Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Announcing the process to find the next GG

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Yesterday afternoon, the government finally announced the process by which they will be selecting the next governor general, and it is the return of an advisory panel – but not really the old vice-regal appointment committee process that Stephen Harper initiated. For one, minister Dominic LeBlanc co-chairs the committee along with the interim Clerk of the Privy Council, which is a big change because LeBlanc’s inclusion means it is no longer arm’s length and won’t be able to claim that it can avoid the appearance of considerations being made through a political lens. As well, the Canadian Secretary to the Queen is nowhere to be seen in this process, whereas the previous CSQ chaired the previous committee process. (There has been some disagreement with this over Twitter, which is their prerogative but I would not consider the creation of a short list to be “political advice” any more than any other options presented to a government as compiled by the civil service).

What concerns me is the timeline of this process, which the government claims to want to be “expeditious” because they don’t want to keep the Chief Justice in the Administrator position for long, particularly if we are in a hung parliament that could theoretically fall at any time (if you discount that the only people who actually want an election right now are bored pundits). Nevertheless, it took them a month-and-a-half after Payette’s resignation to just announce the committee. The old committee process took an average of six months to conduct a search and compile a short-list for a vice-regal position, which is really not tenable in the current situation.

If anyone wants to read more about the old process and the role of the Canadian Secretary of the Queen in it, it was part of the focus of my chapter in Royal Progress: Canada’s Monarchy in the Age of Disruption, which was the product of presentations made at the last conference by the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada.

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Roundup: Closure, and false hope

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The government followed through on their plans to invoke closure on the assisted dying bill yesterday, and with the support of the Bloc, they had final debate and a vote, which passed, sending the amended bill back to the Senate. (The NDP, incidentally, voted against it simply because they refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the Senate). Because the government only accepted a couple of the Senate amendments, and modified others, it will require another vote in the Other Place, but it is most likely that they will allow the bill to pass in time for the court-imposed deadline.

There have been a lot of disingenuous comments about this bill. Certain disability advocates have insisted that this makes it easy to kill them, which it doesn’t, and these advocates ignore that other people with disabilities have requested assisted dying and won in the courts – which is why this bill exists. Many of those advocates are trying to re-litigate the case they lost at the Supreme Court that allowed for the assisted dying regime to be created in the first place, which isn’t going to happen – that decision was unanimous and the Court is not going to revisit it. As well, one of these amendments puts a two-year time limit on the mental health exclusion so that more guidelines can be developed. That exclusion is almost certainly unconstitutional, and the government knows it – but again, there is a cadre of disingenuous commentary, including from some MPs, that this would allow anyone with depression access to assisted dying, which is unlikely in the extreme, and more to the point, it conflates other mental illnesses with depression, and it stigmatises mental illness by excluding it, effectively undoing years of trying to treat mental illness like any other illness.

When I tweeted about this last night, I got a lot of pushback from a certain segment that coalesced around the narrative that the government would not provide supports for people with mental illness but would let them kill themselves; and furthermore, they tried to further say that the government that voted against pharamcare was doing this. There is a lot to unpack in those statements, but there are a few things to remember. One of them is that most disability supports, as well as treatment for mental health, are both in provincial jurisdiction, so the federal government can’t offer more supports for them. Hell, they can’t even simply send $2000 per month to people with disabilities – as the NDP are demanding – because they don’t exactly have a national database of people with disabilities (and they had a hard-enough time kludging together a special pandemic payment through use of the flawed disability tax credit). They do have jurisdiction over the Criminal Code, which is what this legislation covers.

As for the pharmacare bill, we’ve already covered repeatedly that it was unconstitutional and unworkable, and would not have created pharmacare, as the NDP claimed (while the government is already at work implementing the Hoskins Report). But as we’ve seen here, they sold a bill of goods to these people, and gave them false hope as to what they were doing. They lied to vulnerable Canadians to score cheap political points. The sheer immorality of that choice is utterly shameful, but this appears to be what the party has reduced itself to. I sometimes wonder how their brain trust sleeps at night.

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Roundup: Hybrid heckling

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In a case of being careful what one wishes for, it turns out that all of the hopes that hybrid sittings would mean an end to heckling didn’t happen. In fact, MPs are now complaining it’s worse because when someone unmutes to heckle, it creates even more disruption as the camera shifts to them (but of course, this is also a completely selfish thing because it causes even more strain for the interpreters, who are burning out and MPs just don’t care).

