antioxidants has never shown any extended life from it. One of the most damning indictments of it was the unexpected finding that high levels of BetaCarotene, one of the thought to be most benign anti-oxidant treatments, actually increased cancer rates in smokers. The booksCaloric Restriction theory. This theory came from the observation that an early laboratory mouse experiment theory showed an increase in life span, including maximum life span, of up to 40% in laboratory mice. One book that I recommend, not because it is up to date in it's theories, but because it spends the longest time explaining the vast difference between the terms, "Maximum Life Span" verses "Average Life Span" is the book, Maximum Life Span by Roy Walford. While it did a good job of explaining the difference, the book championed caloric restriction as a path to reversing aging, and in the 1980s when it was written, all the experiments till that time indicated that was plausible. But as the experiments moved along the evolutionary tree to the human branch, the effects diminished more and more. Enough people purchased the book in the 1980s, and tried the plans that some evidence of efficacy should have been evident by now, if it were significant, but in humans it doesn't seem to work. Why or why not is a matter of speculation, but there's been plenty of time for strong evidence to be there if it did work, and there has been no such evidence. It's one thing to say, "It's just too hard for people to try" 35 years ago, but 35 years later that doesn't hold up any more. And among people who take anti-aging as a worthwhile goal, all of them know of CR, so it's had plenty of time to get a good result.Hormone replacement therapy: The poster-child for these was research done in the late 80s on human growth hormone replacement therapy, and for a time this looked very promising. Since the pinnacle 1989 study which showed excellent short term effects to human growth hormone therapy among elderly men, many medical doctors joined in and there was a network of anti-aging doctors where you could get HGH replacement therapy and this too has now had over 25 years of testing. Because HGH is somewhat expensive, this testing isn't in the form of a single study. It's more spread out than that. But here's the thing to remember. If HGH could show maximum life-span increase people would be shouting it from the roof-tops. The other hormones, particularly Testosterone fit in the same category. They work to strengthen bodies a bit for a while, but nothing that would get anyone talking cures. And they've had plenty of time to be proven useful. Enough that if they were doing anything statistically sound it would have shown up by now. There's nothing there for solving aging, definitely not for Maximum Life Span.Telomeres: One of the final daggers in Carrel's experiments was Leonard Hayflick's Hayflick Limit on Cell Divisions. It turns out that the Hayflick limit had a biological agent. That biological agent was the way DNA end-caps are designed. The end-caps, called telomeres, are these repeating chains that act as safety zones during cell division, and a max-division counter to stop runaway cell division. The telomere extension idea is to turn on telomerase to insure cells could continue to divide without limit. The good news here is that there is something there. Being able to turn telomerase on hasn't had the cancerous results people originally feared. But while this has some promise, practical tests on mice haven't shown robust rejuvenation. That is to say, no telomerase study has shown total aging reversal. Telomeres have been scrutinized since the 90s. That may not be time to show how they'd work in humans, but it's plenty of time to show some incredible workings in mice if that were, by itself, the true holy grail of aging, but nothing like that has happened.Primitive Living: A lot of fads have come along with different approaches purported to have found the secret in some form of going back to our roots and finding out how primitive people lived. What's humorous about this is that these talk as if the only thing that kills us is the modern environment, as if the ancients somehow had eternal youth. On the plus side, many carcinogens come from things that post-date the use of fire. Fire goes back about a million years. So that gives us some insight into how long natural evolution takes to adjust to change. But none of the grandest claims hold up under any scrutiny. A horrible life style can subtract years from your life, but reasonable life styles tend to pan out about the same, nothing stands out as being able to raise maximum life span.- Evolutionary theory has moved around a bit on aging. Some of the early ideas were that we must not be living well because most animals live to be, on average (excluding predation) 5 times their age at maturity, wheres we, maturing at 21, don't. But that is countered by the fact that in terms of number of heartbeats, we live far more than the average number (metabolic theory), about 3 or 4 times the number of heartbeats of most animals. The current latest thinking (based on fossil studies) is that we live much longer than would be expected because grandparents contribute well to offspring training. Inside of evolutionary theory are things like programmed death or the very strange counterintuitive finding that larger species live longer on average than shorter-lived species, but that within a species smaller individuals outlive larger individuals. Apart from cancers (more cells equal more likely cancer) this isn't well explained. But the failure of Caloric Restriction in humans may have evolutionary rationale. It might be that evolution only cared about adding extra life during famine in short lived species as most famines only last a few seasons. Long lived species can bear children over a period greater than a decade already, so weren't necessarily affected enough by famines to need an anti-aging adaption to thrive during them.***Ok, what's the latest thinking?Right now none of the shortcuts has panned out. Everything remains more complicated than people hoped it would be.It's funny, the book written for layman that I am most fond of right now, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime: Aubrey de Grey, Michael Rae: 9780312367077: Amazon.com: Books is maligned by some anti-aging researchers as being too simplistic, but compared to the prior concepts, de Grey has laid out a multi-pronged approach that is far more encompassing and specific.The basic idea is1. Live rationally. No extreme diets and exercise regimen, nor any extreme medical intervention has been proven to do anything for the general population. Clearly this excludes special subsections, such as diabetics where dietary and medical regimens do make a difference. But in terms of a health person adding extra years, nothing has been proven yet.2. Change the focus from stopping the processes that produce the effects of aging, which has been the nature of all prior anti-aging ideas, to one of focusing on medically assisted rejuvenation maintenance.Rejuvenation maintenance is the idea that instead of trying to keep the effects from happening, go ahead and let them happen, but periodically clean up for them. At a simplistic level we already do this with our homes and cars, so understand the idea. But at a living system level this is a new way to look at it.The gist of the theory is that the causes of aging are varied, complicated and all but intractable because (as occurred with SOD in the free radical theory) the interactions in living systems are highly tuned feedback loops. But the end effects are not so complicated.Critics of the theory would say that not-so-complicated is still pretty complicated. De Grey categorizes 7 different effects, all 7 of which are actually fairly complicated by themselves.But de Grey's approach isn't to over-simplify the problem, but to bound the problem in an all-encompassing frame-work. This way the problem is as simple as possible, but no simpler.I think both the history and the current state have indicated 2 things.The problem is not simple. People who try to make it simple are almost surely wrong.We are making progress so far much in the way Edison said he made