Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: A $28 billion demand

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Misinformation in service of the Narrative

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Lying with statistics, quarterly GDP edition

Posted on by

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.

https://twitter.com/PhilSmith26/status/1366746936825548801

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.

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1366872106806349825

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.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Too-generous benefits?

Posted on by

I find myself a bit troubled by this notion that pandemic benefits have been “too generous,” even when people trot out statistics that show that some households got as much as $3000 more in supports like CERB over reported lost income in a three-month period, and some $2500 more in lower-income households. Partially why this rankles is because this is a gods damned global pandemic and we needed people to stay home rather than try to recklessly go to potentially unsafe workplaces where they could spread the virus. This notion that people needed to get back to work is one of the reasons why COVID infections and deaths were at much higher rates in other countries who had less generous supports, and I don’t think we should necessarily be apologising for this.

The other aspect of this that is unsettling is this notion that if these benefits continue that there will be a disincentive to work as the economy recovers, but again, if the economy is recovering and we are reaching a point of mass vaccination sufficient to actually have a re-opened economy, then these pandemic-specific programmes would be wound down, so it shouldn’t be a long-term consideration. More to the point, however, is that these pandemic supports were not really all that generous, and if people think it’s a disincentive to work, then maybe they should re-examine the wages that people are being paid – if they’re so low that CERB-level payments are a disincentive, then perhaps the job is the wage rate and not the benefits themselves. Businesses have continually lobbied to keep minimum wages artificially low, in spite of an increasing volume of evidence that higher minimum wage don’t actually cause businesses to close (and in fact, have the opposite effect). Perhaps governments should take that into account as we look to “build back better,” with more inclusive growth that should include higher wages for these workers, rather than returning to the failed “old normal” of grinding poverty.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Procedural shenanigans in a pandemic

Posted on by

The state of the government’s legislative agenda remains mired in procedural shenanigans, and the Conservatives are largely to blame. Of course, this is being framed as giving the Liberals ammunition for calling an election to try and win a majority so that they can regain control over their agenda, despite the fact that nobody aside from a few bored pundits actually wants to go to an election in the middle of a global pandemic, especially because we won’t be getting enough people vaccinated until at least summer before this could even be a remotely plausible scenario.

The government has been trying to pass two bills in short order – the latest pandemic support bill, and the assisted dying bill, for which they needed to get yet another extension to the court-imposed deadline because the Conservatives keep denying consent to extend debate on it. The procedural tactics tend to be forcing concurrence debates on committee reports, and because the opposition has enough votes to force them through, the actual orders of the day – mostly government bills – don’t wind up being debated after all. Of course, what has been especially precious is the way that the NDP have been using Question Period to complain that the government isn’t bringing bills up for debate (including the conversion therapy ban bill and the UNDRIP bill), even though they are actively participating in these concurrence debates, and voting with the Conservatives to have the debates. (The NDP also wasted an hour of the Commons’ time the other day when Don Davies complained he couldn’t re-ask his question from QP after his video cut out, never mind that the audio was fine, he was heard, and the question got a response. But he wanted the video so that it could be clipped for his social media, which is what QP had degenerated to).

I find myself particularly bemused by the Conservative House Leader – backed up by the Bloc’s – to claim that the government hasn’t set “clear priorities” and is failing to manage the legislative agenda. This is pretty ridiculous, because they know full well why those two bills are being prioritised, and in the case of the assisted dying bill, the Liberals have several times offered to move a motion that would allow the Commons to sit until midnight and debate the bill uninterrupted, but the Conservatives keep refusing consent for such a motion. And for as much as both the Conservatives and NDP keep saying that it’s the Liberals that want an election and that they don’t want to give it to them, it’s curious how they keep trying to engineer the opportunities for such a call. The fact that this level of gamesmanship is going on while we’re still in the midst of a pandemic just breeds cynicism, but seems tactically stupid if the government can demonstrate that their ability to get help to people (as with the pandemic support bill) keeps getting stymied by these kinds of shenanigans. But most of our parties these days are all tactics and no strategy, so that’s not a surprise in the end.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Taking a culture change seriously?

Posted on by

So much of the discourse yesterday – aside from the AstraZeneca vaccine – was around Admiral Art McDonald stepping aside while he is the subject of an investigation into sexual misconduct dating back to 2010. In particular, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and defence minister Harjit Sajjan were asked repeatedly whether they knew anything about this investigation or the allegations behind it before they appointed McDonald to the post of Chief of Defence Staff. (For the record, both Trudeau and Sajjan say they weren’t aware until it was reported in the media).

Trudeau says that it’s a good sign that McDonald stepped aside because it shows how serious this is being taken, and wants those who have experienced said misconduct to know that they will be heard and listened to. Erin O’Toole says that there should be a freeze on all promotions and salary increases for senior leadership in the military until an independent investigation can look into how the Forces have handled the problem of sexual misconduct.

