Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Stay-at-home again, complete with feigned surprise

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Ontario is now back under a “stay-at-home” order, issued its third state of emergency, and lo, there has been movement on vaccinations in that they are now going to start targeting high-risk neighbourhoods and essential workers, like they should have started weeks ago, so that’s positive. Oh, but still no paid sick leave because Ford and company continue to mislead people by claiming the federal sickness benefit is the same thing, which it absolutely is not. What most assuredly is not positive is the fact that the provincial government knew this was coming. They have been warned for weeks that this was going to happen, and they were explicitly told that loosening restrictions in the face of the new variants would be a disaster. There was that press conference on February 11th that said just that – and they didn’t listen, and now they have the gall to pretend to be surprised that the numbers are exceeding their worst-case scenarios? Sorry, but no. Get out of here with that bullshit.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1379884476054966272

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1379962777566085120

And here’s Supriya Dwivedi which lays out why Ford has completely ballsed this up and created this Third Wave and all of the illnesses and resulting deaths as a result.

Meanwhile, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization has decided to stick with their advice that second doses can be delayed for up to four months – and the “up to” is key – but given increasing vaccine supplies, that interval is likely to be less. And the reason why they’re saying this is because they are looking at the balance of ensuring that as many people get a first dose as soon as possible in order to have at least some level of protection. The problem is that this isn’t being effectively communicated by most media outlets (the Star piece linked here is actually doing a decent job) and even on Power & Politics last night, after the head of NACI patiently explained all of this, Vassy Kapelos still characterised it as NACI recommending a four-month delay, omitting the “up to” and creating a false impression of the advice, and it makes it easy for certain parties like the Conservatives to deliberately misconstrue NACI’s advice for partisan point-scoring. I do not understand what CBC thinks they are doing by reporting this way. It defies sense.

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Roundup: Asking for a “special monitor”

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As case numbers continue to rise alarmingly in most parts of the country, Ontario Premier Doug Ford tried to get into a pissing match with the federal government over vaccines, and the federal government wasn’t playing ball, simply tweeting vaccine delivery numbers in response. This on the same day that Ford insisted that schools were safe, and hours later, Toronto’s chief public health officer issued a Section 22 order and closed all Toronto area schools as of today, so that’s a good look. (In Alberta, Jason Kenney also had to issue new restrictions, while still trying to take swipes at the federal government for vaccines well – distraction from their own failure to contain the virus).

In the middle of this, Erin O’Toole decided that he was going to promise a public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic – which, to be fair, the government has also said they would be willing to hold once things were in the clear, because everyone wants lessons learned – but O’Toole loaded his particular desire for such an inquiry full of easily disproven allegations and conspiracy theories. Things like how there weren’t any vaccines even being considered last spring because everything was too new; or CanSino (which the government never “put all their eggs in one basket” with, and the vaccine task force didn’t give them any priority when they started compiling the vaccine portfolio), which he keeps referencing as though saying it often enough will make it true. That, and by focusing solely on vaccines, he is very conspicuously trying to avoid blaming his provincial brethren for their massive failures, for which a proper national public inquiry would probably be needed to enumerate (because I doubt that most of those provinces will call inquiries of their own).

More to the point, O’Toole’s demand for a “special monitor” to be appointed from the Auditor General’s office to examine decisions “in real time” is literal parliamentary insanity. What exactly an accountant knows about public health decisions I’m not entirely sure, but frankly, having them looking over the government’s shoulders is literally O’Toole abdicating his own responsibility for holding government to account for their decisions. Trying to pawn the job off to a non-partisan Officer of Parliament (or their proxy) as a way of using them as both a cudgel and a shield is the height of cowardice and a refusal to do his own bloody job. It’s also why I keep warning against the proliferation of these kinds of Officers – pretty soon, MPs won’t have a job left to do. This is a mess all around, and O’Toole continues to prove that his attempts at showing he is relevant only reiterate that he is trying to make himself obsolete.

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Roundup: The third wave is accelerating

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The third wave is accelerating, and targeting younger populations, and the affected provinces are seeing record levels of hospital strain, and the number of positive cases has now topped one million since the beginning of the pandemic. School boards are starting to shut down in-person learning in several Ontario regions, and it’s getting really, really bad. But the province is keeping on with its current mockdown rather than imposing actual tough measures, and I’m sure we’ll hear another round of blame being laid at the federal government (never mind that the vaccine rollout is ahead of schedule, with another 2.2 million doses arriving this week).

