Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: CBC’s baffling mandate talk

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There are some pretty questionable narratives that circulate in Canadian media for a lot of very dubious reasons, and we had another winner yesterday, when Justin Trudeau was on Peter Mansbridge’s podcast. Bafflingly, he was asked if he needed to go through an election to get a “mandate” to implement his upcoming budget, and I cannot even.

I. Cannot. Even.

Trudeau – semi-correctly – noted that he does not because he already one.

This notion that we somehow have “mandates” in our system is completely divorced from reality. We don’t have mandates – governments operate on the basis of confidence. They are appointed by the Governor General based on their ability to maintain the confidence of the Chamber – they are not popularly elected. They do not need to solely operate on what was in the election, because a) events, dear boy, events, and b) they operate on the basis of confidence. If the legislature has a problem with the government’s agenda, they will let them know. It’s also incredibly difficult to claim a “mandate” in our electoral system given that we operate by plurality, and even more especially when we have a hung parliament. (More on this from Philippe Lagassé here).

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1374805012120014862

Even more to the point, why the gods damned CBC would write up 800 words on this interaction for a dynamic that does not exist in a Westminster parliamentary system like ours is boggling.

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Roundup: A level of cynicism you need to reach for

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The Conservatives spent their allotted Supply Day yesterday debating a non-binding motion that would demand the government produce a “data-driven” plan to end all lockdowns permanently – something that should more generously be referred to as shenanigans, but is perhaps better described as an act of deep cynicism that is designed to create false expectations, and make it look like the government is guilty of inaction when the demands being placed on them are largely outside of their jurisdiction.

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Part of this cynicism is trying to blame the federal government for the lockdowns – or perhaps more appropriately mockdowns – that have occurred over the past year, when those are provincial decisions. Every few days in QP, we get a question prefaced with “lockdowns were supposed to be a temporary measure,” which then blames the federal government for something or other when it was the provinces who a) did not lock down properly, b) opened too early, and c) tried to play Goldilocks by thinking they could have a little bit of COVID in the community and everything would be fine, forgetting that it grows exponentially, and by not taking proper measures, things spiralled out of control. And it keeps happening – we never properly exited the second wave and we are already into the third because these premiers did not learn their lessons and were too concerned about letting people eat in restaurants and failing the marshmallow test rather than actually crushing the spread and allowing a more normal pace of business operations – much as Atlantic Canada managed to do.

Of course, it’s the Conservatives’ ideological brethren who are responsible for most of the disasters at the provincial level, meaning that they don’t want to criticize them. Rather, they are more invested in creating some kind of alternate reality where the federal government is making the calls (they’re not), and are dressing up their disregard for lives under the crocodile tears of “mental health,” when their loaded questions about re-opening the economy betray their true concerns. The realities of a pandemic, where people need to be paid to stay home in order to limit spread, have proven to be beyond their capacity to process, and they cannot deal with this reality – so they instead create an alternate one. Having the federal government produce a plan for re-opening at this point not only sets up false hope and unrealistic expectations, but it would simply allow people to feel like they have permission to start “cheating” on the rules the closer they get to any of the dates outlined in these plans, and it would set back progress even more than it’s been set back now by certain incompetent and immoral murderclowns who are running many of the provinces. With the new variants circulating in community spread, demanding a map for re-opening when we still don’t know what the landscape will look like is premature and frankly, foolhardy. But they don’t care – they’re just looking to score points by crying “The US and the UK have reopening plans but we don’t!” It makes it hard to treat them as a government-in-waiting if this is the casual disregard they have for human lives.

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Roundup: Moving on China with our allies

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As the secret trials of the two Michaels concluded in China without verdicts, Canada made more moves against China in concert with other international allies. Part of that was Canada warning other countries who do business with China about the risk of arbitrary detention and hostage diplomacy, and we had the support of 28 diplomats from 26 countries at the court houses in China where those trials took place, demonstrating that Canada is not alone in this, and we are also leading over 50 other countries in the declaration against arbitrary detention. In addition, we levied sanctions against four Chinese officials in relation to the human rights abuses taking place against the Uyghurs, in concert with the US, the UK, and the European Union.