Of course, the bigger problem is likely military culture and the structure of leadership, and there are concerns that Operation Honour is failing because it hasn’t tried to understand why sexual misconduct happens in the first place, and that it’s the broader military culture that needs to be changed. There are also particular calls for a fully independent oversight body to deal with the culture – and one that has actual teeth to it – but even though this was a recommendation in the Deschamps Report, the government didn’t go ahead with it. It remains a question whether the government will get over itself and finally create that independent oversight to finally deal with the problem, but they’ve been dragging their heels on other long-overdue independent oversight, especially over bodies like the CBSA, which has no oversight at all. But the fact that two Chiefs of Defence Staff in a row are under investigation should be a wake-up call as to the broader problems with the Forces, and maybe this government should finally take it more seriously than the half-measures they have taken to date.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Pandora’s Box is open

Posted on by

With the agreement of all House Leaders in the Commons, MPs have finally done it and wrenched open the lid of Pandora’s Box (which is actually a jar) and have let loose evil into the world. That evil is their remote voting app, and Parliament will forever suffer for it.

Am I being a drama queen about this? Hardly. Because we’re already seeing the demands to make these hybrid sittings permanent. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was asked to report on “savings” of this set-up, and in spite of the increased IT and staff costs (and almost no mention of the human costs of the interpreters burning out and suffering cognitive injuries at a horrific rate), he figured that it would save about $6.2 million a year, mostly in travel costs, as well as some 2,972 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions. And the senator who commissioned the PBO report was so enthralled with the result that she wants to make hybrid sittings permanent, with the “bonus” that parliamentarians can spend more time in their “ridings” (erm, except senators don’t have ridings because they represent the whole province, Quebec’s senatorial districts notwithstanding).

What I have been warning about this whole time is that MPs would use the pandemic to normalise hybrid sittings and remote voting, because some of them – the Liberals especially – have been pushing for this for years with little success, and with the pandemic, they are not letting a good crisis go to waste. They know that once it’s over, they will contrive excuses to keep these “temporary” measures permanent, starting with the excuse that it’ll be beneficial for MPs on parental leave, and then it’ll be for those with work-life balance issues, and finally it will because they just have so many things going on in their ridings that they couldn’t possibly be in Ottawa – and now they have the added justification of cost savings and reduced GHG from flights. Parliament is facing de-population, and it will become like a homeroom that everyone attends once or twice a year, and that’s it.

The problem is that Parliament is a face-to-face institution. Some of the most important work that happens is actually on the margins of committee rooms, in the lobbies behind the Chambers, or in the corridors. Ministers can be button-holed by MPs in the Chamber waiting for votes, which is incredibly valuable. Relationships are built with stakeholders and witnesses who appear at committee, and that happens face-to-face. And more importantly, MPs need to actually be in the same room for collegiality to happen. When MPs stopped having dinner together in the Parliamentary Restaurant three nights a week after they ended evening sittings, collegiality plummeted and has never recovered. If MPs aren’t even in Ottawa with one another, they will be fully ensconced in partisan bubbles that make it easy to treat one another as the enemy rather than as fellow MPs who can play outraged in the Chamber and go for a drink together afterward (which is becoming rare enough as it is). This is antithetical to what Parliament is. And not enough of them are getting it, so they’re allowing this to go ahead full-steam ahead, and boasting about “modernisation,” and so on. It will kill Parliament, and not enough people will actually care, which is the worst part.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Fuelling the cynicism over pharmacare

Posted on by

It appears that Jagmeet Singh is attempting to play a particular kind of political long game, designed solely to increase the level of cynicism among voters through a series of cute legislation, disingenuous moves, and outright mendacity. Case in point was the party’s “pharmacare bill,” which died at Second Reading yesterday – something that was always inevitable, and it was planned as a ham-fisted trap for the Liberals, to be amplified by an incurious media that only both-sides issues rather than calls out bullshit when they see it.

To wit – the NDP’s “pharmacare” bill was shenanigans. Private members’ bills cannot spend money (as that is the sole domain of the government), and the NDP thought they were going to be super clever and instead of outright making a spending commitment in the bill, it would build a framework that would then obligate the government to pass a second bill that would have the spending commitment, but I have particular doubts that this could possibly be considered kosher without a Royal Recommendation, because it tries to bind the government into a spending obligation. Add to that, this particular framework is essentially a top-down imposition on provinces that dares premiers to say no to “free money,” which is a) not free, and b) fraught with complications. Both of those particulars make this bill essentially unconstitutional, and if it’s not, then it’s empty political theatre.

