Author Archives: Dale

About Dale

Journalist in the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery

Roundup: Get off that former diplomat’s lawn

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For the past couple of days, we’ve been bombarded by this suggestion that the Saudi Arabia spat has been all because the Liberals spend too much time doing their diplomacy over social media rather than in person – which is utterly ridiculous, and smacks of a bunch of retired diplomats railing about kids today before they yell at them to get off their lawns (while they hike their pants up to chest-level). If you actually look at the tweet in question, versus the kinds of vacuous press releases that governments issues on diplomatic issues all the time, about how they “strongly condemn” this or that, there is no actual difference whether it’s a press release or a tweet, except for the character limit (and even then, sometimes no difference at all). There’s a term for this – moral panic.

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Meanwhile, the opposition has gotten in on the “diplomacy by tweet” game, which is awfully rich. Some of these same voices have been ones who would rant and rail that the government didn’t issue tweets condemning one government or another fast enough, or who’ve issued their own foreign policy missives by Twitter on their own. And then there’s the fact that they’ll rail about any diplomacy done behind closed doors with other countries, but when it’s done in the open like this? Terrible. Just terrible.

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The other thing I would mention is the fact that while there are demands that diplomacy be done either in the open or behind closed doors – take your pick on what the outrage du jouris – the assumption that Chrystia Freeland doesn’t know what she’s doing here is also puzzling and not borne out by history. Remember not that long ago, with the pogrom against LGBT people in Chechnya, and there were voices on all sides howling for Freeland to make some grand public gestures about what was going on. As it turns out, she was personally working behind the scenes to get some extremely vulnerable people out of the country and to safety before they wound up in a concentration camp, which she very well couldn’t do while making grand public gestures. All of which to say is that this posturing around Twitter diplomacy is absurd and helps no one.

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Roundup: Saudi spat

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So that diplomatic dispute with Saudi Arabia sure escalated quickly. To recap, Saudi Arabia took offence to Canada calling on the release of activists from their country, and expelled our ambassador, cancelled trade deals (which includes large exports of barley from Canada), and demanded that the 15,000 or so Saudi students in Canada return home within the next four weeks (which could have an impact on the Canadian economy). It remains to be seen if that LAV deal is still on the table, because that could also have a major impact on jobs in Southwestern Ontario. Both Chrysita Freeland and Bill Morneau are holding firm in their position, but what is potentially more worrying is the fact that the US and the UK aren’t taking sides. Peter MacKay thinks that the PM needs to get involved personally to clear this up, for whatever his opinion is worth.

Bessma Momani talks about what’s behind Saudi Arabia’s move in expelling Canada’s ambassador, and John Geddes interviews two other experts on the area. Kevin Carmichael looks at how political disputes are going to affect trade in the future, especially as authoritarian regimes dare Western countries to ignore rights.

Meanwhile, the dumbest take in all of this has to be the number of people who have started salivating about how this loss of Saudi oil imports on the East Coast means that we should resurrect Energy East. Not only does it not make economic sense, it doesn’t make practical sense since the refineries in Eastern Canada aren’t built to handle the heavy crude coming from Alberta, which puts a lie to the notion that Energy East would be used for domestic consumption rather than export. Even if it were economical to convert and extend the pipeline (and currently it’s not with both Trans Mountain being twinned and Keystone XL finally going ahead), you would need to retrofit or build new refineries in the East, at the cost of yet more billions of dollars, which doesn’t make any sense when we can find imports from countries other than Saudi Arabia that are still cheaper. (And for so-called fiscal conservatives to demand this pipeline happen in spite of economics for nationalist concerns makes their reasoning all the more suspicious).

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Roundup: A trifecta of constitutional buffoonery

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Yesterday was not a good day for the constitutional order in this country, as the Ontario government launched a constitutional challenge of the federal carbon price backstop legislation, arguing that it’s “unfair” and “unconstitutional” – which it absolutely isn’t, but this is about throwing a public temper tantrum in the name of populist outrage – but as David Reevely also points out, it’s about dragging this out in the courts, both Ontario courts and the Supreme Court of Canada well past the next election. Ontario’s two ministers insisted that they had legal opinions that said they had a solid case, but that’s almost certainly false, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what kind of novel argument they came up with that the courts will laugh out.

As if this big of constitutional buffoonery weren’t enough, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh also came out with a demand that the federal government immediately give cities the ability to ban handguns – which is constitutionally a non-starter, since cities are the creatures of provincial legislation, and criminal powers are federal. Delegating federal criminal powers to the municipalities is similarly a non-starter. (Singh is also a lawyer and should know this).