This is the point where you get some voices cry out why we haven’t used the “genocide” label yet, as though that doesn’t come without consequences under international law, and if they think that Canada is able to go it alone in trying to prevent it and hold the perpetrators to account, well, they are smoking something particularly potent. What is important to remember about the actions that happened yesterday is that they were done in concert with our allies, which is extremely important because it means that China will be less able to isolate us and try to impose economic retaliation. Most of the time, the Americans are able to say and do anything because they have enough economic heft to withstand the retaliation, but Canada can’t go it alone, and many of the voices in this country, who are deeply unserious about foreign policy, can’t seem to grasp that, preferring instead to thump their chest or virtue signal. Canada needs to deal with China in a multilateral capacity, and that takes time, and the consensus needs to be built behind closed doors so that China can’t try to pick apart participants before agreements are reached. But nobody likes nuance or patience, so we get the caterwauling that we do (especially from media voices, who appear to be even less serious about this, if that is even possible).

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Roundup: The leader and the grassroots disagree on climate change

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After Erin O’Toole’s big speech at the Conservative Party’s “virtual” convention, where he said that the party needed to change if they hoped to win enough seats to form government in the future, the party apparently felt otherwise on a number of policy resolutions. The big one that will be cited for weeks to come is the fact that on a resolution to declare that climate change is real that the party needs to act on it, the grassroots voted this down – predominantly with votes from Alberta and Saskatchewan, but also from the social conservatives. It seems that Campaign Life Coalition distributed a guide to delegates, wherein they equated “climate alarmism” as a tool to justify population control and abortion, so good luck having that rational debate.

But it almost doesn’t matter because O’Toole says climate change is real, and he’s going to do something about it. What exactly is unspecified, and he also intimated that the economy comes first, so that could mean doing as little as possible using the economic recovery as cover – but it won’t be a carbon price (which is ridiculous for a supposed fiscal conservative given that it’s a transparent market-based system that allows consumers to make better choices). But this has become what happens with our political parties now that we have made them solely leader-centric thanks to our presidential primary-style leadership contests. What the leader says goes in terms of policy and election platforms, so these grassroots policy conventions have largely become theatre with little resonance to how said leader operates because his or her word is what goes. The system shouldn’t work like this, but all parties now operate in this mode, but nobody wants to address the cause of it.

To that end, Chantal Hébert weaves together O’Toole’s weakness on promising a climate plan without a carbon price, and the upcoming Supreme Court decision on it, and how those two dynamics play together. Susan Delacourt takes the “virtual” convention to heart and posits that the Conservatives have created a virtual reality for themselves if they believe that denying climate change is what will set the tone for a campaign while their leader tries to shake them out of their complacency.

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Roundup: O’Toole’s hand-wavey five-point plan

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Erin O’Toole gave his keynote speech at the Conservative convention, and it was…serviceable. It was no rhetorical or oratory feat, but it wasn’t the stumbling, breathy mess that Andrew Scheer tended to deliver either, so there was that. But while he laid out his “five-point plan” for economic recovery, it was mostly hand-wavey and gave no real indication of just what exactly he planned to do, or how. Or, as one description put it, it was all tell and no show. But for as much as saying that the country has changed and the party needs to doesn’t really say how. Reaching out to private sector unions? Okay, sure, but just telling a bunch of blue-collar workers that you’re not “woke” isn’t going to cut it when you’re arguing against better wages and benefits. Trying to appeal to Quebec by out-Blocing the Bloc? I’m not seeing exactly what kind of broader, more inclusive party he’s trying to build other than his usual lip service about wanting more Canadians to see a Conservative when they look in the mirror.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1373031101963382790

While you can see my thread responding to his speech here, the party put out a backgrounder on their “Canada Recovery Plan” shortly after the speech, it’s still pretty hand-wavey. In short:

  1. Jobs – What government doesn’t promise jobs? O’Toole promises to recover the million jobs lost by the pandemic, just as Trudeau has, and while O’Toole says that includes women and youth, he literally spent the rest of the speech deriding the Liberals’ inclusive growth plan as being “picking and choosing who gets ahead,” and a “re-imagining of the economy.” Pick a lane.
  2. Accountability – Promises for new anti-corruption laws miss the point. Stephen Harper rode in on the white horse of accountability, and all it did was drive away talent from political staff jobs. Trudeau’s “ethics scandals” have largely been penny ante, and stem from a belief that so long as they mean well that the ends justify the means. Even more laws aren’t going to change that, and this is just populist noise, trying to rail against “elites.”
  3. Mental Health – I will give O’Toole props for mentioning that this will require the cooperation of the provinces, but he’s also already promised increased health transfers with no strings attached. So, again, pick a gods damned lane. As for his “incentives for employers to provide mental health coverage,” we all know that means another tax credit. As for the national three-digit suicide prevention hotline, the Liberals already started this process, but it’s going to take up to two years to implement.
  4. Secure the Country – Partner with pharmaceutical companies to increase capacity for medicines and vaccine production? Erm, what are you willing to capitulate to them? Blow up PMPRB? Give them longer timelines for intellectual property to keep out generics? These kinds of measures would increase drug prices, and would hugely impact provinces and health plans. More domestic production of PPE? You’re talking about subsidising industries to do that, which doesn’t sound very Conservative, and it sounds like picking winners and losers.
  5. Economy – Winding down emergency supports and targeting stimulus are pretty much exactly what the Liberals are promising. There is no daylight here. As for promising to “grow the economy again” and claiming there was slow growth under the Liberals is 100 percent fiction – the Liberals needed to provide some kind of economic stimulus because Conservative austerity was dragging economic growth. This claim is complete bullshit.

Meanwhile, Paul Wells is heartened that O’Toole has woken up to the reality that his party can no longer continue being a cargo cult for Stephen Harper – but also notes that his plan is light on calories, for better or worse at this stage.

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Roundup: Agitating for a political document

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Unable to score points on the vaccine procurement in a meaningful way, now that sufficient quantities have arrived, Erin O’Toole has recently tried pivoting to the federal budget, or the fact that there hasn’t been one in some 700 days. Given that the party is losing its lustre in public opinion polls as being “good fiscal managers” – a bit of branding that rarely, if ever, actually proved itself to be true, O’Toole is trying to bolster their street cred. The problem, of course, is that many of his arguments are, well, not actually sound ones.

For starters, no federal budget is like a household – not even close. It’s a bogus populist argument that just refuses to die, but everyone keeps repeating it and buying into it. More to the point, O’Toole is trying to claim that nobody knows how government money is being spent, which is a falsehood. Any money that the government spends has to come through the Estimates process, which gets voted on in Parliament after going through committee study. Afterward, how that those appropriations wound up being allocated get reported in the Public Accounts, which are released every year. All of this spending is being accounted for.

What O’Toole is looking for is a political document that lays out spending plans in broad strokes. It does not on its own showcase how that money gets allocated and spent. In fact, there has been a disconnect between the budget and the Estimates going back a few decades now, because governments and civil servants preferred it that way, and when the Liberals tried to better re-align those processes in the last parliament, it did not go very well thanks in part to institutional inertia pushing back. Suffice to say, it is not true that money is being spent blindly. MPs have ostensibly been in control of the process the whole time – but whether they have paid attention to what they were voting on is another matter entirely.

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Roundup: The importance of our distinctions

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There has been no shortage of columns on the future of the Canadian monarchy over the past few days – I’ve even contributed my own – and they are all over the map between “Our current system works” and “Barbados is going republican so why can’t we?” But one of the fundamental problems with many of these pieces is a fundamental lack of basic civics. Like, the most basic, which then gets even more compounded with wrong-headed expectations about what our other political actors should be doing. A huge example is the importance of keeping the ceremonial head of state functions away from the head of government functions, but this is failing to find as much traction these days, and that’s a problem.

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I would dispute with Philippe a bit here in that people would get fussed about honours being handed out by prime ministers or ministers, particularly if it’s a PM that they disagree with. That’s one of the primary reasons why honours should be with the Queen via the Governor Genera/Lieutenant Governors, because it keeps it out of the hands of politicians and the whims of the government of the day. When you start turning honours over to politicians, bad things happen – recall the gong show that was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medals, where MPs and senators were given a number to hand out apiece, and some of them went to certain individuals that would never have been eligible for any other honours in this country.

But of course, as Dan Gardner points out, so much of this stems not only from our poor civics education, but the fact that we are so saturated with American pop culture and politics that so many in this country believe that we are analogous in so many ways. Hell, we have political parties in this country who simply swallow the positions of American politicos and just divide by 10, thinking that’s all it takes, like we’re not separate countries or anything. It’s a huge problem and not enough of us are pushing back against it. The Crown is a big part of what keeps us distinct, and we need to better appreciate that. I can say from personal experience that one of the comments I’ve received most about my book is that people read the chapter on the Crown and say that it finally makes sense to them because they’ve never learned it properly before. We have a problem and we need to solve it before more people think that the solution is to become Americans.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1372205403782676486

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Roundup: Chalk up a couple of own-goals

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Political own-goals can be painful but also hilarious, and we saw two of them happen yesterday. The first was courtesy of the federal Conservatives, whose intended shitpost went awry when they wound up praising the Liberal government. It was obviously deleted within an hour or so, but the damage was done, and the day was spent with Liberals tweeting that the Conservatives told the truth for once. Oops.