progress toward the light bulb, "Of course I'm making progress. I now know a thousand things that don't work."Personally, having avidly followed this field for 50 years, I'm very enthused by de Grey's approach. The main detractors come in 5 varieties, all of which are fairly easily counteredThese concepts are longer term, and will take funding from existing work to alleviate the suffering of aging that might produce shorter term results now - Currently all of SENS funding is private and is coming from donors who's interest in is solving aging, not alleviating temporary suffering. But even if it did become the predominate funding and did take away from relief-now suffering, this is considered a smart choice by anyone who has studied the temporal fallacy people have of overvaluing results now over far larger results later.These concepts are unproven - Almost by definition, anything that is being researched is unproven. What can be demonstrated is the extent to which the theories match up to aging tests you can do now. Older cells do have more intracellular inert items. They do have more mitochondrial damage and so on through all 7 of the concepts. All match observation.These concepts are described in too simplistic a term to be successful - for instance, junk inside the cell is a general phrase. We'll need to know more specifically what types of junk. This is a fair enough criticism, but the criticism is missing a point. It is far easier to identify (by looking at older cells) what types of junk tends to accumulate, and then to prioritize accordingly (the fastest accumulating junk first, for instance) than it is to figure out what is responsible for each type of accumulation.These concepts, if they work and keep people biologically young indefinitely), will profoundly change society in ways we aren't prepared to handle - This is the odd counterpoint to the 3rd one. Here the fear is that the ideas are too good and might ravage the mortician industry by dropping the death rate by 2/3rds (among other "problems"). It's the "Too much of a good thing" worry. At it's heart most of the nightmare scenarios involve assuming people will be doing stupid things for centuries. But people don't live like that. If something's not working, that is, really causing problems, people stop doing it. I grew up in the dumping grounds 60s (people would literally take their trash and dump it on the open roads) the smog filled, lead gasoline 70s, the imminent global thermonuclear war 80s, the decade of greed 90s, the terrorism is everywhere, global warming will kills us all 2000s and the world doesn't end just because there's a problem. We adjust when the problems start to affect us. We'll be fine.These concepts are science fiction, immortalist nonsense - There is always a desire to cloak common sense in some emotionally loaded term to bypass people's ability to think rationally. The strange one aimed at de Grey is, "Immortalist." "First person to live to 1,000 has already been born" is the phrase that launched a thousand articles. The upside of that phrase is that it got him a lot of publicity. The downside is that it has gotten some huge flack now that his ideas are gaining traction. What de Grey meant was, "The first person to be alive when advances in technology are happening decade after decade fast enough to add a decade of expected life to the people who lived through that decade, that person is already alive." These 2 phrases mean the same thing, but the 2nd phrase is far harder to parse by the average newspaper headline. The people who think this is ludicrous are saying that they already know, somehow, that 90 years from now we will not be at that point yet. 90 years ago was 1925. Think of how much faster technology is advanced now, in the last decade verses 1925-1935. , SpaceX, Tesla Motors . . . Facebook had only been founded in 2004, youtube 2005, iPhone 2007, Epi-genome mapping 2008. In 2009 we knew of about 100 planets when the Kepler Spacecraft was launched, now we know of thousands, In 2010 SpaceX became the first privately funding company to launch and recover a spacecraft. 2011 Siri voice recognition was launched, I'll stop there because we're in the middle and many things only become clear as to their value over time. The point is, appealing to the sound of an argument rather than it's soundness is just bad thinking.That 5th point is the most annoying to me when I hear it. It requires total lack of any reflection or thought. We are going to be in this world within 90 years, a world in which aging is solved. It's inevitable, even without de Grey. But what he's trying to do is to get us there sooner so that more of the people who wouldn't have made the 90 year date, make the 50 year window, or even 25 year window if he gets a bit lucky.90 years from now dealing with aging will be simple. The advances happening at the cellular level are coming on too fast and furious to see it going any other way. You have to ignore how amazing things have been happening to not see it. Just ask yourself, "Will technology advance faster in the next 90 years, or did it advance faster in the last 90?" The change will happen. The point is, why are we not willing to do everything in our power to speed the change up by a few decades?*** Regarding how to live and what to do nowOf course the what-to-do-now gist of the book is to invest in the SENS foundation SRF Home | SENS Research Foundation but that's not directed at a particular individual level, but a global solution.What if you personally want to do all you can for yourself, given what is known now?Personally, I've been a lacto-ova vegetarian since I was 15, haven't smoked a pack of cigarettes in my life, stopped drinking over a decade ago and exercise regularly, all in the knowledge that all of that combined might add 10 years to my life (7 of them from the not-smoking).I am actually old enough to have tried remedies on the Nutrition/Elimination ideas, and tried the ideas around the free radical theory (mainly from the books of Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw).I looked at the science behind CR when I first read about it, and was bothered by the fact that the best results were only if begun before puberty, but they also had a side effect of some deaths. So it was maximum life span at the risk of significant loss to average life span. (It didn't help when the most serious proponent, Roy Walford, died at 80 having stayed on CR for decades). I do avoid the sun, and avoid unhealthy foods in excess.I have, for a time, used HGH precursors.In the early 2000s I started taking exercise seriously and found that the results for rational exercise (everything in moderation) seemed do far better than the HGH, so I stopped that, and I stopped all of the anti-oxidant use, limiting myself to the normal one-a-day type daily vitamin and minerals on occasion, more to insure that I don't run into some accidental deficiency.For my age, I'm ridiculously healthy. There's a serious of tests in Roy Walford's later book, "The 120 year diet" aimed at testing ongoing health. I take those test every 5 years or so and have stayed scoring in the 30 year old range (the youngest range it has) the entire time. Before you say, "You must be doing it right then" full disclosure is that I have centenarians on both my moms and fathers side, so it's not at all unlikely that I'm just one of those lucky people who would have been super-healthy anyway.It's just that I'm a devout futurist (not an organized church, far as I know) who has looked at the pace of technology's growth and am all but certain that aging is a tractable condition that will be solved in the next few decades. I base that certainty on the exponential growth in parallel processing speed and a back-of-the-envelope calculation of just how much speed is required to figure out how to fully simulate anything you'd need to do to perfectly repair the 300 cell types and 30,000 protein types that are in the human body. And while the problem seems big now, compared to the pace of the growth in technology it doesn't seem big going forward.One thing sometimes hurled against continued exponential growth in computer technology is that they did hit a wall a couple of years ago at the 3 Gigahertz rate, which indicates that we'll need to focus more on parallelism for our future gains and less on clock speed. While this might be a big problem in a lot of arena, in biology the new direction of focusing more on parallelism between offloading some ever more tasks to GPUs and re-thinking all programming in more functional paradigms are ideal for molecular simulations of the type that will affect life sciences. So I remain hugely optimistic that the next 2 decades will greatly advance compared to the last 2 centuries.