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But to cap off the trifecta of constitutional idiocy comes courtesy of the Toronto Star, who asked Ontario Attorney General Caroline Mulroney if she was prepared to use the notwithstanding clause to opt out of the federal carbon tax – which is not something that the notwithstanding clause could actually deal with. Compounding this was that Mulroney’s answer was that they were going to examine all legal options, which made it sound like she was considering it, rather than simply saying “that wouldn’t apply here” and possibly adding “you moron” because it was not only a bad question, it was an irresponsible question and one that was either designed to make Mulroney look stupid (which she kind of did with the answer she gave) or to demonstrate that the reporter in question had no idea what they were talking about. So well done, Star. Slow clap for making all of us look bad in the process.

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Roundup: The walkback that wasn’t

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It started, as it so often does, with a Globe and Mail headline that was misleading and which managed to get the story wrong. The headline “Ottawa to dramatically scale back carbon tax on competitiveness concerns,” had the sub-head that “the decision follows months of lobbying by industries and comes just as Ontario is backing out of cap-and-trade,” but it completely misconstrued what the announcement was about. And every other news outlet was quick to follow with a matching story, because it was just too juicy to ignore, not that they got it right either. Not that it mattered – opponents of the federal carbon price backstop were all quick to cheer, declare victory, deploy their memes, and start hoisting Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe around as a hero, without at all understanding what happened, so good job there, Globe.

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As energy economists started bemoaning over Twitter, this wasn’t a policy change or a walking back on the carbon tax, because the price hadn’t changed. All that was announced was the subsidies available to certain large emitters who were particularly trade-exposed – in other words, this offsets any disadvantage they’d have by competing with non-carbon-taxed jurisdictions. They still pay the price, and it still is the incentive for them to drive innovation. But to add fuel to the fire, environment minister Catherine McKenna was particularly useless in communicating what this was about because she once again stuck to her go-to line that “the environment and the economy go together.” Her singular tweet during the day was unhelpful in unpacking the what was being announced. And it wasn’t until the end of the day that the National Post had a story written that spoke to those economists and unpacked the issue properly – you know, which should have been done at the start of the news cycle, and not the end of it.

Which leads to the bigger problem here, in that this has become a classic example of how media organisations have the power to frame slightly more complex issues in the dumbest possible terms in order to set it up in partisan terms. Well, the Globehas been racking up a record of outright misleading stories as well, but they weren’t the only culprits. CBC’s Power & Politics, for example, gave a not correct rendition of what happened, got Scott Moe’s boneheaded take, and only then talked to an economist about the issue, by which point it had been framed as a government climbdown, which it wasn’t. But we keep seeing this kind of pattern of dumbing down stories that aren’t even complex. Recall Stéphane Dion’s “green shift” plan – the only thing that reporters would say was “it’s complicated!” when it wasn’t, and hence, that’s how it got branded throughout the campaign. It does a disservice to Canadians to not explain policy issues properly and to frame things with facts on the table rather than in partisan boxes, but that takes time, which is what nobody seems to have, and that is a major problem for our democracy.

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Roundup: Moe’s carbon bafflegab

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Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe (or his staff) penned an op-ed in the National Post yesterday, to explain why he thinks Canadians are opposed to the federal government’s planned carbon tax. The reasons, however, are…not convincing. Nor are his counter-claims about what the alternatives are. And to be fair, almost nobody likes taxes, which is why leaders like Moe have been casting any kind of carbon price in as negative a light as possible in order to turn public sentiment against them. And we can’t ignore that most Canadians want to fight climate change like they want a pony – they say they want to do it, but don’t actually want to undertake any of the responsibility that goes with it.

As for Moe’s arguments, he decries the carbon price as a “one-size-fits-all” approach, which is bogus off the start. The price does not indicate the mechanism by which it’s implemented, whether that’s cap-and-trade or a tax, and how those systems are set up and administered can vary greatly, particularly in how the revenues are recycled. That’s why the federal government gave provinces the space to design a system that fits their particular circumstances best. So right off the start, Moe is being intellectually dishonest in his argument. And as for the stated goal of reducing emissions, a carbon price is not only about reducing emissions – it’s about giving a market signal so that major emitters can drive innovation to reduce their emissions and avoid paying it (you know, something a fiscal conservative would recognise, were Moe actually one and not a populist goof), and it ensures that everyday consumers make choices to reduce their emissions. If you see people lining up at gas stations when the price drops a few cents, imagine what price indicators mean when it comes to other behaviours.