What the Hill Times piece missed, because none of their reporters have shown up to QP during the pandemic, is that there are still shenanigans in the Chamber while the exchanges are happening over zoom. Most days, it’s Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen (the most consistent Designated Liberal™ in the Chamber) sniping back and forth with one or two Conservatives opposite – often Pierre Poilievre or Gérard Deltell, and this can be fairly distracting because you can’t hear the exchanges happening on screen. The worst was the Friday where Poilievre decided he was going to have a running commentary on everything going on on-screen, and when I say that he has a singular wit, I mean that he’s the only one who thinks he’s funny. He’s not. It was so bad that I couldn’t hear what was happening on the screen because of the constant running commentary that the Speaker wasn’t cracking down on. And I get it – they’re bored because there’s nothing for them to do but sit there as room meat as the charade carries on over Zoom, but it’s terrible.

Hybrid QP is actually pretty demoralizing. There is no spark or energy to what happens. It’s a lifeless recitation of talking points where they can’t inhabit the same space, and thus there is zero frisson to any of it. It’s unnatural and yet MPs seem to want more of this rather than fighting to have proper sittings in a safe way.

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Roundup: Support on a closure motion

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There appears to be some marginal progress with the government attempting to move legislation in the House of Commons, now that the NDP and the Bloc are starting to realise that something needs to be done. To that end, the Bloc have agreed to support a motion on closure for Bill C-7 on assisted dying – as there is a court deadline and only eight more sitting days between now and then – with tentative NDP support. And the NDP are also starting to realise that the current impasse could give the government ammunition to call an election (even though the only people who want said election are bored pundits), and want other bills to move.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, did pass a motion yesterday to fast-track debate on the Canada-UK trade agreement implementation legislation and MPs sat until midnight as a result, but there will be a battle over the assisted dying bill. From there, it becomes a contest of wills as to which bills are getting prioritised. The government has been trying to pass Bill C-14, which implements measures from the fiscal update back in December, before the budget is brought down (likely next month). And there is another bill to close loopholes in pandemic supports, which the Conservatives have refused to fast-track, while complaining about said loopholes. But the NDP want other bills fast-tracked instead – the creation of a Day of Reconciliation with Indigenous people, the UNDRIP bill, and finally passing the conversion therapy ban bill, which is at third reading whenever it can be brought forward. The government is also trying to get some bills past second reading so that they can get them off to committee, which you’d think opposition parties would relish.

I do find the Conservatives’ complaint that the government keeps introducing bills to be somewhat ludicrous, as though the government doesn’t have a legislative agenda that they laid out, and that they can’t try and walk and chew gum at the same time. The parliamentary calendar is finite, and there are a lot of things that this government needs to be able to do, and the Conservatives have been putting a damper on much of that for weeks now. Now that the Bloc and NDP are looking more willing to play ball with the government, one presumes that we’ll see some time allocation motions upcoming to prioritise more bills, and get them through the process, rather than give the government “more ammunition” for the election nobody actually wants.

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Roundup: Stop hitting yourself!

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Yesterday, the Conservatives had the gall and the cheek to put out a press release blaming the Liberals for the fact that none of their legislation is going through in a timely manner, never mind that it’s the opposition using procedural delay tactics to hold bills up. In particular, Conservative House Leader Gérard Deltell accuses the Liberals of not calling bills “in a logical order,” scheduling “insufficient time” (never mind that some bills recently have had more debate than budget bills), and then sounding wounded when the Conservatives are the ones being accused of playing games.

While most of this statement really reads like Detell holding the government’s arm while telling them to stop hitting themselves, while trying to craft the narrative that the Liberals are deliberately causing problems in order to engineer an election – err, except that it’s not the Liberals who are calling for concurrence motions and debates on committee reports rather than proceeding to government orders every day.

But hold up, you may say – surely the government could cut a deal with the Bloc or the NDP! What do you think those terms would be? The Bloc demand unconditional transfers to the provinces, which the federal government would be foolish to agree to, while the NDP want an intrusion in provincial areas of jurisdiction on things like rent, sick leave, pharmacare, dental care, and long-term care – things that the federal government cannot make unilateral change on, and are already negotiating with provinces on in most cases, and that is a time-consuming process. Nobody wants to play ball, even though nobody says they want an election (and really, the only people who do are bored pundits), but nobody wants to look like they are helping out the Liberals too much because they think it’ll cost them at the ballot box. Accusing one another of wanting an election while essentially engineering excuses to have one is making for a very irritating sitting, and I don’t imagine it will get any better the longer it lasts.

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Roundup: A nuanced conversation post-interview? Hardly.

