Author Archives: Dale

About Dale

Journalist in the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery

Roundup: A late start isn’t an extra week off

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I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s a very, very slow news season, or if the basic knowledge of how Parliament works is that lacking, but we got a lot of really bad headlines yesterday about how the Senate plans to take an “extra week off.” Which is not actually true, and distorts the situation. And in some cases, it’s being spun this way by certain media suspects completely out of bad faith, because anytime they can badmouth the Senate they’ll grab the opportunity and run.

To clarify: The Senate does not have a fixed sitting schedule the way the House of Commons does, and in no way are they bound to match the sitting schedule, because they do different work, and the timelines are different. The Senate frequently doesn’t convene at the same time as the House of Commons after the winter or summer break because they simply don’t have enough work on their Order Paper to justify it. They passed all of the bills that the Commons sent to them before they adjourned for the break, so coming back at the same time makes no sense—especially when they are competing for IT resources and interpreters with the Commons in the current hybrid context (which has, frankly, screwed the Senate over, but they’ve also allowed it to happen). More to the point, there are many years where the Senate will sit for weeks after the Commons rises for its break, and they will have break weeks out of sync with the Commons every now and again because their workloads are different. But this isn’t communicated effectively, either by the Senate itself, or by the media reporting on it—and it most especially isn’t communicated or even mentioned by the bad faith actors whose only agenda is to paint the Senate in a bad light. It’s disappointing, but not unexpected.

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Roundup: A plan to tax the unvaxxed

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By all accounts, it sounded like Quebec premier François Legault was spit-balling policy when, at the press conference to announce the province’s new chief public health officer, he proposed that the province impose additional costs on the unvaccinated in the form of some kind of surtax that would be “significant,” meaning more than $100. There were no details, which is kind of a big deal, but you immediately had other political leaders worried about “slippery slopes,” as though we don’t have other sin taxes on things like alcohol and cigarettes which impose their own significant public health burdens, as well as concerns that this will further disenfranchise those who are already marginalised. And fair enough.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1481062196314624000

The concerns about whether this somehow contravenes the Canada Health Act seem to be overblown, as it’s not charging for healthcare services, but other concerns about just how this might be implemented remain, as professors like Jennifer Robson articulate below.

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Roundup: Recalling a committee for a dog and pony show

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The House of Commons’ access to information, privacy and ethics committee will be recalled for emergency meetings after the Conservatives were “alarmed” to hear that the Public Health Agency used anonymised mobile data to see how Canadians were responding to public health measures. The point of the data collection is to get a sense of travel patterns during these kinds of measures, and to see whether people stay at home, or how far they go, and because its anonymised, nobody can see who is doing what individually—they’re looking at patterns.

But this kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth over anonymised data is nothing new for Conservatives, who have sounded this particular alarm before when Statistics Canada was hoping to use anonymised bank data to track Canadians’ purchasing habits in a more robust and accurate way than shopping diary surveys can, and lo, that project got iced. Of course, because irony is dead, the Conservatives’ election platform had their “carbon points” plan, which would require so much itemised consumer data that it puts this kind of anonymised data to shame, but why worry about consistency or logic?

Because this is a House of Commons committee, we are guaranteed that this is going to be nothing more than a dog and pony show. If they agree to hold a study on this—which it’s not yet guaranteed—it’s going to be hauling public health officials before committee and subjecting them to ridiculous questions that have little to do with this particular issue, in the hopes of catching them out on something, and attempts to build some kind of conspiracy theory that the government was trying to play Big Brother during the pandemic, and it will balloon from there until the point where the government has had enough and starts filibustering the increasingly unreasonable demands by opposition members, and the committee will grind to a halt. Because that’s how this kind of thing happens every time, because our MPs are more concerned with being partisan dicks on committees than actually doing their jobs of accountability. But maybe I’m just getting cynical about the current state of affairs in federal politics.