Moe keeps pointing to his province’s investment in carbon capture and storage, which has not yet proven itself cost-effective as a technology, but ironically would be more cost-effective if there was a carbon price that would help to better monetize its value. He talks about designing an offset system that would recognise carbon sinks in agriculture, but again, having a price allows this recognition to be better tracked and monetized, which again, provides incentives. You’d think this would be elementary stuff to someone who purports to be a fiscal conservative that believes in the free market. But that’s not what Moe is (nor is Doug Ford or Andrew Scheer for that matter), and they need to justify how they’re rejecting actual fiscal conservative measures.

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Roundup: A public dust-up

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Late last week, as news came out that the Canadian government had been instrumental in getting a number of Syrian “White Helmets” and their families out of that country and that a number of them would be resettled in Canada, there was a bit of a public scrap between Conservatives as the party’s foreign affairs critic gave a position on the situation that Rempel hadn’t been consulted on, despite the fact that she’s the immigration and refugee critic. Her musing publicly as to whether the boys made the decision without her is one of those signs that perhaps not everyone is singing from the same song sheet in Andrew Scheer’s Conservative party – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but not consulting the relevant critics before freelancing an opinion to the media is a bit of a faux pas. Whether it was sexism (per Rempel’s insinuation) or just arrogance on the part of O’Toole, remains to be determined, but it was certainly illuminating for observers.

On the subject of Rempel, the Hill Times has an extensive profile of her, which is a good read that I’d encourage everyone to do. It’s a pretty fair piece, and I would suggest to people that her persona over social media is not representative of who she is as an MP. Which isn’t to say that her social media persona isn’t a problem – it very much is, particularly when she sends her followers on the attack against someone who she has a disagreement with. But that aside, she’s the kind of MP who takes the time to do her actual job of things like reading the Estimates and the Public Accounts, and who can follow debate and ask questions that aren’t scripted (and indeed, she tends to eschew talking points whenever possible). We need more MPs who take the job as seriously as she does.

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Roundup: A summer stunt

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With the new Cabinet in place and a new trade minister now in the portfolio, Andrew Scheer decided that yesterday was the day to engage in a political stunt and demand that Parliament be recalled in the middle of summer in order to pass the enabling legislation for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Astute observers may recall that the Conservatives made a couple of attempts before the Commons rose for the summer to pass the bill at all stages with zero debate or committee study, but were rebuffed both times. Now they want Parliament to sit over the summer in order to pass it expeditiously.

There are, of course, a few problems with this demand. First of all, Ottawa is a virtual ghost town at this time of year, as a sizeable portion of the population (and most especially the civil service) is off at some cottage somewhere, and very little is getting done. You want to ensure there’s a revolt, then cancel everyone’s vacations. A number of workers on Parliament Hill, such as those who work in the Parliamentary Restaurant, get laid off over the summer, so rehiring them for a few days or a week would be a giant logistical nightmare. Not to mention, you’re going to have a tonne of cranky MPs who are hot and sticky in humid Ottawa, who are will spend the time grousing that they have work to do in their consitutencies (especially with an election a little over a year away). This especially includes Scheer’s own MPs. Add to that, Scheer says that the Commons needs to move now because there’s no guarantee how long the Senate will take with this – err, except if his own senators offer to play ball with the other senators and come to an agreement on a timeline for the bill, then it’s more of an empty threat.

The government, mind you, shot down this proposal because it’s a blatant stunt, but that left the Conservatives the day to start tweeting sanctimoniously over Twitter about how they’re willing to get to work but the Liberals aren’t. (Seriously guys, this game will bite you in the ass before you know it). And then there’s the kicker – Scheer made this demand, then rebuffed the media requests and said he’s off for holidays for the next two weeks, thus cementing the fact that this was all a stunt. Slow clap, guys. But I guess it’s a way to try and capture the news cycle for the day.

Meanwhile, here’s Philippe Lagassé to school you on how most people don’t it right when they talk about treaty ratification in our parliamentary system.

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Roundup: Neither a minor nor a major shuffle

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So there was a Cabinet shuffle, and while not major, it was a little bigger than some may have anticipated. Five new ministers have entered the fray, which expands things somewhat, but still isn’t into later Harper territory. Some of the changes are not unexpected – Joly being moved to tourism while still keeping official languages is a bit of a demotion from the Heritage file that she garnered so much criticism from, particularly in Quebec, on things like the Netflix file. Some of the changes are pretty political – moving Sohi from infrastructure to natural resources in order to have the Alberta minister on the pipeline file is pretty naked on its face. Bill Blair to border security (plus organized crime reduction) are two files that the government wants a stern face on to make it look like they’re taking action. Some of the additions, however, are a bit mystifying, like a minister for seniors? Really? Is this not just a pandering exercise to a voting demographic rather than a file with particular challenges that need addressing? And some of these questions won’t be answered right away, because the mandate letters won’t be available until later in the summer. Here is the updated Cabinet list including the existing ministers whose titles got modified, and here are profiles of the five new additions.