My goals here are three-fold:To give non-Canadian readers a window into the story that’s going to determine whether Trudeau gets re-elected this year.To give Canadian readers a clearer and more complete sense of what’s happened than is easily found in any other single source.To make a few arguments re: what does and doesn’t matter here, and why. (And in the case of what doesn’t matter, outlining a theory on why some are pretending otherwise.)By necessity, what follows isn’t exactly short. But I’ve done my best to keep it as interesting and concise as possible while still hitting the above goals.For those unfamiliar with my writing, two quick notes: (1) My only interest in the partisan side of politics is deconstructing it. I have no team or tribe. (2) To ensure the most accurate takes possible, I offer rewards for all corrections.Ok, enough housekeeping.[EDIT: My original answer here was written March 1st. I returned on March 13th to make a few minor corrections and to address some common questions / objections. Where it made sense, I added edit snippets throughout the main text. Where I felt additions would be too distracting, I saved new commentary for the end. You can track all changes via the answer’s edit log.]Background ContextHere’s what brought us to today, in six bullet points:SNC-Lavalin is an EPC firm, which is to say that they’re the folks governments turn to when they want to contract out large infrastructure projects. SNC has roughly 50k employees globally, including 9k or so in Canada, with some 700 of those Canadian jobs being in the Montreal area (where SNC is currently headquartered). As recently as last October, SNC was worth about $9bn CAD, which is a fair amount for a Canadian company. If not quite a crown jewel, they were right at the top of the next tier down.SNC engaged in some shady stuff between 2001 and 2011, leading to a mire of lawsuits and investigations. As evidence of their misdeeds mounted, thousands of employees left, the board was made over, and a host of new compliance procedures were put in place to ensure that The Bad Times were behind them.In July 2012, the Harper government (the Conservative majority that preceded Trudeau’s Liberal majority) had Canada’s national contracting office revise their anti-corruption rules, with the net effect being that any vendor found guilty of certain crimes would be “rendered ineligible” for future federal contracts for a period of 10 years (reducible to 5 with good behavior). The Conservatives also made further amendments over the following years to reduce options for leniency, largely (it’s assumed) to position themselves against the Liberals, who had a party history of bedfellowing with shady corporations.For obvious reasons, SNC didn’t care much for this. They began lobbying for Canada to adopt what many other countries call deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs), which are something like plea deals, where a corporation can admit wrongdoing and submit to certain penalties and government-supervised renovations without bearing the full weight of a potentially crippling criminal conviction. (The logic here being that it’s not generally fair or useful to punish an entire enterprise for the sins of a few, especially if those few are no longer there.)The Trudeau government, which came to power in late 2015, ultimately did move forward with creating a DPA regime this past September. Unsurprisingly, SNC was quick to request an invitation for entry, arguing that they’d already done all the sorts of penance and reform that a DPA would require, and that further punishment was basically just value-destruction with no upside.The person responsible to decide on SNC’s request said no, setting off a chain of dramanoes just now reaching their crescendo.Now, before we can unpack the decision itself, we have to make a quick detour into the structure of the Canadian government — which I promise isn’t (quite) as boring as it sounds!Super Fun Learning Time!Trudeau, in addition to being Prime Minister (PM), is a Member of Parliament (MP) representing a riding in Montreal. That’s because in Canada the PM is always head of the executive branch and a sitting member of the legislature, with those two branches of government being heavily intertwined.[EDIT: Mike Hewson pointed out that all ministerial roles, including PM, can legally be filled by Senators and/or credentialed professionals, though this is only applicable in fringe cases where no suitable MP is found for a given role, which almost certainly would never be the case for PM — though this did happen twice in Canada’s early days when the sitting PM died in office.](I’m going to skip over the roles of the Queen, her Governor General, her Privy Council, and the Canadian Senate — mostly because those are all legacy institutions that hold marginal effective power today. If a PM has the backing, or “confidence”, of a majority of individual MPs, the PM effectively is the government. They own nearly all executive powers, and have enormous influence over legislation. Individual MPs have latitude to vote as they will, but those in the PM’s party will generally support the PM on all but rare “vote your conscience” items. The only part of the federal government that a majority-party PM has no real influence over is the judicial branch.)Anyway, there’s this other thing that the Harper government did (again, presumably) to brand themselves in distinction to the scandal-ridden Liberal Party of the early 2000s.In brief:The Conservatives instituted the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, which was to be subordinate to (but somehow independent of) the Department of Justice.The Department of Justice is headed by the Attorney General (AG), who is almost always a sitting MP selected for said purpose by the PM. In this new arrangement, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) would be a civilian appointed by the sitting Attorney General.The idea here is that the DPP would be two steps removed from the PM, which would theoretically protect the former from undue political influence from the latter as far as deciding whom to prosecute.(Oh, and by the way, the Attorney General is also the Minister of Justice, which is a totally different hat that the same person always wears. It’s a confusing duality not worth getting into here, outside the basic idea that the same person is to be considered independent or not-so-independent depending on the hat they’re wearing in a given instant, which often leads to all the obvious complexities that one would expect.)Now, if you’re wondering what the division of power is between the AG and DPP on a practical level, there’s a handy guide for that very thing: Relationship between the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions.In a way, it’s the most “Canadian Politics in a Nutshell” thing you could ever read — almost 4,000 words of high-sounding rhetoric (“independence!”, “justice!”, “accountability!”) that accomplishes basically nothing outside of making the system even more convoluted and bureaucratic.Two reasons I say that:The DPP serves at the pleasure of the AG, who serves at the pleasure of the PM. While this gap between the DPP and PM probably does make it slightly harder for an otherwise good PM to improperly influence an otherwise good DPP, it doesn’t at all solve the problem that a bad PM would appoint a complicit AG, who would hire a complicit DPP.The AG can overrule and/or sideline the DPP at their own discretion, making the whole thing kinda pointless. (The AG would have to publish a memo of sorts explaining why, but that’s about it.)The obvious (if uncharitable) reading here is that Harper wasn’t all that interested in changing anything, so much as he was very interested in the optics of being seen to change things. That this chess move would also make it near impossible for his successor to reverse the changes without massive blowback (despite the changes being largely symbolic) was just an added bonus.