Author Archives: Dale

About Dale

Journalist in the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery

Roundup: Mary Simon en route to Rideau Hall

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At long last, prime minister Justin Trudeau announced his pick for the next Governor General – and that the Queen had approved of her appointment. The choice is Mary Simon, an Inuk woman from Nunavik in northern Quebec, who started off at CBC North, moved on to negotiating land claims and was part of the constitutional negotiationsin the early 1980s, and later served as Canadian ambassador to Denmark and to the Arctic Council, before becoming president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, serving two terms. The only real downside was that she doesn’t speak French, and she cited that it was because it was not offered during as a choice when she attended day schools in the 1950s, but was committed to learn it – though it does bear noting that Inuktitut is an official language in Nunavut, so that should count for something among critics.

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Speaking of critics, here is a rundown of praise and criticism for the choice, as well as some praise from some of the loudest Indigenous advocates in the country, as well as a few others. One of the recurring things that keeps coming up, however, is that Simon is taking on a role that is colonial, and while Simon herself doesn’t see a conflict (and I’m told that the Inuit view their relationship with Canada differently than the First Nations do). Something that I’ve also seen a lot of online have been variations of “If she doesn’t use the office to burn it to the ground, then what good is it?” or “I hope she’s the last Governor General,” and the usual republican nonsense that misidentifies exactly which queen she will be representing, but of course, the problem with these narratives are both that a) as Governor General, she it’s not her place to burn it all down – that’s why we elect governments; and b) abolishing the monarchy will only complete the colonial project, not advance reconciliation. There are too many facile narratives floating around that only serve to make things worse, not better.

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Meanwhile, Philippe Lagassé enumerates the additional burdens that Simon will have to take on – rehabilitating the office post-Julie Payette, dealing with military sexual misconduct as the commander-in-chief, and walking the line of being the representative of the Crown in a time of reconciliation. Susan Delacourt states that Simon should have been appointed in 2017, making the salient point that she is experience over novelty, and diplomacy over celebrity. Aaron Wherry argues that the appointment is not simply empty symbolism. Paul Wells emphasises the value of presence and being present in the role, which Simon will fulfil greatly.

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Roundup: A big reduction in GHGs from steel

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You can tell that the pandemic is subsiding because politicians are starting to travel again — and more to the point, the prime minister and Cabinet members are starting to spread out across the country in order to start making funding announcements. Naturally, this is immediately being billed as election speculation, never mind that this happens every year once the House of Commons rises, and that there is certainly a pent-up desire on the part of government to be back in the spotlight doing these kinds of announcements. (But seriously, let’s ban the phrase “campaign-style” from news copy).

The major announcement yesterday was announcing $420 million in fully repayable loans to Algoma Steel to move away from coal-fired production to electric-arc production, which aims to reduce as much as 300 million tonnes of GHGs from their process every year, which is huge. Steel and cement are some of the biggest producers and some of the toughest to achieve GHG reductions with, so this is a fairly substantial announcement that will have a meaningful impact when it comes to reducing Ontario’s emissions.

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Heather Scoffield, meanwhile, complains that while the announcement sounds good on its face, too many of the details are obscured and not made transparent, so we don’t know if it’s really a good deal for Canadians or not — though I will note that Power & Politics interviewed one of the Algoma executives who said that some the details around who much of the loan could be forgiven if carbon reduction targets were met are still being negotiated, so perhaps the rest of those details will be made public once they are finalised.

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Roundup: The bravery of a hollow stand

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Over the weekend, The Canadian Press had an interview with out gay Conservative MP Eric Duncan, talking about his fight against the blood donation deferral period for men who have sex with men, while at the same time members of his own party have been fighting the bill to ban conversion therapy. And while it’s great that the Conservatives finally have an out gay MP (previously, their only out member was Senator Nancy Ruth, though they had ministers like John Baird were out in their private lives, but simply refused to acknowledge it in the media), and that their new leader professes to want to be more inclusive (apparently in spite of his own members), there is nevertheless something a bit off with the way this has all played out.