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Roundup: The healthcare debate needs to include strings

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Our healthcare system is the topic du jour across much of the media, with a lot of “told you so,” and handwringing about how provincial governments drove “efficiencies” over the past number of decades that left almost no surge capacity­—Ontario most especially—while not doing anything about its robustness. And through it all, there are a number of opportunists saying “See! We need more private options!” which in turn leads to accusations of “See! You want American-style healthcare!” and the argument goes binary and unhelpful. (And here is some perspective on the American system amid COVID, which had more capacity, but is similarly overburdened now and some hospitals are declaring bankruptcy because they have had to cancel elective surgeries).

What I find particularly curious, however, is that in none of the pieces I read over the weekend was it ever acknowledged that over the decade that the health transfer escalator was at six percent annually, that provincial health spending didn’t match that growth, and that the money was being spent elsewhere. Provincial governments should be held to account for the fact that they were given money to fix their healthcare systems, and they didn’t, which has led us to this situation, and while my reply column on Twitter likes to insist that this is just conservative governments, no, it was common to governments of all stripes for decades now. This is why we need all future federal transfer agreements to come with hard strings, and compliance measures to ensure that we actually use those federal dollars to fix the system, not paper over cracks while they use the money to lower taxes elsewhere.

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Roundup: The limits of federal capacity to help

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As the omicron variant continues to surge and stress hospital systems around the country, the federal health minister has started issuing a warning to provinces—the federal government’s resources to help provinces are finite, and that provinces are going to need to do more to bend their curves and reduce caseloads, because the federal government is about tapped out. That could include stricter vaccine mandates within provinces, because they may not have a choice as the unvaccinated continue to swamp the healthcare system. (This is where Jason Kenney and his mini-me, Scott Moe, immediately declared that it wasn’t going to happen in their provinces).

The Canadian Forces’ own medical abilities are very finite, and even before the pandemic, they were already short thousands of bodies necessary to do all of the work they’re supposed to be doing. The pandemic has very much not helped this situation, and between pandemic needs and natural disasters (wildfires and floods), the military is having a hard time doing its own job and preparing soldiers for possible combat deployments when provinces keep demanding more military help—and there is talk that Ontario should bring in more military personnel to deal with the crisis that is yet again brewing in its long-term care homes. This is not only not sustainable, but I suspect there is also a troubling willingness on the part of provinces to simply turn to the federal government (and federal dollars) because it’s easier than doing the hard work on their own, in their own backyards.

Yes, the federal government is doing what it can, but at this point in the pandemic, a lot of bad decisions by provinces are catching up with them, but we already know that the blame is going to fall on the federal government because they couldn’t do enough to fix the premiers’ mistakes (and really, they have neither the jurisdiction, the capacity, or the necessary competence to do so). But too many bad actors are willing to blame the federal government because it suits there purposes to do so, and I will bet you that virtually nobody in the media will bother to correct them because too many of them believe the maxim that “nobody cares about jurisdiction in a pandemic,” even though real life doesn’t work that way, and no amount of political willpower (or Green Lantern rings) can change that fact. And premiers whose bad judgment cost thousands of lives will get away with it, because we have an allergy to holding the right people to account in this country.

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Roundup: Fuzzy logic, rank innumeracy, and outright lies

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Erin O’Toole has apparently decided he’s going all-in for the unvaccinated, and wants “reasonable accommodations” made for them while they continue to flood the healthcare system and push it to the point of collapse, and lo, he wants the federal government to halt their vaccine mandate for truck drivers citing the fragility of the supply chain. (Erm, so when the virus rips through the unvaccinated drivers, that won’t further disrupt the supply chain?)

