Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Carney out, no need to panic

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To the dismay of the bulk of the pundit class, Mark Carney says he has other climate-related commitments and won’t be running for a seat in the next election. In response, Pierre Poilievre tweeted that Carney is afraid of running because Trudeau will cause a financial meltdown, and Carney will try to blame it on Freeland. It’s just so stupid, and yet this is the state of public discourse in this country.

To be clear, there is no financial meltdown going to happen. Yes, there are challenges that need to be addressed, but let’s be real here.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1417623876880588800

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1417625158450225153

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Roundup: The Languages Commissioner goes rogue

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We appear to have another Independent Officer of Parliament who has decided to go rogue, as the Commissioner of Official Languages, Raymond Théberge, has announced that he plans to investigate the nomination process that selected Mary Simon as Governor General, given her lack of French. There are, of course, a whole host of problems with this, starting with the fact that the GG is not a federal bureaucrat and is not included in the Official Languages Act. Her office in Rideau Hall is certainly subject to the Act, and there is no question it will operate bilingually, but Simon herself is not. Furthermore, she is appointed by the Queen on the advice of the prime minister, and the advice that he gets from his appointments committee (as problematic as the current structure may be) is non-binding.

Théberge, in that case, has decided that he’ll investigate the Privy Council Office for their role in supporting said committee and providing advice, which…is a stretch. A very, very big stretch. The whole sham investigation is already outside of his mandate, and more to the point, it is hugely colonial at that, and certainly not exactly befitting the stated goals of decolonization and reconciliation. (There is, of course, the matter of this government’s apparent hypocrisy in how it treated the appointment of Simon and how it treats the appointment of Supreme Court of Canada justices, but that is also not exactly something that Théberge could investigate).

Meanwhile, Philippe Lagassé enumerates these points, explains the role of convention versus legislation in these kinds of appointments, and most especially points to the fact that Théberge might want to better familiarize himself with the Constitution, given that the appointment didn’t violate any Act of Parliament. What a gong show.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1417267990790279174

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Roundup: Reprieve for Annamie Paul?

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After weeks of intense drama (sooo much drama), it looks like the Green Party’s federal council is finally going to back off on holding a vote to challenge Annamie Paul’s leadership, and possibly the review of her party membership as well. Nobody is saying what exactly went on, other than Paul will be holding a press conference in Toronto Centre at some point today, so we’ll see what she has to say for herself.

Meanwhile, one of Paul’s former leadership rivals has helped establish the Green Left, which promises to be a political organization but not a party, and it seems to be largely geared toward Green Party members in order to help them organize and push the party further toward eco-socialism. Whether there is any correlation between the two, or whether it’s simply coincidence, remains to be seen, but perhaps this sorry chapter in the Greens’ history may be drawing to a close – or at least transitioning to a new phase.

As for why this happened in the first place, I think part of the fault rests with how the Greens are structured, which is a hugely decentralized party that gives its leader very little power – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but this certainly highlights some of the drawbacks of structure (and which other parties will use as a cautionary tale when it comes to demands that their own leaders relinquish their iron grip on power). But with the Greens, this particular problem is not just with the leader, but with much of their policy development process, which they have opened wide in the name of earning more democracy points, but leads to things like “men’s rights activists” writing swaths of their platform because it’s that open, and without much in the way of adult supervision. This is further compounded by having a leader who doesn’t have a seat, who isn’t planning on running in a winnable seat, and who doesn’t actually understand enough about what her own MPs are doing and how to communicate with them (thus driving one of them to cross the floor). There needs to be a better balance of grassroots empowerment and having a leader who has enough power to do things but is still beholden to the elected members (of which Paul is not one). You can’t just handwave and shout “democracy!” and not have any reasonable give-and-take in the process. Right now the balance is as absent in the Green Party as it is with the other mainstream parties – it’s just tipped in the opposite direction.