One thing we are hearing a lot about is workplace spread, and most of it with “essential workers” (even though that definition is so broad these days). This is causing a number of infectious disease experts to call for the province to shift its vaccination plans from simply going by age to targeting areas where more of these essential workers live, or even vaccinating at workplaces. I’m not confident, however, that the affected provinces will do so, because a) they are being run by incompetent murderclowns who are incapable of pivoting to where there is greater need, b) they want to cater to boomers because that’s where the votes are, and c) they have an in-built ideological inability to doing the kinds of things that are needed to halt workplace spread, such as paid sick days or simply paying people to stay at home to avoid spread, and this is allowing things to get progressively worse.

To that end, here’s Robert Hiltz, who quite rightly points out that the current mockdowns will remain useless because the provincial governments have decided that these workers are expendable to keep the economy chugging along, while tut-tutting at the rest of us, and yes, that should make us all furious.

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Roundup: A refusal to admit failure in the face of the third wave

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Ontario is once again going back into a four-week mockdown because the province walked right into the third wave of the pandemic, despite being warned repeatedly that they were headed for disaster, but they barrelled ahead anyway. And because the murderclowns who run this province want to keep things as confusing as possible for everyone, decided to brand this one a “shutdown” instead of a “lockdown” or a “stay at home” order.

But what remains galling is the fact that nobody wants to take responsibility for the current state of affairs. Most concerning is that the province’s chief medical officer of health insists that it hasn’t been a failure, because hey, the modelling said we’d be at five or six thousand cases a day if they didn’t make any interventions, and we’re only at 2000, so mission accomplished. No, seriously – that’s his argument. It’s utterly bonkers, and they’re getting away with it because all of Doug Ford’s folksy sing-song pronouncements keep blinding people to what is going on, and the bulk of the media in Queen’s Park is not going hard enough on him for it.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1377376033729511425

Of course, this isn’t simply confined to Ontario either. Alberta is seeing some its highest case numbers, and the variants are in full-blown community spread, and what does Jason Kenney do? Refuse to impose tougher measures, trot out his failed “personal responsibility” schtick, and blame the federal government for not making enough vaccines appear from thin air by way of magic. No, seriously. How people stand for it, I just don’t understand.

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Roundup: Sending in the wrong minister

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The shenanigans at committees on all sides are severely testing my patience, as things continue to spiral toward a potential contempt of Parliament charge, never mind that what’s being demanded is exceeding what is generally acceptable parliamentary norms.

The demands that staffers appear at committee are clearly outrageous and in violation of the sacrosanct notion of ministerial responsibility, but the Liberals are nevertheless pushing the bounds of what is acceptable in and of itself. Instead of sending staffers, they were offered the chance to send the prime minister instead – a bit of a long shot, but sending the Government House Leader was clearly testing the committee’s bounds. For them to then send the Minister for Middle Class™ Prosperity® on a second appearance is definitely pushing buttons, and they should know better. If you’re going to invoke the principle of ministerial responsibility, then gods damned well respect it and put the actual minister forward, and for PMO staff, then the prime minister is the responsible minister. Sending Mona Fortier is a deliberate slap in the face.

At the same time, I am also particularly at the end of my rope with the constant demand for unredacted documents, and the insistence that the House of Commons’ Law Clerk be the one to do any redactions. His office is already buried under the literal millions of documents that the Health Committee demanded, and now the Foreign Affairs committee also wants a piece of him and his time to do even more redactions when the non-partisan civil service is normally the body that does this work. This is generally beyond the scope of what the Law Clerk should be doing, and he’s already stressed his resources and staff to do work they shouldn’t be doing, and yet more MPs keep making even more demands. That’s not how this works, and not how this should work, and yet they keep hand-waving about “cover-up!” as though that’s some kind of talisman. I’m not sure what the solution here is other than telling MPs from all sides to grow up, but that’s where we are.

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Roundup: Cheering on an attack on institutional independence

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Yesterday, Senator Claude Carignan tabled a bill that seeks to strip Julie Payette of her pension, and would strip any former Governor General of a pension if they don’t serve at least five years (never mind that nine of our 29 past Governors General did not serve at least five years). It’s an attack on the institutional independence of an office that can serve as a check on government, and needs to be called out as such.