And then the reaction. Blair’s promotion may send the signal that they’re taking the border situation seriously, but it also can look like they’re a) caving to critics, b) admitting that this is a security and not a humanitarian situation, c) putting border security alongside fighting organized crime in the same portfolio risks conflating the two in the eyes of those who are convinced that these irregular migrants are really all criminals and terrorists. Trudeau apparently lured Blair into politics on the promise of fighting the number one enemy of public security – fear. I’m not sure that putting him in this new role fights fear or reinforces it.

In terms of analysis, Paul Wells notes both that putting Blair into Cabinet is a bit of a poke in the eye to Doug Ford, given that they were nemeses during the Fords’ years in Toronto City Hall, and that this new Cabinet is one built to survive the coming storms until the next election (along with the observation that Trudeau seems to have demoted himself by stripping away the intergovernmental affairs responsibility and giving it to Dominic LeBlanc). Kady O’Malley makes five observations about the shuffle, while Susan Delacourt looks at the shuffle from the perspective of reacting to the recent Ontario election.

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Roundup: Deleting the message

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The Conservatives decided to delete their tweet yesterday that depicted a black migrant crossing to Canada – over a bridge made of Trudeau’s #WelcomeToCanada tweet, and through a broken chain-link fence. There was backlash that the tweet was racist, and it certainly was intended to stoke the xenophobic tendencies that they have been flirting with. I will point out once again that their continued reliance on the talking point that this is about the “orderly” asylum system would probably make most of Europe laugh and pat them on the head condescendingly, because it’s pretty precious that they think Canada should get the special status of an “orderly” system that no other country gets.

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Meanwhile, Maclean’shas a look at the history of the Safe Third Country Agreement, and how it’s basically just waiting for Donald Trump to blow it up if he actually learns about what it is and what it does. Chris Selley, on the other hand, points out the ways in which both the federal government and the new Ontario government are mishandling the whole file, which is fair criticism. But I do think we can’t take our eye off the fact that the Conservatives are flirting with xenophobic populism for partisan gain, and playing cute with it, pitting one group of newcomers against another, and patting themselves on the back for their “compassion” for certain groups of refugees that they use solely as props to hammer away at the regime they’re fleeing. This has been their modus operandi since Jason Kenney was immigration minister, but they’ve poured it on a little thicker since they saw that this kind of populist rhetoric worked for Trump and Brexit (never mind the fact that we have solid proof of election interference in both, and definitive proof of broken rules in the Brexit referendum). This is worrying for our democracy, and we should be very wary of their adopting these techniques.

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Roundup: Recalling the committee

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Yesterday was the day when the Commons immigration committee returned to town for an emergency meeting on the irregular border-crossing situation, and in the end, they agreed to hold two more meetings in the next few weeks to get a better sense of what is going on, and what the government’s plans are. There’s partisan gamesmanship happening on all sides of this, and each party wants a different outcome from these hearings, but they’re going to happen, and despite the fact that Michelle Rempel tries to spin the fact that she “forced” the Liberals to pay attention to this, she was apparently pushing on an open door as they were happy to do it, as their position is that this gives them an opportunity to correct the spin and misinformation that Rempel and her compatriots are putting out there.

Meanwhile, the government also made it clear that they were going to give funding directly to the City of Toronto to deal with their housing situation for migrants (only a few of which are actually irregular border crossers) because the provincial government has abdicated their responsibility to do something – while other communities outside of Toronto are willing and able to house and resettle more of them, and are actively seeking to do so. David Reevely gives more context here, and in particular notes that while the number of migrants is relatively small, the bigger problem is that they’re being put into a system that is already stressed.

But the rhetoric carries on, and Andrew Coyne takes it on in this piece – that, despite the claims, this isn’t actually a “crisis,” and treating it as such isn’t helpful, nor are the suggestions that the Conservatives are throwing out there. And worse, the Conservatives have put out a particularly problematic Twitter campaign that is being decried as racist, basing itself on a headline from a Diane Francis column in the Financial Post which is full of outright misinformation (particularly the notion that irregular border crossers aren’t screened – they absolutely are), torque, and reheated Conservative talking points. Coyne went further in a twitter thread, but regardless, the Conservatives continue to walk a fine line around pandering to xenophobic anger while still insisting that they support “orderly immigration,” as though we that were feasible 100 percent of the time. Real life doesn’t work like that, and Canada has been fortunate in that we’re protected by three oceans and American paranoia, but now we have to deal with a fraction of the migrants that other countries do. Maybe it behoves us to act like grown-ups about this.

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