[EDIT: For more on Harper’s presumed insincerity, see this combined with this. Also note that the current chair of SNC’s board was a key figure in Harper’s government for three years, as he’d been in several governments prior. He was expecting his calls to be answered, regardless of who was PM at the time. The idea of a Conservative government handling the SNC case any differently on a practical level seems like bad fiction to me, and I’m not sure on which grounds someone could even argue otherwise. I suspect Harper was unsurprised to hear that his trap had worked, if also a bit surprised to learn it was the SNC deferral that sprang it.]This all in mind, let’s get back to the current narrative.A Series of Unfortunate DecisionsBefore the new law even came into effect, the SNC began pushing hard for their chance at a deferral. But Canada’s current DPP, Kathleen Roussel, for reasons still unknown, decided that she was going to tell SNC “no deal”, leading her to issue an internal memo to this effect on September 4th of last year. The contents of said memo aren’t public at this point, having been private to the AG. But the fact of the decision was communicated to the PM’s office, which Trudeau and co. were, well, not entirely satisfied with. This set off a chain of contacts over the next three months or so, which broadly consisted of the PM’s office looking for the AG to either reconsider or allow an outside legal opinion.As to Trudeau’s motivations here, we can make some reasonable guesses:SNC is headquartered in Trudeau’s home city.Trudeau has an election coming up, and Quebec often plays the deciding role. SNC is a big deal to Quebec, and a conviction could cause deep harm to SNC. (At the least, the conviction would play poorly, whatever the ultimate economic consequences.)The Liberal Party has always been corporate-friendly (in ways both good and bad). In particular, they’ve largely been against value-destruction as a general principle. And Trudeau almost certainly sees refusing SNC’s request to be textbook value-destruction.Anyway, whatever his motivations or their relative weighting, Trudeau’s entreaties to Wilson-Raybould to intervene didn’t change her mind. But they did cause significant friction between them, which Trudeau was unable to keep entirely private. This was a gift that Andrew Scheer feasted upon. (Scheer is the current leader of the Conservatives, and Trudeau’s chief competition in this year’s election.)As a further gift to Scheer, Trudeau initiated a cabinet shuffle in January, which included the reassignment of Wilson-Raybould to Veterans Affairs (with additional responsibilities in National Defence). While this was met with some suspicion, the real drama began on February 7th when The Globe and Mail published a rundown of the spreading rumors. This in turn led to someone asking Trudeau a few days later if he and Wilson-Raybould were still on good terms. His answer was to the effect of “well, she’s still here working for me, which should be its own answer” — which, uh, backfired spectacularly in that she resigned a few hours later.[EDIT: The timing of an ethics probe may have also played into her timing. Also, it isn’t clear how aware Trudeau was of how Wilson-Raybould felt until the shuffle. She says it should have been obvious. He says it wasn’t. As of this time, no documentary evidence has come out proving either right or wrong.]Her resignation obviously raised even more questions, which ultimately led to her appearing before the House Justice Committee to address concerns over whether Trudeau and co. had crossed any legal lines in their lobbying.The FalloutYou can read Wilson-Raybould’s opening remarks here.Being as objective as able, I’d summarize them as follows:Trudeau and team lobbied aggressively on SNC’s behalf, and he made it clear that he was displeased with her and Roussel for being inflexible.While she didn’t accuse them of breaking any hard laws, she feels they did cross well into “inappropriate” territory, both in tone and frequency of approach, including after she’d basically said “no means no”.She feels that she was “demoted” because of her stand.All said, she seemed entirely credible. Her notes were thorough and it’s hard to imagine her having lied on any point. Even so, there’s the open question of interpretation, especially as it concerns that last bullet point.While there’s much that’s still unclear, we do know that, as far as immediate causes go, she was reassigned as part of a larger cabinet shuffle triggered by someone else’s resignation. This in mind, Trudeau’s official position has been “had Scott Brison not stepped down, Jody Wilson-Raybould would still be minister of justice and attorney general of Canada.”Now, Scheer is obviously hoping for a smoking gun that will prove this statement false. But we don’t have one yet, and it doesn’t seem all that likely to me that one exists. Could Trudeau have opportunistically used the shuffle to punish her? It’s possible. But it’s also possible that he was simply annoyed at how she handled the whole affair, leading him to decide that he’d prefer her elsewhere. I can see how either scenario could be viewed as objectionable, but I’m less sure that even the former rises to the level of criminal obstruction. Whatever Trudeau’s motivations in shuffling her, his replacement AG has so far left the existing DPP in place, which means nothing involving SNC-Lavalin has actually changed. I suppose you could still argue pettiness, but pettiness isn’t quite a crime.[EDIT: There’s also the possibility that there was no pettiness at all and that the shuffle was exactly and only for the reasons that Trudeau’s former top aide suggested. I found his testimony compelling in its own right, and I’m not sure how to adjudicate between the two accounts outside further evidence. My lean is that it feels a little unlikely for there not to have been some secondary motive, however small. But YMMV. I get into this a bit more in the edits at the end.]Anyway, all those arguments are meaningless to Scheer, mostly because it’s very convenient for him to not consider them.(Note: As I don’t want to give anyone cause to believe that I’m meaningfully biased, I’ll point out before continuing that one of the last two votes I cast was for a Conservative. And I’m fine with throwing more votes in their direction — just as soon as they stop nominating feckless lizardpeople like Andrew Scheer.)A Study in InsincerityWhile I wasn’t much of a Harper fan, my dislike for him was mostly benign. Had he won against Trudeau in 2015, I’d have made a vaguely disappointed clicking noise and then gone back to whatever I was doing. I ultimately voted against him because I was displeased with how he seemed to court the alt-right as it became clear he was going to lose — but his work as PM was largely … fine?Andrew Scheer, however, is a different category of conservative. Andrew Scheer, in a nutshell, is the kind of person you’d get if you isolated all the unhealthy impulses that Harper struggled with and then doused them with growth hormones (and then also stripped most of Harper’s policy/strategy IQ).He made a speech yesterday in response to Wilson-Raybould’s testimony, of which I’ll share just one excerpt:The testimony Canadians have just heard from the former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould tells the story of a Prime Minister who has lost the moral authority to govern. A Prime Minister who allows his partisan political motivations to overrule his duty to uphold the rule of law. A Prime Minister who doesn’t know where the Liberal Party ends and where the Government of Canada begins. And a Prime Minister who has allowed a systemic culture of corruption to take root in his office and those of his most senior cabinet and public service colleagues.Now, much of this is just your run-of-the-mill disingenuous nonsense. But even in that ignoble context, I still find this one line incredible:a Prime Minister who doesn’t know where the Liberal Party ends and where the Government of Canada begins.Scheer seems to be making one of two absurd arguments here: (1) that “the government” is somehow separable from the declared values/views/proposals of those specifically elected to form said government; (2) that a majority government should set the values/views/proposals they were elected on aside so as to privilege the values/views/proposals which voters judged less attractive.I honestly don’t know which one of those ideas is less preposterous, but that Scheer would employ that kind of cutesy phrase despite it not actually meaning anything is one of many reasons I hope he’s never allowed to run anything more important than a blender. (Like, is it better if he just didn’t think through how dumb the sentence was, or if he did and said it anyway? And in the case of the latter, what does it say about the state of things if he judged this a viable tactic?)