The other was in Alberta, where a committee was examining the Energy Department’s budget, and questions arose about the spending on the province’s “war room,” whose job is supposed to be pushing back against the supposed “falsehoods” about their energy sector. You may have heard that last week, said war room decided to do battle against an obscure Netflix film called Bigfoot Family that shows a battle against an oil magnate seeking to blow up an Alaskan wildlife preserve. As a result of the war room’s ham-fisted campaign, the movie made the top ten streamed films, and had pretty much the opposite effect of what was intended. Nevertheless, the province’s energy minister, Sonya Savage, defended the attack against the film, and some UCP MLAs were praising the war room’s ability to make a film reach the top ten to be “pretty awesome.” Erm, they achieved the opposite and had more people watch the film they wanted to censor, guys. It’s so mind-numbingly dumb, and I just cannot even.

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Roundup: Final debate on the amendments

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While the Commons is not sitting this week, the Senate is, with several bills now on their Order Paper for consideration, most especially the assisted dying bill, which is under a court-imposed deadline (that has already been extended thrice). At issue are the amendments that the government accepted, rejected, and otherwise modified from what the Senate sent back to the Commons a few weeks ago (where the Conservatives then held it up).

The Government Leader in the Senate, Senator Marc Gold, is taking the line that this is a “historic example” of collaboration between the two Chambers that has resulted in better legislation, but I’m not sure just how historic that is, and by “better legislation,” it’s a fairly marginal case because the government reduced the attempt to render this legislation fully compliant with the constitution with one of its famous half-measures that means that people’s suffering will be prolonged as a result, and yet more others will need to embark on yet more court challenges in order to fully access what should be guaranteed rights.

Ultimately it does look like this will pass without sending it back to the Commons again, as most senators are taking the line that the House has had their say, and because they’re democratically elected, it can go ahead now (though there have been instances where the Senate made a second insistence on certain bills in order to make a point – though I’m not sure that will be the case here), and that it could pass and get royal assent before the court deadline. Nevertheless, the amount of time this has taken for something that had court-imposed timelines is a sense of just how vulnerable the parliamentary calendar really is when you had determined opposition to bills, and it’s not over yet because the proposed changes in this legislation will impose a two-year timeline for more consultations on aspects of the law that currently remain prohibited (where that prohibition remains unconstitutional), but that the government is dragging its feet for the sake of politics. Ultimately, nobody comes out of this exercise looking particularly good.

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Roundup: Pointing to the civilian culture too

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The reckoning over the culture in the Canadian Forces that permits sexual misconduct continues to get an airing, and over the weekend, we saw another dimension to this reckoning be raised, which is that the culture of the civilian branch – the Department of National Defence – has many of these same cultural problems in part because a good portion of its staff are former military and came up in the same toxic culture in the Forces. One example of ways in which the Forces were trying to show women that they weren’t welcome was forcing them into co-ed showers in 1997, and how the people involved in those decisions are still in positions of authority today.

Also over the weekend, there was an interview with retired Lt-Gen. Christine Whitecross, who discussed her experiences with misconduct that she did not always pursue complaints about, but also her sense of optimism that more people reporting sexual misconduct in the ranks. Whitecross also let it be known that she did apply for the chief of defence staff position, but obviously did not get it (to the surprise of many). As well, the accused in one of the most high-profile cases of sexual assault in the military – the story of which wound up in Maclean’s and touched off the Deschamps report and Operation Honour – is going to plead guilty to the charges after all.

Amidst all of this, the current military ombudsman is now echoing previous calls to make his office fully independent and reporting to Parliament, rather than to the department and the minister, and I just can’t. The very last thing we need is one more unaccountable Independent Officer of Parliament, and yet they are proliferating like mad, and this is yet one more demand. Surely we can figure out some sort of mechanism to help them retain greater independence within the current structure, but we need to stop the proliferation of Officers of Parliament, before they completely overrun our system, reducing our MPs to battle droids who recite canned speeches and vote according to their whip’s instructions. And it’s not like we’re not seeing other Officers of Parliament going well beyond their job descriptions and turning themselves into media darlings, right? Oh, wait…

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