The thing about Duncan’s apparent “bravery” with talking about the blood donor policy as a result of his own history with being rejected is that this is not something the government can actually do anything about because Canadian Blood Services and Héma Québec are arm’s length, and Health Canada’s regulatory role is outside of the minister’s purview. Yes, we can ask questions as to why the Liberals promised to end the ban if they couldn’t actually fulfil their promise, but for Duncan (and for that matter, the NDP) to try and hold the government to account for something that they can’t actually do is a problem. Likewise, they too would be making promises that either they can’t keep, or they are proposing a massive and troubling overreach where the government would wind up asserting jurisdiction, bigfooting those arm’s-length agencies, and setting precedents for bigfooting other arm’s-length bodies in the future, which is a very bad thing that we should be very concerned about.

As for the conversion therapy bill, there were no “common sense amendments” that would make it acceptable to the Conservatives without gutting the bill. The bill would not criminalize conversations between parents and children, or with pastors, and this constant fear that social conservatives have had for decades as LGBT+ rights have progressed has never come true, and yet they will keep banging on that drum. As for the refrain that certain senators are pushing that “the government had six years to do this” is disingenuous. There is only so much time in parliament and only so much capacity in government to get everything accomplished, and it’s not like we didn’t have anything else happening over these past six years (such as a crash in oil prices, the Donald Trump years, getting climate legislation passed, advancing the cause of Indigenous reconciliation, of when it comes to LGBT+ issues, getting trans rights enshrined in law – again to these same social conservative fears of criminalization). Governments can’t do everything at once, and these people know that. Don’t fall for the rhetoric.

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Roundup: Where is the civilian control?

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Something rather unusual happened yesterday in that both prime minister Justin Trudeau, and his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, publicly panned the decision by the Chief of Defence Staff to keep the head of the navy on the job after he went on that golf game with the former CDS, General Jonathan Vance, while Vance is under active investigation for past sexual misconduct. But it’s pretty crazy that this happened given how things work under our system.

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This boils down to Harijit Sajjan and the fact that he’s not doing his job as minister. He is supposed to be the person in Cabinet who does the civilian control, who manages the CDS, and who ensures that the CDS is doing his job properly, but Sajjan hasn’t been doing that job. If he were, then he wouldn’t have been so incurious as to why the investigation into Vance never took off when the former military ombudsman brought forward the allegations, and he would have taken the opportunity to cycle Vance out of the job and put in someone new rather than renew Vance for another term. These are all things were things Sajjan should have done and didn’t do.

Trudeau, however, keeps insisting that Sajjan is the right person for the job, that he’s not part of the old boys’ club, but that’s part of the problem – Sajjan was an active member of the military when he got elected and had to process his resignation papers while he was named to Cabinet, because technically at that point, the CDS outranked him, which is not good when Sajjan is supposed to be exercising civilian control. That’s why we shouldn’t put former military people into the role – they are not civilian control. This can’t be stressed enough. Sajjan shouldn’t have been put in the role, and hasn’t properly done his job since he’s been in it. It’s time for a new minister, and the sooner the better.

Programming note: I am making a long weekend for myself, so no post tomorrow or Saturday. See you next week!

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Roundup: A dubious plan for the next pandemic

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Erin O’Toole unveiled his party’s pandemic preparedness plan yesterday, and it was very curious indeed. His framing was a lot of revisionist history about border closures, and some outright fabrications about supposed contracts that went to people with close connections to the Liberals, which has not been shown anywhere other than the fevered imaginations of what happened around the WE contract, and the bullshit story they concocted around Baylis Medical. More than this, however, a number of things that O’Toole was critical of were things that dated back to the Conservatives’ watch – including changes to the management structure of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The fact that O’Toole is saying he would essentially undo changes the government he was a part of made – without acknowledging that they made the detrimental changes in the first place – is quite something. The fact that they’re going on about the pandemic stockpile without acknowledging that its management failed under their watch, going back to at least 2010 – and we have an Auditor General’s Report that confirms this – is not unsurprising. Other aspects seem to be dubious at best, such as doing something about pharmaceutical patents and doing away with PMPRB (Patented Medicines Price Review Board) regulations in order to appease these companies in the hopes that they will do more research and manufacturing here seems both unwise at best, and will mean higher drug prices for Canadians going forward.

There were some other things buried in there, not the least of which were contradictions around raising tariffs on PPE in order to ensure they are manufactured domestically, while also trying to “secure the North American supply chain” to reduce reliance on imports – but imports from the US and Mexico are still imports. There were also a number of jabs at China in the document, some of which will limit our ability to have international cooperation around research of emerging viruses, and he managed to wedge in the current drama around the National Microbiology Lab firings into his piece as well. The problem of course is that a lot of this sounds like it makes sense on the surface, but the moment you start reading their backgrounder (which doesn’t appear to be online – just emailed to reporters) and scratching beneath the surface, the more apparent it is that a lot of this is hot-air, blame-shifting, and disingenuous rhetoric masquerading as a plan.