[EDIT: I don’t know how I forgot this, but by far the funniest thing here is that Harper had literally renamed the Government of Canada as “The Harper Government” in 2011! And guess who worked for Harper at the time? I wonder if he was this passionate about the distinction then?]Anyway, let’s shift from the statement to the motivation behind the statement. Who benefits from the SNC being prosecuted? Scheer! Who benefits from Trudeau being perceived as trying to interfere with this prosecution? Scheer! He wins either way. The only way he doesn’t win is if he’s forced to actually give his own opinion on why SNC does or doesn’t deserve a deferral.Lucky for him, no one is going to force him to do that — which I’d argue is symptomatic of the defining problem in this whole mess.About That DeferralBefore we move on to why Scheer is able to get away with all this, a few final words about SNC.What Scheer would prefer lost in the hubbub is that a deferral is not an exoneration. It’s a decision to choose a scalpel over a sledgehammer. While there may be times when the latter is the more appropriate tool, Scheer hasn’t really made any argument to that end (nor will he on this side of the election). His argument is simply “the DPP said sledgehammer, so Trudeau has to use the sledgehammer, which I don’t otherwise have an opinion on, but hey it does win me a lot of votes! — and PS, if Trudeau argues against the sledgehammer, it’s because he’s a coward/crook who hates Canada!”Trudeau’s response hasn’t been “c’mon, let’s let them off lightly because they’re my yacht buddies and besides I need their votes!” but rather “let’s pursue a form of justice which doesn’t introduce unnecessary collateral damage — and PS, I’d rather keep those votes thank you very much”.All else being even, it isn’t unreasonable for politicians to lean towards decisions that benefit them in the polls. But all else isn’t even here. One of these decisions is better for Canada, and one is worse.Now, is it possible that the DPP and AG actually had good reasons to stick it to SNC? Could be. The problem is that neither explained their reasons, both citing that it would be inappropriate to comment while SNC is pursuing their appeal of said decision in the courts. (This is probably a reasonable position now, though I’m less sure it’s a good reason for not having explained the decision at the time.)[EDIT: Just to be super clear on this point: the DPP’s Section 13 memo was read by the AG and no one else that we know of. The AG’s deputy didn’t read it. No one in the PM’s office read it (though Wilson-Raybould says a copy was forwarded, and then re-sent again after her conversion with Wernick on Dec 18th). SNC was never told why they were rejected. It’s all a mystery. And despite this being the first decision on this law, the AG refused to solicit an external opinion from a former Chief Justice of Canada. The AG had the right to make this set of decisions, but it’s hard to understand the logic here.]While their silence keeps us from perfect clarity, there are two dominant theories for why the DPP and AG decided against SNC’s plea:They agreed on the technical argument that SNC is legally ineligible for deferral on the explicit grounds of national economic interests (which is to say that Canada can’t use that as a factor in its judgment).They found compelling evidence that SNC hasn’t reformed and/or wouldn’t offer good faith cooperation in context of a plea.In the first case, it’s hard to argue against this reading of the law being facially correct. Even so, there are non-trivial counter-arguments: (i) Governments make this kind of self-benefiting decision all the time. The game is that you simply list reasons other than “national economic interest” when filling out the paperwork, regardless of how important said interests actually were. Now, maybe countries shouldn’t do this. But they do. And while I personally see the appeal of “let’s go by the book, even if mostly alone, even if that’s a net tax”, I don’t think people who take the other side are necessarily bad. (ii) If you have enough other reasons outside the national economic interest, it isn’t clear to me that it being helpful to the national economic interest is bad. (iii) Pragmatic flexibility is half the Liberal Party’s platform. Most voters who had an informed opinion here would have expected Trudeau to take precisely the stance he has. As such, you could argue that this is a form of mandate that he’s actually responsible to uphold.In the second case, the counter-argument is simply that over-ruling the PM’s judgment shouldn’t actually be their call, regardless of what the current letter of the law may say. Remember that this whole new structure was a Harper innovation, and arguably just a symbolic one. And while the AG has always theoretically been independent from the PM’s office, there are realist arguments for why this distinction has always been something of a legal fiction.(To be clear, we don’t know which — if either — of these arguments Trudeau is leaning on, largely because we don’t know what Roussel’s thinking was.)Formalist v. Realist(As preface for what follows, I’m not trying to convince anyone that one particular school of thought here is better or more right than the other. My point is that both are valid, in as much as they’re both logically robust frameworks that you could believe and defend without being inherently bad or crazy.)As to what I mean by the realist school, there’s a significant parallel here (in a narrow way) to the current situation in the US with Trump. When his new AG (who at the time wasn’t yet his AG, but who had been an AG before under Bush Sr.) issued an unsolicited memo outlining an argument that Trump was constitutionally OK to reassign and fire his way to outcomes he wanted without this implying actual obstruction of justice, this was widely met with cries of “treason!” — despite (a) that not being what treason means, and (b) it being a coherent and well-argued theory of law.Now, sure, you or I may disagree with this philosophically. And we may be right! But the idea that the chief executive has extraordinary and unilateral powers over nearly all executive affairs isn’t necessarily as dangerous as it may seem at first blush.Over-simplifying this a bit, imagine two competing scenarios:You restrain the executive’s powers with a complicated set of rules which are really hard to enforce with any consistency and which involve endless subjective judgment calls and which can easily be misused by a belligerent opposition to thwart the executive doing its job and which really don’t offer much effective restraint anyway.You restrain the executive’s powers with two simple levers: (a) in the case of gross judgment, you vote the executive out next election; (b) in the case of gross judgment that will cause more harm if left that long, you vote them out by pressuring your reps for impeachment / a no-confidence vote.Now, yes, there are real objections to this second system, which we’ll get to in a second. But just keep this idea of two approaches in mind as we consider a statement from Wilson-Raybould’s remarks yesterday:We either have a system that is based on the rule of law, the independence of prosecutorial functions and respect for those charged to use their discretion and powers in a particular way, or we do not.This is