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Roundup: Kenney announces his next big distraction

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By now you’ve heard that Jason Kenney has announced the referendum questions that Alberta will be voting on in October as part of Kenney’s mass distraction plans. It’s unheard of to have multiple referendum questions – in this case, daylight savings and removing equalisation from the Constitution – on top of an unconstitutional sideshow of Senate “nominee elections,” and yet Kenney is putting these all together with the upcoming municipal elections. This has the bonus for Kenney of muddying the waters of those elections, where more progressive candidates tend to do better, particularly in the cities, and he gets to claim that he saves money by holding them at the same time, but this is a lie. Municipal elections are run by the municipalities themselves, while these referenda and bogus “nominee elections” are held by Elections Alberta, and just because they happen at the same time and can co-locate spaces doesn’t change the fact that it going to cost more.

The thing is, the referendum on equalization won’t actually do anything because even if they sent a message to the rest of Canada and brought everyone to the table to negotiate, the only thing that’s in the Constitution is the principle of equalization – the formula itself is federal legislation, because the programme is paid out of federal general revenues. But Kenney is content to keep lying to the public and pretending that Alberta signs a cheque every year that Quebec cashes and pays for its child care system with (which it doesn’t – they pay for that out of their own taxes, and they reap the direct economic benefits from it as well). As well, the myth that Quebec killed Energy East is being invoked (Quebec had nothing to do with it – the proponent couldn’t fill both Energy East and Keystone XL with their contracts, so Energy East was abandoned as Keystone XL looked like the more likely to reach completion – not to mention that it wouldn’t have actually served the Eastern Canadian market), which is again about stoking a faux sense of grievance. The fact that Kenney is stoking this anti-Quebec sentiment because he thinks it’ll win him points (and hopefully distract the angry mob that is gathering outside his own door) is not lost on Quebeckers when it comes to Kenney’s good friend, Erin O’Toole, looking for votes in the federal election.

But as economist Trevor Tombe keeps saying, Alberta doesn’t need equalization in the same way that Bill Gates doesn’t need social assistance – Alberta is still making way more money than any other province, even with their harder times economically. The province’s deficit is not a result of equalization or money supposedly being siphoned east (again, equalization comes out of federal taxes) – it’s a result of a province that refuses to implement sales taxes or other stable revenue generation, and expecting everyone else to subsidize that choice (while also cutting corporate taxes under the illusion that it would create jobs, but didn’t). This is just Kenney handwaving and shouting “look over there!” because he knows he’s in trouble, and he needs to keep everyone focused on a different enemy. He shouldn’t be rewarded by people falling for it.

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Roundup: Ford’s eagerness to please

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The Star had a very interesting, if very infuriating, longread out yesterday, which charted the ways in which Conservative-affiliated lobbyists impacted on the decisions that Doug Ford made over the course of the pandemic – the laundry list of exemptions that kept growing by the day, the fact that the long-term care industry has insulated itself from any and all accountability and is getting their licenses renewed as if the deaths of thousands of seniors aren’t on their hands, the illogical restrictions for small retail but not box store, right up to the illogical closure of playgrounds.

The piece was illuminating not because of the look at lobbying – all of which is legal, above-board, and not the same as we’d understand from an American context of the cartoonish Hollywood portrayals – but rather because of what it shows us about Ford himself. He’s someone out of his depth – his sole experience was a single term as a junior city councillor while he brother was mayor – who was not only struggling to understand his job, but who also has a pathological need to be liked, and to be seen to be doing favours for people he knows. People like these former Conservative staffers and operatives who are now in lobbying firms. It less that these lobbyists are cozy with the provincial Progressive Conservatives – it’s that Ford wants to please them and do them favours because he knows them. That’s why the pandemic in this province turned into such a clusterfuck – because Ford needed to please the people he felt close to.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1415672572574715909

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Roundup: The “failure of negotiations” is nonsense

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It appears that the lack of seriousness around getting Bill C-6, which would ostensibly ban conversion therapy in Canada, through the Senate has reached its peak, as the Government Leader in the Senate, Senator Marc Gold, claims that negotiations have collapsed and he can’t bring the Senate back to deal with it. Which is nonsense. He has the power to petition the Speaker to recall the Chamber, and that request would almost certainly be granted. They can sit as long as necessary to pass the bill, and if they can’t get unanimous consent for hybrid sittings, well, by now most if not all Senators should be double-vaxxed and can attend in person. There are no actual impediments to them actually doing this.