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1376970875031945217

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1376971807576711168

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1376998266282328065

But just how was it discussed on Power & Politics last night? Over several segments, each of them with different pundits, the common consensus that this was great populist politics to go after an unpopular figure like Payette, and digging into the issue of their other benefits – because nothing sells in Canadian media like cheap outrage and hairshirt parsimony. The most we got to the cautionary tale was to beware unintended consequences, and that a future GG may have to invent a medical reason for a resignation (which the bill states that Cabinet would have to approve, which is entirely bonkers). Not one person – not one – raised the issue of institutional independence, and why it’s a Very Bad Thing to open the door to governments being able to threaten their financial well-being as a way to hold power over them, most especially when the beneficiaries of this independence (not only the GG, but also senators and Supreme Court justices) provide a check on the power of government. This is the level of discourse in this country? Seriously? And even more to the point, the host of the show kept steering the topic to this kind of populist, vindictiveness rather than the actual consequences of making an action like this. It is absolutely boggling, but it gives you a sense as to why things have degenerated as they have. This bill represents an existential threat to our parliamentary system, and it’s being played for petty drama and populist cheap shots.

We need better pundits in this country, and better politics shows. This is horrifying.

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Roundup: Confusion over AstraZeneca

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The third wave of the pandemic is now out of control in Ontario while the murderclowns in our provincial government continue to stand idly by, as BC goes into a “circuit breaker” lockdown to try and get a hold of their own skyrocketing numbers – because apparently fourteen months into this pandemic, nobody can grasp that exponential growth means that cases grow exponentially. Funny how that happens.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1376630821717569538

Meanwhile, there was confusion over new advice on the AstraZeneca vaccine as the National Advisory Committee on Immunisation informed provinces on Sunday that they were advising on pausing doses for those under 55, but didn’t make a broader announcement about that until late in the afternoon Monday, leaving a mess of confusion for much of the day. It seems that the blood clotting issue, while still extremely rare, is of a type that can have a forty percent fatality rate, and it’s been seen more prevalently in women under 55 (though it is suspected that it may simply because more women have been vaccinated in the healthcare fields and hence it is showing up more often there). That being said, they have decided to hold off on that age group until they can get more data, which could come in the next few weeks – especially as there have been no reported case of clotting in Canada thus far. It should also be noted that there would be very few AstraZeneca doses given to those under 55, because most provinces are not there yet in terms of their vaccine roll-outs, so those under 55 who have received it are likely some essential workers. (More from Dr. David Fisman in this thread).

While this was going on, there was a little too much made of the (temporary) disunity between Health Canada and NACI, in spite of the fact that they are separate, that NACI is arm’s-length from government, and that they each have different roles to play. Too many people – especially in the media – were just throwing their hands up and proclaiming their confusion, which allowed certain actors like the Conservatives’ health critic to take advantage of the situation and insisting that the minister wasn’t “controlling her bureaucrats” (NACI are not “her bureaucrats), and trying to paint a situation like the government is out of control. Yes, it’s a fluid situation, and there should have been earlier guidance released after the provinces were notified and started pausing their own appointments, but I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to consider the situation as being out of control, or so confusing that nobody knows what was going on. I think there were a lot of dramatics (or possibly histrionics) from people who should know better, but perhaps I’m being too generous.

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Roundup: Sending in Rodriguez

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I suspect we are in for another round of procedural drama and possibly a meltdown or two as the Liberals have decided that they are going to put up House Leader Pablo Rodriguez to the Ethics Committee today, instead of staffers from PMO or the prime minister himself, as was demanded in a non-binding Supply Day motion last week. (More on the background in my weekend column here). I get why this is happening – the government is (rightfully) defending the notion of ministerial responsibility and the fact that we don’t call staffers to committee to testify, but at the same time the PM has already answered on the WE Imbroglio, and he’s got things to do, so they’re going to put up Rodriguez instead – and Rodriguez is going to be punchy and combative in ways that Justin Trudeau can’t be.

So I get this, but I also feel like this is just going to make things worse. The WE investigations have pretty much run out of steam because they’re just recycling the same material over and over again, and starting to delve into areas that are way beyond their ambit, but because the opposition has the votes on these committees, they’re content to let them spin off into never-ending witch hunts. And as for the sexual misconduct investigations in the military, it’s all going to end in Harjit Sajjan needing to fall on his sword before too long, so everyone is basically biding their time until that happens, so the pressure is on. In either case, things are just going to keep circling until either there is an election (so, not this spring) or the government inevitably ballses something else up and everyone moves on to the new shiny screw-up. Meanwhile, very little actual work will get done, and on and on it goes.