basically an argument for that first system — which, on its face, seems entirely reasonable. The rule of law is obviously good! And independence sure sounds like something we’d want! But step back for a minute. Let’s recall that the AG is a member of the executive (not the judiciary). They serve at the pleasure of the PM. And while we’d want the AG to have their own personal philosophy and set of legal interpretations, they weren’t elected to enact those. (In the US, the AG isn’t even an elected official at all!) And if the PM/President happens to have a different philosophy and set of legal interpretations (which they, in effect, were elected to enact), it isn’t at all obvious why they must lose in the event of a tie.By way of analogy, imagine that I’m a hiring manager working directly under the CEO in a public company. She’s the one hired by the shareholders (via the board), not me. She’s hired me to be an extension of her vision. To the degree that I do this well, all is well. But if she and I disagree on whether to hire a given candidate, my objection of “well, our bylaws say this is my call” isn’t itself all that compelling. I can go to the board and say “hey, she overruled me and our bylaws say she can’t do that”, but for the board to be fully interested they’d want me to also add “and her judgment was dangerously flawed for x reason”, else the board would just say “yes, well, we hired her and not you, so if she thinks your judgment is wrong, you’re not really fulfilling the function you were hired to fulfill, so I’m not sure why you’re still here”. What they care about most is whether the CEO displayed poor judgment relative to the standard they were hired to uphold. Whether or not bylaws were broken along the way is somewhat incidental. (While some board members care a lot about bylaws, that concern is more often about organizational dynamics than any higher theory of justice. If they like the CEO’s vision and you were hired to execute that vision and the CEO no longer feels like you are executing that vision, arguing “but the bylaws!” is probably not going to save your job.)To be ultra clear, this isn’t to say that a CEO or PM or President should be allowed to “get away” with whatever they want. There are many occasions where a PM will want something that’s not actually consistent with the platform on which they were elected (or that’s just generally bad in some moral or ethical sense) — in which case we would want the AG to object, and object strongly. But in cases where the AG loses this argument, we’d also expect them to no longer be AG thereafter, which is itself fully consistent with a healthy system provided that their exit triggers a thorough review.To use an extreme example, imagine that Trudeau tells his AG to tell her DPP to bring a Biblical flood of lawsuits against his next-door neighbor because they objected to his backyard Nickelback concert. In the realist view, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the AG says yes or no, or even whether they have the latitude to make that decision. What matters is that the public is informed so that we can all decide whether this is something we object to or not. And if we do, enough of us will call up our local MP and say “if you don’t stop this guy immediately, we’ll vote in your opponent next year”, which they’ll take as impetus to go vote the PM out. It’s no less an effective check against the PM’s abuse of power than the AG having theoretical independence. It’s just a different mechanism. Sure, there are plenty of people who prefer one mechanism over the other (which is the kind of viewpoint diversity that’s good and healthy!), but it’s hard to argue that this realist view is essentially wrong. Having an independent AG is not as structurally important as having an independent judiciary — provided that the actions of the executive are regularly and efficiently reported back to a voting public interested in holding leaders to account.And it’s exactly with this last bit that things get thorny.A RequiemThe phrase “constitutional crisis” has been bandied about a lot in both Canada and the US in recent days. Yet few of the underlying situations really seem to fit the bill, at least relative to a much deeper constitutional crisis that’s been growing unchecked for decades now.The constitution (both in the US and Canada, and in nearly every developed democracy) depends upon an engaged citizenry willing to demand and do, and a press capable of giving said citizenry the data on which they can fairly decide.The problem is that none of this works if we don’t share common ideas of which bad things are especially bad, or if we don’t all trust that at least a few impartial and talented journalists will always ask the right questions to empower useful explanations of what the executive did so that we can vote and/or pressure our reps accordingly.The challenge as I see it is that Canadians have long been remarkably ill-served by their press.Huge chunks of the country only have a Postmedia outlet as their local paper. (Postmedia being the antithesis of unbiased.)There are less sensational papers, including some large national ones. But none are especially good at what we need them to be good at. (If you can find me an explainer from a major outlet that’s anywhere near as thorough or clear as this one, I’ll send you $25. And I really don’t mean this to my own aggrandizement. I just don’t think one exists.) [EDIT: I’m happy to 10x this offer to $250 CAD just in case $25 isn’t enough of an incentive.]Most papers have dedicated an increasing amount of space to opinion pieces, which are quite good for clicks and quite bad for reader education. (They’re too short, too slanted, and they mostly use the little space they have to tell rather than show.)Most opinion columnists sell a partisan spin, which only serves to divide people into camps that inevitably grow further and further apart, thus making voter coordination across party lines difficult to impossible, all while also reducing common ideas of which things are worth coordinating on.No outlets have shown a willingness or ability to force Trudeau or Scheer to answer hard questions. (Hard to say if they’re too worried about losing access, too self-focused to coordinate, or too distracted to see the civic necessity of getting those answers.)I’ve polled a bunch of my Canadian friends — all bright young people who regularly vote and try to do so intelligently. None could really explain what happened with Trudeau and SNC, nor were they sure where to turn to rectify the gap. Plenty of stories were a search away. But which would give my friends the context required to understand Trudeau’s decisions for what they were?(That’s a non-rhetorical question, by the way. My wallet is open if I’ve misspoken here.)Why This MattersConsider this current case. It’s fine for someone to say “hey, I believe in closely following the letter of the law in all cases” and for them to thus side against Trudeau here (assuming he did in fact inappropriately pressure Wilson-Raybould). Like, I may not personally find this to be the world’s most sophisticated ideology, but the point is that we all tend to think our own judgment best, which is exactly why we do things like vote in free multi-party elections. Lots of people probably believe that an AG should be 100% independent in every way, and these voters should be welcome to form a party around that belief! But that party wouldn’t quite be today’s Liberal Party (or the Conservatives), which is something that’s been poorly explained to voters.The resulting issue is that I don’t think most people will go to the polls this October with optimal clarity in mind. While some are only ever going to vote against the candidate they hate more, many with less tribal feelings are going to be swayed by a faulty assumption that Trudeau committed some especially heinous crime here, where the reality (to the current public evidence) is more that, at worst, he and his AG were approaching from two different angles, with one of them ultimately having the trump-card of being the elected PM.There are all sorts of valid reasons why someone might vote for or against Trudeau. But I think it’s important that those votes are cast in light of what