The bill was designed to fail. Singh knew that the Liberals were committed to the process laid out in the Hoskins Report, which they have been pursuing with negotiation with premiers, as well as the establishment of the Canadian Drug Agency, which got funding in the 2019 budget. And the Hoskins Report is quite clear that this could take as long as seven years to negotiate the national formulary as part of this process. It’s not going to happen overnight – but that’s what Singh is trying to claim, that all the federal government has to do is cut cheques to provinces if they pay for all prescription drugs. That’s not how a pharmacare plan works. Singh also claims that the Liberals were voting against the Hoskins Report by killing this bill, which dishonest – yes, the report says a federal statute would need to be drafted, but that is the end-point of negotiations, not the beginning.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1364786672265814021

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1364787372098007049

And this is the thing – because this was designed to fail, it was an attempt to paint the Liberals as betraying their promise to implement universal pharmacare, when they’re already doing the hard work to make it happen. This is solely about breeding cynicism, pretending that there are magic wand solutions, or that you can force things on provinces by sheer force of will. Singh likes to make promises he can’t keep, and by trying to paint the Liberals as betraying their promises – which they are keeping, but which take time to implement because federalism is hard – he is just breeding unrealistic expectations and disappointment that will fuel disengagement. There has not been any honest discourse over this bill – and attempts to point out the truth are met with hostile responses, including a bunch of straw man arguments that pointing out that this bill is unconstitutional is Trudeau priming to declare the Canada Health Act unconstitutional, which is batshit crazy logic – and that just poisons the well for everyone. Well done, guys. I had not gauged the level of sheer cynicism that Singh possesses for the political process, but he’s made it abundantly clear.

Continue reading →

Roundup: More alike than unalike

Posted on by

The NDP decided that the bilateral meeting between Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden was the perfect time to take to shitposting about it, in the form of a juvenile mock-up of the agenda items, and making their remarks on them. Because this is where we’re at in this country – our two main opposition parties have decided that the online tactics of shitposting are definitely the way to win the hearts and minds of Canadian voters.

In the NDP’s case, this is not only about trolling Trudeau, but also Biden, because they have made a concerted effort to appeal to the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Bernie Sanders fanbase – consistent with their lifting their policy ideas wholesale, no matter whether or not they have any relevance in the Canadian context. This tends to involve a certain amount of trying to “win the Internet,” whether it’s with Jagmeet Singh adopting TikTok memes, or the culmination of this attempt to co-opt American Democrat cred when Singh and Ocasio-Cortez played Among Us over Twitch as part of a fundraiser. As a more centrist, compromise candidate, Biden is seen as a betrayal of the progressive wing of the Democrats, and you can bet that the Canadian New Democrats trying to appeal to them is going to cash in on that as much as possible.

None of this should be too surprising, however – the NDP have long-since abandoned any real sense of ideology for the sake of being left-flavoured populists, running after flavours of the week and pursuing policies that don’t actually make sense for their own purported principles (like their demand to cut the HST off of home heating, which would only disproportionately reward the wealthy). In this way, they have been more like the Conservatives than unalike for a while now, but with this full-on embrace of shitposting (as opposed to simply the mendacious omission of jurisdictional boundaries in their demands) just drives that point home.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A slacktivist declaration

Posted on by

The Conservatives’ non-binding Supply Day vote went ahead yesterday on declaring that China is conducting a genocide against the Uyghur population, and it passed unanimously – without anyone in Cabinet voting. Well, Marc Garneau was there to performatively declare that he was abstaining – which you can’t actually do, because Commons votes are strictly yay or nay (the Senate has an abstention option), but no one else in Cabinet was there, for what it’s worth.

Immediately, news outlets everywhere started declaring that “Parliament declared a genocide,” which, no, did not happen. It was a non-binding vote in the House of Commons – which is not Parliament – that essentially expressed an opinion. There is nothing official about said declaration, which is important, because an official declaration would have consequences. Essentially, the House of Commons voted to put a black square on their Instagram and call it action against genocide.

And there will be consequences, such as China attempting to impose further sanctions upon Canada in an attempt to try and warn other Western countries from making a similar declaration, because China doesn’t want to lose face. This is precisely why the government has been working with allies to do – ensure that all of their ducks are in a row before they make a formal declaration of genocide, so that they a) have a united front against China’s retaliation, b) that they can uphold the obligations under the Genocide Convention around preventing genocide and punishing those responsible – something that the Americans have opted themselves out of because they refuse to respect the authority of the International Court of Justice, which means that America declaring a genocide is largely a symbolic act, whereas Canada doing the same is not. (And it would be great if media outlets could actually articulate this point rather than ignoring it, because they all have. Every single one of them).

But the opposition parties – and apparently the backbench Liberals as well – are more concerned with making a statement and the kind of preening that comes with “showing leadership” rather than doing the actual hard work of getting our allies on-side so that we have a meaningful declaration and that we aren’t cheapening the term “genocide,” which is literally the worst crime against humanity. But political leadership in this country is decidedly unserious, so this is the kind of clown show we’re getting, complete with a cartoonish understanding of foreign policy. Go us.

Continue reading →