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I’ll say right off that I did not watch That Interview last night because I was trying to have what little life I have available to me in these pandemic times, but judging from the reaction over the Twitter Machine, I have a feeling that we’re in for a week full of boneheaded op-eds and “tough questions” about being a constitutional monarchy, or whether we should abandon the monarchy. Well, good luck with that, because we’d need to rewrite the constitution from top to bottom, because the Crown is the central organising principle, and good luck deciding on just what we would replace the monarchy with. No, seriously – good luck, because that exercise went so poorly in Australia that not only did their republican referendum failed, but support for the monarchy has been on the rise since.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1368770788128620544

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And lo, some of our country’s Serious Journalists are already Asking Questions™. And it’s going about as well as you can expect.

So, yeah. That’s what we can look forward to this week. I can’t wait, because I’m sure it’ll be even dumber than we expect.

https://twitter.com/tomhawthorn/status/1368818526564229121

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Roundup: Keeping the minister away

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The drip-drip-drip of revelations around the allegations surrounding former General Jonathan Vance continues to be felt, with emails showing that defence minister Harjit Sajjan’s former chief of staff emailing about the attempted investigation, but with the former ombudsman not providing any information that could be deemed actionable, we know it went nowhere until after Vance retired. The Conservatives are trying to use this to “prove” that PMO knew that something was up with Vance and are now engaged in a cover-up, but I am not entirely sure about that. A Liberal MP appearing on Power & Politics last night made the salient points that as soon as Sajjan was alerted to the allegations, he steered clear of them and turned PCO onto the case, because he needed to ensure that this did not become politicised, and if this is the case – and it sounds very plausible that it is – then it’s also quite plausible that these staff were trying to create that ringfence around the minister and prime minister to keep them from getting involved so as to avoid politicising any aspect of the investigation or its fallout.

This of course raises questions about what Sajjan should have done in leaving Vance in place knowing this allegation was out there, and whether or not he had an obligation to pursue the claim against his chief of defence staff. If he was trying to stay out and let the arm’s-length PCO process carry out, and it didn’t proceed because of a lack of actionable information, is that on Sajjan? Or should he have been more proactive in possibly accelerating Vance’s departure, given that he was already reaching what would have been the usual end of his term as CDS (and the fact that he stayed on for three more years meant that Vance became the longest-serving CDS in Canadian history)? Again, it’s a hard call to make because he was trying to keep that separation in place to avoid this being politicized.

Trudeau, meanwhile, says he still has confidence in Sajjan, which had everyone joking on Twitter that this essentially put a countdown clock over Sajjan’s head. But this is a mess that makes it very difficult to sort out because of the considerations at play, and the fact that a parliamentary committee is now digging into this will make it all the more partisan as the days go on. I will not be too surprised if Sajjan is made to fall on his sword about this in a few weeks’ time, but not before the Liberals put up a fight to say that he did all the right things, and that the real problem is that the accuser didn’t feel comfortable enough to want to make the allegations official or actionable – but that gets us back into something of a Catch-22. None of this will end well.

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Roundup: A $28 billion demand

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It was with a certain amount of chutzpah that the premiers assembled virtually yesterday, and demanded that the federal government turn over an additional $28 billion a year to them in Canada Health Transfers – or else they’ll ask the opposition to demand it for them. And yes, all three opposition parties are happy to demand that unconditional transfers be increased for the provinces (the NDP, at the same time, also saying that they can offer more federal money with strings attached for things like pharmacare, under the false assumption that the premiers wouldn’t dare turn it down).

Of course, this is a completely laughable proposition, because without strings, there is no guarantee that premiers will actually spend this money on healthcare, or that they won’t reduce their own spending. It’s almost like we’ve seen variations of this roadshow before – under the older health transfer escalator, health transfers were rising at a much higher rate than healthcare spending growth was, meaning that the additional dollars were not being spent on healthcare by the provinces (in spite of all protests to the contrary – math is math). When the current federal government boosted infrastructure spending with the hopes that it would help boost productivity, the provinces retreated in their spending and lo, those productivity gains didn’t happen. When Stephen Harper agreed to Jean Charest that the fictional “fiscal imbalance” with Quebec existed and decided to placate him with those billions of dollars, what did Charest do? Turn it into a tax cut. Justin Trudeau isn’t an idiot – not to mention, he’s got pharmacare on his agenda to implement, and he wants national standards for long-term care if he’s going to turn over more money for it. Of course, he’s going to put all kinds of strings on this money, and the provinces are going to have to either take it to get the money they claim they are so desperately in need of, or they can throw a tantrum and hope that they can get votes by claiming Ottawa is being mean to them (which, to be fair, will work in some provinces). Either way, their request is laughable, and Trudeau would be a fool to give in to it as is.