Logic doesn’t seem to be penetrating O’Toole’s rhetoric—nor the simple fact that premiers are responsible for the management of the pandemic, not the federal government. There are no “reasonable accommodations” because rapid tests are not actually passports that allow the unvaccinated free licence to go out in public (unlikely to be masked either, because the Venn diagram of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers is nearly a perfect circle). All it does is prolong the pandemic and the strain on the healthcare system which is leading to the mockdowns across the country—which again, O’Toole is trying to pin on Trudeau because the federal government continues to offer pandemic supports, and he claims that this is “normalizing” them. (He also calls them lockdowns when they are nothing of the sort). He’s tried to claim that the federal government should have been able to increase bed capacity in hospitals (physical beds are not the problem—the problem is trained staff to tend to the patients in those beds). It’s just a bunch of fuzzy logic, rank innumeracy, and outright lies, and O’Toole knows it, but he’s decided that this is the path that he can exploit politically, and there frankly aren’t enough people, particularly in the media, calling him on his bullshit (because both sides! *jazz hands*).

Meanwhile, O’Toole is also calling for emergency meetings of the health committee to examine the “critical gaps” in the federal government’s ability to manage the pandemic in the omicron wave. Which is…not the federal government’s fault. They provided the vaccines, and the rapid tests when asked, and are deploying military help across the country when provinces ask (never mind that the military is stretched beyond capacity and they can’t do their actual jobs right now). No, what O’Toole has decided we all need is a dog and pony show to deflect from the failures of the premiers so that he can try and pin this all on Trudeau. It would be risible if we hadn’t already seen the Conservatives abuse that very same committee in the previous parliament, for the sake of a few headlines.

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Roundup: The inevitable comparisons will be flawed

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It’s the anniversary of the Capitol Hill insurrection, so you can expect the media on both sides of the border to be full of thinkpieces about What It All Means™, particularly as America continues down the path of being a failed state. So while there is some good stuff out there, such as this good analysis piece, we’ll see some inevitable “what about Canada?” pieces out there as well. Case in point:

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1478858665423745026

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1478861864541036544

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1478865054699294726

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1478868398192930817

To answer Wherry’s question, there aren’t the same structural weak points in Canada, because our system is far more robust than the Americans’ system. For example, the insurrection happened on the date that Congress had to ratify election results, which doesn’t happen here, because Parliament is dissolved for an election. Elections Canada, which answers to the Crown, does the work of verifying election results, and they have uniform rules around the country, unlike the US, where every state and county runs their own federal polls, and there is no uniformity and voting rights are a mess across the board. We don’t have their gerrymandering because we gave that to arm’s-length judge-run panels decades ago. Nothing could prevent a transfer of power, short of a recalcitrant Governor General, and in that case, there would be the recourse of going to the Queen, but even in those cases, things tend to work behind the scenes to prevent that eventuality from ever happening (because the first rule of constitutional monarchy is that you keep the Queen out of it).

Our structure is sound, but we do have a problem with bad actors because much of our system depends on people having a sense of honour or decency to do the right thing, and when they don’t, things get sticky. They tend to work out in the long run because it’s resilient—but if we go about codifying a bunch of things that operate by convention, we would likely find things being perverted even more so, because then the impetus to find ways around those written rules becomes apparent, rather than there being a broader spirit of the convention to be upheld. It also tends to lead to all kinds of unexpected consequences—Erin O’Toole weaponizing the (garbage) Reform Act is proof of that. And it’s hard to build systems to be bad actor-proof, because bad actors will find a way to exploit the system to their ends. We do need to fix some things in our system, such as the way we’ve bastardised leadership contests and turned them into quasi-presidential primaries, the broader point is that we don’t have the same structural vulnerabilities that the Americans have, which is a good thing, but we do need to be on guard to ensure that bad actors don’t get the chance to wreak havoc.

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Roundup: Badmouthing the CBC for grift

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Because this is occasionally a media criticism blog, I will mention that piece circulating from former CBC producer Tara Henley, who made a splash by quitting her job and starting a Substack blog (with paid subscriptions!) by badmouthing the CBC on her way out the door. While I was initially planning on not mentioning this, because the complaints she makes in the piece merely reflect poorly on her rather than the CBC, but it attracted some bizarre traction yesterday, from the likes of Jody Wilson-Raybould, and Erin O’Toole, who invited her to call him about plans to reform the CBC (as he promised to slash its budget).