Part of the problem is Gold himself – he doesn’t seem to grasp how the Senate works procedurally, and that he has a lot more power than he claims to. He also, for no good reason, proposed a date for the Senate to rise at the end of June when he could have kept it sitting into July with no actual problem. He also seems to be enamoured with the idea of agreeing on a timeline to pass the bill, which he doesn’t need, but ever since the Senate agreed to timelines around some major pieces of legislation in the previous parliament, there is a romance with doing this all the time in the Senate, which is unnecessary and in some cases counter-productive.

The other part of the problem is Justin Trudeau. And while it has been suggested that he has ordered Gold to let the bill die so that he can use it as a wedge in the election – frankly, the dynamics in the Senate don’t really support this line of reasoning – it’s more that Trudeau has a case of not-so-benign neglect when it comes to the Senate. By cutting it loose, so to speak, he gives it no mind rather than making it part of his strategy. There’s no reason why Gold is not a Cabinet minister who can answer for the government in the Chamber, rather than his current half-pregnant quasi-governmental role while still claiming independence, which doesn’t work in theory or practice. He clearly needs the support of PCO because he’s not able to do a reasonable enough job as it stands with what support he does get, and there frankly needs to be an actual government (meaning Cabinet) voice in the Chamber. But in insisting on “Senate independence,” Trudeau simply expects things to go through the Chamber and he can forget about it, which is a mistake.

Gold needs to fix this situation, and fast. If that means recalling the Senate in person, so be it. But claiming negotiations “collapsed” and he can’t do it is both untrue and against procedure. This is on him.

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Roundup: Nova Scotia makes two for child care

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau and Iain Rankin, premier of Nova Scotia, announced yesterday that Nova Scotia was now the second province to sign a new childcare agreement with the federal government under the dollars allocated in Budget 2021, and that it would transition the province to halving current fees by next year, and reducing them to the goal of $10/day by 2026, with commitments along the way for those five years. And crucially, there are federal funds going toward training new early childhood educators, as well as to improve the post-secondary programming around ECE, which are important considerations for expanding the system, especially as one of the federal government’s criteria for that expansion is quality of care.

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https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1415130851755511808

This makes it two provinces down, both of them with non-conservative premiers, and it’s speculated that Newfoundland and Labrador will be next. Alberta claims to be “negotiating” around things like flexibility, but there is a bit of a red herring in there – nothing precludes the province from creating additional, more flexible spaces outside of the federal parameters if they feel they need it, but trying to insist this is about “choice” is a false dichotomy – there can be no actual choice if there is only constrained choice available. In other words, it’s not a real choice if there are no spaces available, and the federal government has long recognized that we have a supply-side problem, which is what they are trying to address. Opposing the federal plan because you claim it’s not flexible enough is, frankly, an abdication of responsibility.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, put out an extremely bizarre “backgrounder” yesterday to claim that the Liberals never meet their promises on childcare, and it was both strange and dishonest. Strange in that this is the kind of thing you’d expect to have an NDP header on it and not a Conservative one, but dishonest because they killed the gods damned system that was in place in 2006. Seriously – Paul Martin’s government had signed agreements with all of the provinces in 2006, and money for the first year was starting to flow when the NDP teamed up with the Conservatives and brought the government down, killing the childcare system that had just been established, because the Conservatives preferred to send $100/month to families instead – because “choice.” Oh, and they created tax credits for new childcare spaces, which created approximately zero of them. They vehemently opposed childcare, and still do, so for them to try and say the Liberals haven’t kept their promises when they actively worked against them and killed the programme that was created is just galling.

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Roundup: Cue the emergency committee meeting

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It wouldn’t be summer if we didn’t have an emergency committee meeting of some sort, and we got just that yesterday, as the Conservatives triggered the recall of the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics committee with an eye to opening an investigation into Liberals contracting database services from a Liberal-friendly company, headed by a personal friend of the prime minister’s. The party has claimed that this is for constituency services, and that there is no data going to party databases (as has been the case with the Conservatives and their own constituency data in the past), and that all of the rules have been followed, but the Conservatives have a narrative they need to feed, so there it went.