Oh, and as a reminder, every time you read a premier saying that healthcare spending used to be 50-50 and now it’s not, that would be true except that Ottawa and the provinces long ago agreed to change the formula in exchange for giving the provinces tax points instead, which they happily accepted at the time, and trying to make the 50-50 claim without mentioning the tax points is revisionist history that should be called out for what it is. You have been warned.

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Roundup: Misinformation in service of the Narrative

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Every now and again, coverage of a story gets me so riled up that I absolutely cannot even, and this happened last night on Power & Politics where once again, former Conservative interim leader Rona Ambrose was trotted out to complain that her bill on training judges in sexual assault law hasn’t passed. This is the fourth or fifth time that the show has had her on to complain, and every single time, they mischaracterise the legislative process, and absolutely ignore that her original bill was blatantly unconstitutional and was completely unworkable in a real-world scenario, and it needed to be rewritten entirely.

Every. Single. Time.

Part of the framing last night was that the bill is “stalled” in the Senate – except that isn’t true at all. It was sent to the Senate at the beginning of December, at a time when they were preoccupied with the assisted dying bill (which is under a court deadline), and it just got sent to committee now that the Senate is back from the winter break (which was longer than the Commons’ because they have so few bills on their Order Paper). In no way is the bill “stalled,” but this is the narrative that the show chose to run with, and facts be damned, that was how they were going to play it. The CBC’s flagship politics show was actively misinforming its viewers as to what was going on with this bill, which makes me really question its ethics, and those of the producers.

Aside from the misinformation about the process, over subsequent appearances, Ambrose has repeatedly maligned the Senate as holding up the bill because of the “old boys club,” which is patently absurd because the Senate is at essentially gender parity (unlike the Commons), she has also dismissed the concerns of judges as “arrogance.” But that’s in contrast to the concerns that judges themselves actually raised (and lo, I actually spoke to them in this piece I wrote about the original version of her bill). And yet there was zero pushback to these assertions, nor was there any mention of the first bill – or even mention that this version of the bill is basically just for show because it’s now useless (because that was the only way to actually make it constitutional).

There has been so much journalistic malpractice on this particular bill over the past several years, and it very much seems that there is a consensus Narrative about this bill that every media outlet has decided to service rather than actually challenge, and that’s a problem. The way this has been handled has been a complete disservice to Canadians, and I wish there was far more critical thinking among the media about this, rather than simply blindly servicing the Narrative.

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Roundup: Lying with statistics, quarterly GDP edition

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Statistics Canada released their fourth quarter GDP data yesterday, and it was surprisingly not bad – it far exceeded expectations for growth, with an annualized increase of 9.6 percent, and the estimates of January’s GDP numbers are that they will grow, in spite of renewed lockdowns/mockdowns across much of the country, which is good economic news. Comparatively, OECD data shows that Canada ranked second out of G7 countries in terms of GDP growth over the quarter – only Japan beat us. This should give rise to some cautious optimism about the direction of our economic recovery.

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Erin O’Toole, however, declared that these figures just will not do, and that the country needs “economic leadership.” As proof, he cited that the country’s annual GDP fell a record 5.4 percent – the most since comparable data began being kept in 1961 – never mind that the economic shock was brought on by the global pandemic, plus the false notion that we have the “highest unemployment in the G7,” as well as high pandemic spending levels. The Conservatives keep trotting out these unemployment figures, but every country measures unemployment differently, so they are effectively lying with statistics. Even if we measured our unemployment by the same way the Americans do, the gap is consistent with the gap in figures that always exists between our countries. Meanwhile, we still have the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7, and our pandemic spending has insulated the economy so that it will be more resilient once we’re able to open – and hey, we also managed to have a much lower death count than most other G7 countries because we paid people to stay home. But part of the problem is that O’Toole (and most especially Pierre Poilievre) never gets called out for essentially lying with statistics, because the CBC has essentially given up on economics reporting, and the Financial Post largely sticks to getting their commentary from Jack Mintz and the Fraser Institute (with one or two exceptions). So O’Toole can stand at the lectern in the current ad hoc press theatre in the West Block and lie with statistics unchallenged, and media won’t call out the misinformation because they will either both-sides it, or just report it verbatim because they don’t know enough about the numbers to challenge it. It’s a sad state of affairs.

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Meanwhile, in more news that O’Toole is unwilling to have an honest discourse, his staff penned an op-ed in his name in the National Post calling on the government to turn to India instead of China for future economic growth – but the piece was deafeningly silent on Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism, which has turned into pogroms against Muslims and mistreatment of Sikhs in the country. It’s a lie of omission to simply call India the world’s largest democracy and ignore the flagrant human rights violations going on there as well – but this is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from O’Toole and company, because We The Media have enabled them the whole way.

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