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Roundup: Exit McKenna

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It’s now official – Catherine McKenna is bowing out of federal politics, citing that she wants to spend more time with her kids while she can (the oldest is off to university next year), but insisting that she still wants to do her part to fight climate change in other arenas. This was immediately met with questions about whether this is a signal that it can’t get done in government, which she flat-out denied, but we should remember that the federal government is limited in what it can do, because it only has so many policy levers at its disposal (which we should all realise after living through those limitations in this pandemic).

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McKenna, who also stated flat-out that she’s not going to run for mayor, dismissed the attacks against her as “noise,” and that they weren’t successful because she did the work of getting the carbon price in place, and made more tangible progress on the environment file than we’ve had since the Mulroney era. But we can’t forget that the abuse was real, it was horrific, and she needed police protection because the threats were so bad. This should be one of those moments of reflection about where we are as a society that these kinds of misogynistic are able to keep happening with little to no recourse for the victims, and few consequences if any for the perpetrators. McKenna did note that she does still want to work with social media companies to address this, but we’ll see if anything actually happens.

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Of course, this has entirely been overshadowed by the spectre of Mark Carney entering the political arena, which he categorically should not, because even if he’s been out of the Bank of Canada for seven or eight years, it still has the possibility to taint the institution by association, and him declaring himself to be sympathetic to the Liberal cause is not helping either – especially given that Pierre Poilievre is currently attacking the institutional independence of the Bank by positing that they are somehow in cahoots with the government, and that they are simply “printing money” to finance the government’s deficits which will drive up inflation – entirely ridiculous notions given that quantitative easing is not actually “printing money” and that their whole mandate is to control inflation at around two percent, which they have been very good at. Nevertheless, people are believing Poilievre’s bullshit (especially as other media won’t actually call it out as such), and this will only get worse if Carney actually enters the political arena. And because the media and the pundit class have decided that they like this narrative of Carney being some kind of heir apparent and saviour, they are trying to make it happen, damn the consequences. It’s not a good look, and yet here we are.

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Roundup: An end to hybrid sittings?

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Now that the Commons has risen for the summer, the parties are starting to evaluate the hell that is hybrid sittings, and lo, they are largely in favour of returning to regular, in-person sittings once again. Praise the gods on Olympus! They recognise that it’s harder to hold government to account when you can’t see the minister in front of you, and that you can’t build comradery with your fellow MPs, and that there is a sense of futility debating video screens. (And in an interview a week ago, outgoing MP Wayne Easter also noted that it’s harder for MPs within a caucus to form groups to push back against the leadership if they can’t be in the room together).

I’m going to temper that praise a little bit, because they’re already talking about exceptions, whether it’s for MPs with illnesses, or those with small children, and this is where it starts. When they return in the fall, or in the next parliament, whichever comes first, you can bet that the Liberals in particular are going to keep pushing for a number of exceptions so that the hybrid format never really goes away, and therein lies the danger – that the longer it’s able to carry on, future cohorts become more used to these sittings than the ones who are used to in-person sittings, the easier it will be for future populists to start abusing the system to stay out of Ottawa as a point of pride. It won’t happen overnight, but once you open the door a little bit, it will get used and abused.

There was one area where I could be persuaded, which was around committee meetings during weeks when the Chamber isn’t sitting – particularly emergency meetings. Often times, those involve flying into Ottawa for a single hour-long meeting, then flying home, which is a huge waste of time and resources (not to mention the carbon footprint). So I could be persuaded – but the flipside of that is that it removes an element of deterrence for not calling these emergency meetings, which are often done for the sake of a political performance. It’s something to consider in the longer term, but again, now that Pandora’s box is opened and the evil is out in the world, we should try to limit the damage as much as possible.

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Roundup: Parliament versus itself

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Not unexpectedly, the Speaker of the House of Commons has declared that he’s going to fight “tooth and nail” for Parliament’s right to demand whatever documents they want – as well he should. But this is a very complex issue that becomes parliament fighting against itself, because of the obligations in places like the Canada Evidence Actthat triggered the process that the Attorney General had to undertake around those Public Health Agency documents related to the National Microbiology Lab firings.