But the piece itself (which I’m not going to link to, but I did read when the National Post reprinted it) was not the stunning indictment she claimed it to be, or the usual cadre of CBC-haters have been touting it as. When you get through all of her prose, it seems that her biggest complaint is that the CBC asked her, as a producer, to ensure there were more diverse guests on panels or interview segments. In Henley’s recounting, this was the booming klaxon of “The Wokes are coming!” and how this is some kind of Ivy League American brain worm/neural parasite import that has destroyed the CBC’s reporting over the past 18 months. Reality is most likely that what she considered “compromising” to the reporting was being asked not to use the same six sources on all of the panels or packages she was responsible for—because that is a very real problem with a lot of Canadian news outlets, where they have a Rolodex of usual suspects who have a media profile because they answer phone calls and make themselves available. There are a number of people, whose credentials are actually terrible and who have zero actual credibility or legitimacy, but because they are easy gets for reporters or producers, and they say provocative things, they are go-to sources time and again. That the vast majority of them are heterosexual white men is problem when a news outlet has had it pointed out to them repeatedly that they need more diverse sources. Henley appears to have balked at that.

There are a lot of problems with CBC’s reporting these days—much of it is either reductive both-sidesing, or its credulous stenography that doesn’t challenge what is being said, even if what is being said is wrong or problematic but has a sympathetic person saying it. There are a lot of questionable editorial choices being made in terms of who they are granting anonymity to and who they are not, particularly if it counters the narrative they are trying to set with the particular story (and there was a lot of this in their reporting on the allegations around House of Commons Clerk Charles Robert). There are problems with its mandate creep around their web presence, and yes, they have made very questionable decisions around some of their editorial pieces—and attempts to alter them once published. None of its problems have to do with the fact that Henley was asked to get more diverse voices. But Henley also knew that there is an audience for her recitation of the “anti-woke” platitudes, and she has a book she wants to sell, and figured that a paid Substack was more lucrative than the Mother Corp. And the fact that O’Toole and others are reaching out seems to indicate that she gambled on media illiteracy for this particular grift, in the hopes it might pay off.

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Roundup: No, an electoral agreement won’t work

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Because Doug Ford and his merry band of incompetent murderclowns have decided to make Ontario miserable again with eleventh-hour changes and nonsensical measures (sorry, guys, but I am going to be insufferably bitter about the gyms being closed down again), there is once again talk about how the provincial Liberals and the NDP need to come to some kind of agreement in order to get Ford out. Which is insane.

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1478063212281085953

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1478064242985246720

The Liberals and NDP, provincially and federally, are not the same party, don’t have the same positions, and even if they both err on the side of progressivity, and frankly, it’s a major betrayal of local democracy if you’re telling your riding associations not to run candidates because of some cockamamie plan that involves dubious polls or results from an election three-and-a-half years ago with other factors in play which are irrelevant to the current context. Sorry, but no. The opposition parties need to come up with a coherent message and plan to sell to the people of Ontario, and to be steadfast in holding Ford to account rather than letting him get away with his folksy aw-shucks routine. It means the parties need to organise their ground game. It means a proper electoral contest, not a theoretical exercise based on bullshit reasoning.

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Roundup: Your year-end reminder about Basic Income

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Because there is some Basic Income nonsense floating around once again—an NDP private members’ bill, some Senate initiatives, and now of course, some national columnists, so it’s time once again to remind you that economist Lindsay Tedds was a contributor to the BC Basic Income study, and they found pretty conclusively that Basic Income won’t solve the right problems, will create new ones, and that improving existing supports is the best way to go forward. Here’s Tedds reminding us of her findings:

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1474202800833785856

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1474204448905842688

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1474205459095556096

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1474212307982958593

Programming Note: I’m taking the rest of the year off from blogging and video/Patreon content. My Loonie Politics columns will continue on their usual schedule, but otherwise I am taking some very needed time off. (The burnout is real). Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in 2022.

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