actually happened here and what it actually implies — which Scheer is actively trying to muddy and misrepresent, which the media is largely unwilling to combat, which I think is probably a bad thing?EDITS: ROUND #1Original answer written March 1st. Coming back on the 13th to get around to some needful updates/corrections/addendums.Some I’ve made above; others I’ll list here in no particular order:Trudeau and Butts have been arguing that they do believe in full prosecutorial independence. But I almost wish they wouldn’t. It’s hard to believe that they (or any PM team) totally believes it to be the best possible mechanism. I get that it’s scary to say anything else (imagine the headlines!), but this feels like a good opportunity to maybe start talking about all the stuff I’ve outlined here. (I suppose there’s a world in which they could totally believe in the idea. Butts certainly sounded sincere when he talked about it. But I just can’t get there as it concerns a PM. The sorts of people who win national elections aren’t generally the sorts to take being overruled by an underling all that well. I only leave this door open because of how authentic Butts seemed on the point.)My original piece included this note: “In the interests of precision, the most recent source I could find said that SNC has 3,400 employees in Quebec (vs. just Montreal). But as their headquarters are in Montreal, I’m assuming the bulk are there. I could be wrong.” As an update, this authoritative-seeming Globe & Mail article puts the number in Quebec at 2,500 and the number in Montreal at 700.Lots of commentary out there about just how at risk those 9,000 Canadian jobs were (and about how a federal debarment wouldn’t necessarily influence bidding on provincial/municipal projects). Though I’ve made a few edits to account for these arguments, they all seem peripheral to me for two reasons: (i) if SNC was found guilty, this would almost certainly impact their employee retention and bidding prospects in a general downstream way (we have evidence of recent press impacting them already); (ii) while most displaced workers would find new jobs, there’s no obvious replacement within Canada for SNC in terms of EPC firms. (For more, I thought this take was balanced and thorough — though I did find the final four sentences wildly upsetting.)I found this personal testimony from a current SNC exec (who lives and works in Saskatchewan) worth reading. His main point is that those trying to politicize this as some Liberal gambit to exclusively favor Quebec are overlooking that some 2/3rds of SNC’s Canadian workforce don’t live or work in Quebec. (On a political level, an SNC conviction would definitely hurt Liberals more. But his point that Trudeau is fighting for jobs that are mostly not in Quebec is certainly valid.)It still isn’t clear to me which laws/precedents are shielding the DPP’s SNC-related memo(s) from public review. The court has since ruled against SNC’s appeal, and it really feels like this whole debate would be much simpler if we all knew exactly why Roussel and Wilson-Raybould felt so strongly against SNC being eligible for a deferral. (FWIW, you can read the full text of the deferral-related legislation here.)For those asking, I’m 100% behind a thorough investigation. Let’s get lots of uninhibited testimony, and let’s subpoena relevant emails/texts, etc. Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant. But let’s also report those findings in a cautious and contextual and non-sensational way.There’s a representative thread here on why the AG's independence is somehow sacrosanct. All such threads/articles I've come across share the same hallmarks: (i) they ignore/discount that individuals serving at the pleasure of the PM can never be truly independent; (ii) they make a weird assumption that independence is a required pre-condition to keeping a PM from interfering with prosecutions in a gross way (when a non-independent prosecutor could just as easily report the PM for gross judgment). I don’t know who is debating that bad judgment is anything other than bad, or who is suggesting we shouldn’t deter/punish it. The question is whether a certain old and imported legal doctrine is the most effective mechanism to ensure an end we all agree is important.The way most journalists use the word “political” in the phrase “political interference” is also weird! Whether interference is “political” has nothing to do with whether it’s good or bad. Take the case of weed-related prosecutions. Most would say that more political interference would have been good (in terms of directing prosecutors to not prosecute any more pot cases while new legislation was framed). The fact that Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould didn’t interfere with those prosecutions is a widespread criticism. That resources were spent fining and jailing people for trivial amounts of pot possession after Trudeau’s majority election on a “legalize pot” platform is, to many, a symptom of a flawed system, not proof of some sacred pillar doing its job. The public will was pretty clear about this (and had been for some time). Following the existing law to the letter led to an outcome that most consider bad. Governments semi-regularly opt to not prosecute existing laws for various political reasons (most of them positive/healthy). This isn’t necessarily a meaningful threat to the rule of law. (This is doubly true when it’s a new law with no prosecutorial precedent either way.)On a related note, I think “rule of law” is one of those phrases where everyone has some idea of what they mean by it, but where few actually have a robust conception that could survive a hard cross-examination. By any conception, sure, inconsistent and partial rulings are generally to be avoided. But the idea that prosecutorial independence (which just shifts who gets to make the decisions which some will find inconsistent and/or partial) has some necessary role in supporting the rule of law is curious. Taking up the example of pot again, look how many Americans were angry at Jeff Sessions for increasing the number of pot prosecutions given that this was contrary to Trump’s platform. Sessions’ decision caused all sorts of confusion/chaos, and it clearly favored one demographic of voters at the expense of another. No one is questioning that he was legally allowed to make said decision (the federal law was clear, and the restrictions placed upon on it by the previous AG were non-binding), but I’m not sure how any could argue that his decision reflects the rule of law working in a positive way either.A few good write-ups about the Shawcross doctrine (the basis in Canadian legal theory for prosecutorial independence) here, here and here. The last link (about the UK implementation) is interesting in that it describes a “Shawcross letter” (i.e., a letter sent by the AG to their ministerial colleagues to solicit their input). This was, in effect, what Wilson-Raybould didn’t do. She made up her mind independently, then dismissed those who expressed contrary views. Had she gathered up all available views to inform her decision (rather than decide based exclusively on her and her DPP’s legal judgment), one imagines that others would have found less cause to ensure their views were being heard/considered. (She had the legal right to make up her mind independently, but that hardly means she was right in doing so.)I’ll have to write a separate answer about Butts’ testimony at some point, but the big things for me were: (i) it gave a pretty good explanation for why Wilson-Raybould was shuffled; (ii) Butts made an extraordinary and easily-falsified set of claims about her interactions with him about the SNC file, which, if true, are enormously problematic for her case.The other thing that came out of Butts’ testimony was that Trudeau really dropped the ball in offering Wilson-Raybould (who is Indigenous) the Indigenous Services portfolio as opposed to the Crown-Indigenous Relations portfolio, with that difference being, roughly, the difference between being in charge of restructuring relations (the latter) and being in charge of administering welfare (the former). She was never going to accept the former, and he and Butts have no real excuse for not