With that in mind, here is some context as to what the Canada Evidence Act demands, and why this is not Justin Trudeau personally defying the will of parliament, but the government following its own laws.

For a further breakdown of the legal balancing act involved, and what the court process for this will look like, read through this thread (which was a little too long to simply post, but a couple of highlights are below).

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Roundup: Another 751 unmarked graves

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There was yet more sobering news yesterday, that as many as 751 unmarked graves were located near the former Marieval residential school in Saskatchewan. Aside from the sheer number, some ways in which this site differs from Kamloops is that not all of the graves will be of children, and that many had headstones, which the Catholic Church removed in the 1960s during a dispute – which is a criminal offence, and the local First Nations chief said that they are treating this like a crime scene. And non-Indigenous Canadians should brace themselves, because we’re going to hear about hundreds, perhaps thousands, more of these graves over the next few years as the work of locating them ramps up, making it impossible to ignore the true face of our country’s history.

In response to the announcement, prime minister Justin Trudeau stated that this is Canada’s responsibility to bear, which was met by the usual calls that this was not enough action. The government has already committed to funding these searches in accordance with the wishes of local First Nations communities, as not all of them want the same approach, and Marc Miller said that they are open to boosting the funding if the need is there. There are also calls for an independent inquiry into these sites, but that could be a complicated structure if it requires provinces to get involved (and it likely will), and we could find ourselves with a repeat of some of the problems faced by the MMIW inquiry if that is the case.

Of course, the government’s response was made all the more problematic because Carolyn Bennett sent a spiteful one-word text to Jody Wilson-Raybould, who then tweeted it out and declared it to be “racist and misogynistic,” listing the tropes that she felt it invoked. Bennett publicly apologised and stated that it was their “interpersonal dynamics” that got the better of her, by which she means that the pair pretty much cannot stand one another, which lines up with the stories of their fights in Cabinet. It doesn’t excuse it, and Bennett absolutely should know better (especially because Wilson-Raybould has demonstrated that she keeps receipts), but that hasn’t stopped this from eclipsing some of the coverage of the day, which should have focused on Marieval, and what the next steps need to be.

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Roundup: Annual amnesia and Estimates abrogation

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The House of Commons has risen for the summer, with four priority bills having made it to the Senate – including the budget implementation bill – but the rest of their “priority” bills languishing on the Order Paper. And the main party leaders spent the day sniping at one another in their respective press conferences, not necessarily telling the whole truth of the situation along the way, because that’s the way this particular game gets played.

It’s also that magical time of year when Hill reporters realise that the Senate exists and doesn’t operate in the same way that the House of Commons does, and we go through the ritual song and dance of worrying that bills won’t get passed before the Senate rises for the summer, and some usual tough talk by certain senators that they won’t be pushed around and they won’t fast track bills, until they do. We go through this every June, and every June, they push through these bills to ensure that they get royal assent before they leave for the summer. And no, the Senate’s calendar is not as fixed as that as the House of Commons, and yes, they do frequently sit later in order to get these bills passed. There is also the annual ritual of the government leader insisting that they really shouldn’t amend these bills because that would mean recalling the House of Commons, and that costs x-number of dollars per day and that’s apparently a bad thing for democracy (no, I don’t get the logic either), and with the constant speculation of an election, we’ll get additional concerns that they really can’t amend these bills because of that fact, and after some requisite chest-thumping, most senators will back down and pass the bills unamended. Yes, this happens every year, and it might behove these Hill reporters to remember this every year.

There is, of course, a more alarming aspect of what has transpired in this particular year, which is that several House of Commons committees didn’t do any scrutiny of the Estimates for the departments they are responsible for overseeing, and this is absolutely bloody alarming. This is the whole gods damned point of Parliament, and because they were wrapped up in their procedural warfare, that fundamental job didn’t get done. (And because of rules written in the sixties, Estimates that aren’t signed off on are deemed adopted, which is another outrage that they have not corrected). This should never have been the state of affairs – and I will note that some of those committee chairs offered additional sittings to ensure this scrutiny happened, but the MPs on those committees didn’t agree to it, which is an absolute outrage. That is your number one job as an MP, ahead of all other considerations, and you blew it because you were too busy grandstanding and/or protecting ministers who should have fallen on their swords, and we have further undermined our parliament as a result. Slow clap, MPs – stellar job.

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