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Roundup: Kabuki theatre around the Elections Act changes

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There are days when the state of our parliament achieves the level of farce, and we appear to be having another of those moments. Minister Dominic LeBlanc sent a letter to opposition party leaders – which seems to be a more common occurrence the days – urging them to pass the bill that would allow for pandemic-related changes to the Canada Elections Act per the request of the Chief Electoral Officer. This bill was tabled back in December, and we have just exhausted the sitting weeks in March, and it still has not even made it to committee, in part because the Conservatives have spent weeks using procedural tactics to delay debate on most every piece of legislation on the Order Paper.

LeBlanc apparently mentioned the upcoming budget in the letter, because that is a confidence measure and this is a hung parliament, so it is possible that the government could face a non-confidence vote and trigger an election at pretty much any point. And so during what debate there has been on this bill, the opposition MPs keep saying that there’s no imminent election unless the Liberals plan on calling one, and the NDP are going so far as to say that they simply need to work together to avoid one. Essentially, they get to accuse the government of opportunism for trying to do their due diligence at the request of the Chief Electoral Officer, which is cute for everyone involved.

But here’s the real kicker that makes this all a farce – the bill has an implementation period of 90 days after royal assent. The House isn’t sitting for the next two weeks, and even if they managed to have a Second Reading vote, speed it through committee and rush it to the Senate, I don’t image that it could be passed both chambers before the 23rd of April at the earliest, and only then would that 90-day clock start. That means that the changes couldn’t be fully implemented until the very end of July, meaning that even if the budget were the crux by which the government could fall (those votes would likely happen sometime in early May), there is no way that these changes could pass before a spring election could be called (considering the usual writ period of about six weeks). Any party pushing for an election without these changes would be suicidal. The government really has no interest in calling an election (seriously, and I’ve spoken to ministers who lament the number of items they have on the Order Paper that they need to see passed), especially because we are now into a Third Wave of this pandemic and there is no possible way we can vaccinate our way out of it without a time machine, so all of this chest-thumping by parties (and pleading by bored pundits) is for naught. This is all a bunch of Kabuki theatre for the sake of scoring points. We are not a serious country.

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Roundup: Not a tax but a regulatory charge

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The big news yesterday was that the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 6-3 that the federal government’s carbon price backstop was indeed constitutional, and included in that ruling was that the price was not a tax, but a constitutionally valid regulatory charge. This is important for a couple of reasons – taxes go to general revenue, whereas regulatory charges must be cycled for specific purposes, and in this case, they are rebated to the provinces in which they are collected, and under the federal backstop, if a province doesn’t have a revenue recycling mechanism, these carbon charges are rebated at a rate whereby most households will get more back than they paid into it owing to the fact that institutions who pay the prices don’t get those same rebates.

Of course, you wouldn’t know it based on a bulk of the coverage in this country, for whom the common headline was “Supreme Court declares carbon tax constitutional.” CBC, iPolitics, The Globe and Mail, Global TV, the Postmedia chain – all of them using “carbon tax” throughout to describe the very ruling that says it’s not a tax. This matters for a couple of reasons – one of them is that calling it a tax is actively misleading as this charge does not go into general revenue. Why is that important? Recall that in the lead-up to the last election, then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer kept declaring that the federal “carbon tax” would keep increasing because the government needed the revenues to pay for their deficits – a lie because it’s not a tax, and those revenues got rebated to household. But he almost never got corrected on that, because people kept using “tax.” Erin O’Toole keeps offering the lie that this “tax” is punishing low-income households, again misleading because of the rebates, which again, few people correct him on.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1375152876641746947

The other reason it matters is because using “tax” fits it into a particular ideological framing device for which “taxes” are a bad thing. “Taxation is theft,” and all of that particular bullshit, but this is a particular frame that serves those narratives. Journalists should be under no obligation to carry water for those interests, and if anyone says “calling it a tax is just easier,” then you are party to misinformation. And I am starting to wonder how many of my journalist colleagues either didn’t pay attention or skipped the class in journalism school where we discussed framing devices and how they influence coverage. A few outlets were able to get the nomenclature correct – that others couldn’t is a problem.

Meanwhile, Jason Markusoff makes note of what certain premiers did and did not say about the result, given that this is now a reality that they will be forced to contend with. Heather Scoffield considers the decision the stake to the heart of governments’ ability to drag their feet on tackling climate change. Colby Cosh takes a deep dive into the ruling’s exploration of the Peace, Order and Good Government provisions of the constitution.

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