foreseeing this.The real crisis here (if we must use the term crisis) seems to be that Trudeau was so out of tune with two of his ministers, and that he was unable to keep them in the fold after they raised their objections (even if the way they raised them was less than ideal).On the subject of raising objections, Scott Welch wrote a great companion answer here about the various opportunities (if not obligations) that Wilson-Raybould had to report any inappropriate or unethical behavior on the part of Trudeau or his staff. She, to our current knowledge, made use of none of them. Prior to her being shuffled, her only vocalized discontent came in the form of telling some people (paraphrasing) “stop lobbying already!”, which is not at all the same thing as raising a formal concern/complaint about misconduct. (And again we have Butts’ testimony that his sole one-on-one conversation with her about SNC came at the end of a friendly two-hour dinner which she initiated, with no other text or email ever being sent to him on the subject. Per his testimony, she was the one who brought it up then, and her after-dinner text said nothing further about it. He claims she never laid out her concerns until during one of their “four or five” “long” and “personal” conversations they had after she was transferred, and that he was dumbfounded when she mentioned her suspicion on why she had been moved.)While she isn’t a disinterested party (and while I think some of her criticisms are overly strong), I thought Sheila Copps’ interview with CBC contained some solid points, namely: (i) that saying “I’ve made up my mind, now go away” is not exactly consistent with the role of an AG/MOJ when your colleagues don’t feel heard, (ii) that it’s kinda weird to quit a cabinet without also quitting caucus, (iii) that the number of meetings which Wilson-Raybould took on this file was not especially high, (iv) that the original decision to not prosecute was split. (As an aside, I really dislike that interviewer. He’s part of the problem.)EDITS: ROUND 2So, the Conservatives have started a “Let Her Speak” campaign pushing for a second (at least) round of testimony from Wilson-Raybould. While I’m broadly supportive of this, it’s worth noting that Trudeau has a rational case for saying “no” that isn’t solely rooted in being afraid of some harmful truth being revealed. From his perspective, Wilson-Raybould is on a mission to take him down. Let’s assume that every word she said in the first testimony was true. There was nothing particularly damning in it from a legal context, but it played very poorly for Trudeau all the same. He’s now facing a decision between: (i) allowing her to speak again and the same thing happening again and it hurting him more in the polls, (ii) not allowing her to speak again, which will hurt him in the polls now, but which may also cap the damage. Were I his advisor, I’d push him toward letting her speak and then prepping a killer set of rebuttals (assuming the facts are indeed on his side). More downside, but more upside. That said, it would seem that he’s being pushed in a different direction. While I’m not so much a fan of this, I wouldn’t infer from it (as many are) that it’s necessarily a sign of guilt.Ok, a bit more about Scheer. I keep getting comments wondering why I dislike him so much. First, I should point out that most Conservatives never cared much for him either until he was their sole hope against Trudeau. He didn’t crack 20% in opinion polls until after Kevin O’Leary dropped out (and that’s among Conservative Party members). He won the nomination on the 13th ballot, having trailed on all 12 ballots prior. The fact that he won (which was contested due to significant inconsistencies) was largely viewed as a frantic rejection of Maxime Bernier (who had led on all of the first 12 ballots), not an endorsement of Scheer. From his first speech post-nomination, he’s relied on red meat, generalities, and strawmen. That’s not what we need from the Leader of the Opposition. We need someone able to carefully and accurately deconstruct the PM’s decisions, showing voters a detailed vision of some plausibly better way. Jack Layton was that guy. Harper, in his own way, was that guy. Scheer is not that guy. He once wrote an op-ed in support of Brexit — aka, arguably the most ill-conceived set of decisions in modern political history. (He was still in support of it as recently as this past November, which is just wild given how things have unfolded. It’s one thing to be theoretically in favor of sovereignty. It’s quite another to be in favor of a nation jumping off a cliff to get it.) Scheer’s campaign chair, Hamish Marshall, is also a former director of Rebel Media, which is morally inexcusable in itself. (Marshall says he had nothing to do with editorial there and that he eventually did resign. But this rundown of all the content they published before he quit is deeply disturbing — not to mention that we have no reason to believe that he quit for moral reasons.)I’d been waiting for a transcript of Nathalie Drouin’s (Wilson-Raybould’s former deputy) testimony before the House Justice Committee (which it seems doesn’t exist anywhere, maybe due to some rule). But snippets were reported by the CBC. A few interesting takeaways: (i) JWR had given Drouin an instruction not to talk about the SNC case by September 17th, which was super early into the process; (ii) JWR forbade Drouin from answering a question from the PCO (civil service) about the potential impact of SNC failing to get a deferral; (iii) Drouin was never told what the evidence against SNC’s case was. This is all very odd.An important open question: where did the original leak to the Globe & Mail come from? And why was a leak made to the press before internal remedies were exhausted (or even attempted)?An interesting tidbit from Butts’ testimony that I missed the first time around: Wilson-Raybould was the second minister that Trudeau attempted to move from a dream portfolio to Indigenous Services using the same logic. The difference is that the first person said yes. (Incidentally, this was the other minister that later quit in solidarity with Wilson-Raybould.) While it was still an unwise move, this does lend credence to the argument that Trudeau was doing it to signal continued support for his Indigenous reconciliation efforts, which is to say it could have been a bad decision made with positive intent. (Logically, though, this same move having been made before might have been a really convenient cover. I don’t know how we’d know for sure unless we’re just taking someone’s word.)Echoing what Copps said about the insubstantial meeting count, Butts estimated the number of meetings on the TMX pipeline deal as being around 100. By comparison, the SNC file ended up drawing 10 meetings and 20 contacts over a little more than three months. While the context is a bit different with an AG vs. other ministerial roles, this number still doesn’t seem outlying.Lots of people have been mentioning how prosecutorial independence is “constitutionally guaranteed” (or other wording to that effect). This is true in a sense, but that sense is mostly misleading. Canada is unlike the US in that we have no single document called The Constitution. What we have is a messy patchwork of acts, statutes, orders, and precedents. Prosecutorial independence is a “constitutional convention”, meaning that it’s an unwritten rule with no binding power over Parliament. In the absence of contrary legislation, conventions are the best practices which all are generally expected to follow. But not only have conventions been broken from time to time with little consequence, the House is free to pass new laws to make written what is unwritten, and the courts (explicitly) have no power to overrule. So if Trudeau were to decide tomorrow “hey, let’s do away with this thing” and if enough MPs were to say “yeah, let’s do that”, then the bill would be passed. (There are more steps, but the gist is that there’s no way to stop a majority-supported bill without sparking an actual constitutional crisis likely to resolve in the House’s favour.) While I can’t imagine that any PM would try this in the current climate, there’s nothing actually legally stopping them.