In the end, it got nowhere. The Liberals managed to stymie the proceedings long enough for the Bloc MP to side with them in opting not to pursue the matter, but along the way, they (correctly) suggested that this is a matter best suited for the Board of Internal Economy, which deals with MPs’ resources and allocations, and these payments have been coming out of MPs’ office budgets. Of course, the Conservatives (and to an extent the NDP) can’t put on a public dog and pony show at BOIE like they could at the ethics committee, so of course they had no interest in pursuing that course of action – especially after the Liberals also wanted the Conservatives’ database practices included in their referring the study to BOIE.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t issues that could be better explored here, the chief of which is that political parties are exempt from privacy legislation, so there aren’t many effective firewalls around the use of constituency files. And hey, that would be something that the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics committee should be tackling, because it’s right in their mandate! One Conservative MP also suggested that perhaps the House of Commons build their own constituency file management system so that parties don’t have to contract their own systems, which may not be a bad idea – but it’s one that BOIE would tackle, not the ethics committee. And the point of this exercise was about the dog and pony show, not anything of substance, which is one more reason why this particular session has turned toxic.

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Roundup: Speculating about normal activities

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As there are only three narratives available to mainstream journalists in this country, and the first of those is speculating about an early election, that’s what we got a lot of over the weekend. Yes, it is looking more likely these days, but eventually this starts looking like a self-fulfilling prophecy more than anything else.

To that end, we got an examination of the electoral considerations that each of the main party leaders is hoping to access in BC, and why they have focused so much attention there over the past week. We got an examination of how pre-writ advertising limitations don’t apply to early elections under the current legislation – though nobody is pulling the trigger on early ads just yet anyway (especially not when TikToks and social media shitposts are free). And there was a state of play when it comes to conservative premiers around the country and how much of a fight they’ll manage to put up against Trudeau if and when an election comes, considering how badly wounded most of them are at this point.

Now, as for the summer tours and announcements that the leaders have been on, apparently much of the media either has amnesia, or they’re being wilfully blind to history because they have a narrative to maintain. While some of these tour activities may be electioneering, but this is also typical after the Commons rises for the summer – leaders always head out across the country, and there is a pent-up desire to do so after some sixteen months of public health restrictions related to the pandemic. Not to mention, the budget has just passed, and the government wants to spread the good news and largesse, which happens every year, election or not. So while I can understand why my fellows in the media want to put everything in the election speculation box, these are also the same things that happen every other normal year, so maybe – just maybe – we should cool it a little until we get some actual signs that Trudeau is going to march over to Rideau Hall to demand a dissolution. And maybe we should ban the phrase “campaign-style” for the time being (maybe permanently), because it’s starting to look embarrassing.

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Roundup: The jobs numbers are in

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It was jobs day at Statistics Canada yesterday, and the June figures showed that there was a big recovery in part-time employment, largely in accommodation and food services, as well as retail trade – signs that the economy is starting to open back up across the country, and this was before we had any re-opening in Ontario, showing that there is still definitely room to grow. There were also more people looking for work, which meant the unemployment rate was a little higher than it might have been otherwise.

Of course, this was entirely being spun in entirely disingenuous ways by Pierre Poilievre, who has made an artform of lying with statistics. He called a press conference to decry that there was still a loss in full-time employment (never mind that full-time employment has held far steadier during the pandemic than part-time work, particularly because a lot of that part-time works is in the service industry that couldn’t operate during the mockdown/lockdowns). He decried the unemployment figure, but deliberately ignored that every country calculates their rate differently, and didn’t mention that if we calculated our rate the way the Americans do, there is a marginal difference between them.

But more to the point, he has spent the past couple of months trying to build this narrative that a job recovery projection in the budget was a promise to have fully restored the million jobs lost from the start of the pandemic by this point. Never mind that we had a third wave that was far deeper and longer than could have been anticipated when those projections were made (and you can thank murderclown premiers for reopening too soon before the second wave had subsided, and then waited too long to impose new measures once again), or that projections are not really promises. Yes, there is still more work to do in order to recover the employment we had pre-pandemic and to do the work of removing barriers so that women and minorities can better participate. But there’s no need to lie with statistics to make a point or as a means of trying to hold the government to account for its actions (or inaction) during this pandemic.

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