Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Getting to COVID-zero

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The pandemic continues to grow exponentially, and people are wringing their hands about what to do, the notion of getting to COVID-zero is circulating again, after certain jurisdictions – Australia, New Zealand, Slovakia – managed it. So here’s Dr. Isaac Bogoch to explain it.

We can barely get premiers to institute some reasonably tough measures as it is, which is going to make anything required to actually crush the virus almost impossible – especially if we’re relying on their political calculus that closing businesses is worse for them than the hundreds or thousands of deaths that will happen otherwise.

For a bit of a reality check on the feasibility of this, Chris Selley explains why some countries’ systems for locking down COVID wouldn’t work in Canada, either because they were draconian or we are too far behind the curve to make it happen.

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Roundup: Some real repercussions of the post-Trump era

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There was a Canadian Press piece over the weekend that took a cursory look at how the end of the Trump era may help Canadian conservatives, given that he can’t really be a bogeyman to beat them over the head with. The problem, however, is that this was just a cursory look, and didn’t get into any of the more profound cultural changes within politics that have come out of the Trump era, which the Conservatives in this country have taken full advantage of.

Some of this is the culture war stuff that the Conservatives have been very much keen to dive right in with, and you can see Erin O’Toole very much embracing that as he tweets about “cancel culture” (when it’s very much not about cancel culture), or his refusal to give a proper reckoning to historical injustices rather than complaining that this is about “erasing history” – mostly because it’s historical conservative figures who are the targets of such actions. Some of this has to do with ways in which he is trying to target working-class votes in a way that is essentially twisting himself into pretzels in order to reconcile with is past record and that of his party – populism doesn’t encourage ideological consistency after all.

More than anything, however, the piece doesn’t grapple with some of the broader legacy, which is that it made it permissible to lie constantly in politics – especially because they have learned that the media will only both-sides everything and not call them out on it. And more to the fact, they have learned that they can attack the media with impunity, and will face no rebuke or suffer no damage from doing so. They have learned that they can coarsen politics and crank up divisive rhetoric and that it will get a rise out of people more than civil dialogue and discourse will, and more than anything, they have learned that they can largely get away with it because the mainstream dialogue has shifted to make it acceptable. This is the real legacy of the Trump era that will be harder to dissipate once Trump is out of the picture, because the underlying sentiments remain, and here in Canada, while they may not be as pronounced as they are in the States, they are nevertheless still there, and they are festering because we broadly ignore them by assuring ourselves that we’re nothing like the Americans so we have nothing to worry about. But we should worry that the state of our discourse has moved, and we need to call it out for what it is, which few people seem to be willing to do.

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Roundup: A warning of finite federal resources

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Apparently spooked by the new modelling numbers showing daily infection counts in the range of 6,500 by mid-December, and the fact that he got caught out ignoring public health advice in favour of uncontrolled spread, Doug Ford announced that they were re-jigging their advisory system to a much more reasonable number to trigger “code red” states. You’d think this was good news, but “code red” still means you can eat out at restaurants and go to bars, and aren’t really in any kind of serious lockdown state, so it looks like a lot of show, and more excuses to not inconvenience business owners while case counts grow exponentially and hospitalisations and deaths mount.

Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau is sounding a bit more impatient with premiers, reminding them that their resources aren’t infinite and that there is still a chance to save Christmas if we all act now (but probably not). And while certain voices sounded incredulous that a government that has shovelled money out the door at an unprecedented rate doesn’t have infinite resources, we’re not talking about money – we’re talking about personnel from the Red Cross and Canadian Forces if absolutely necessary to step into hospitals and long-term care facilities, and one imagines it also means physical resources like PPE. You can’t simply buy capacity or trained staff – it doesn’t come off the shelf, and people should realise this. And to that end, Trudeau also warned that if they reach the threshold beyond which they have capacity, then difficult choices are going to need to be made about the allocation of those resources.

And if the calls for the federal government to invoke the Emergencies Act wasn’t bad enough (it’s not going to happen), we’re not getting calls for Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health to resign because Ford won’t take advice and he won’t visibly push back against Ford’s blundering – even though his options as an advisor would be limited, and he may not feel he’s at the ethical line of requiring a public resignation just yet. And even further down that path was a piece in Maclean’s (which I’m not linking to) that called on these provincial health officers to assert authority and start making orders, which is a dangerous path to tread down. Why? Because this isn’t a technocracy. In a democracy, advisors advise, and elected politicians decide. Dr. Howard Njoo, the deputy federal chief public health officer, made this exact point yesterday – that they give their best advice to their political masters, and it’s up to those masters to make the final decision, which Ford, Kenney and company are certainly doing. We don’t want politicians to hide behind their advisors by blurring that line of accountability, and we don’t want unaccountable advisors to be making the decisions exactly because we can’t hold them to account at the ballot box. We also need to remember that “listen to the science” isn’t actually public policy. Science can provide guidance, but policy is about implementation, which the science cannot always dictate. Nevertheless, we need to stop blaming Ford’s public health officer and blame Ford himself (along with Kenney, Moe, Pallister, Legault, et al.) They are where the responsibility and the accountability lies, and where the pressure for them to actually take this pandemic seriously needs to be centred.

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1327380638106849283

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Roundup: A promise to fight back against federal action

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Another day, more record-breaking COVID cases in this country. In Ontario, new modelling suggests that if we don’t get this under control that we’ll be seeing 6,500 new cases a day by mid-December, which should terrify everyone. And Doug Ford? Well, he called the reports that he ignored public health advice “inaccurate,” and “one doctor’s opinion,” and insisted that he’s trying to find a “balance.” Because the needs of businesses outweigh human lives.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1326965295941099521

In Alberta, where the pandemic is starting to overwhelm a couple of hospitals, Jason Kenney was back in isolation for the second time after another close-call with a positive COVID case (which he tested negative for) – because he’s totally taking it seriously. Kenney decided to “toughen” measures, which means that he…reduced hours in restaurants and bars, stopped indoor sports, and limited weddings and funerals. Because he still refuses to do a proper lockdown to get infections under control, and he refuses to do anything to inconvenience businesses. Hell, he’s still telling people to go out to restaurants and bars – just not as late, which also has the added effect of ensuring more people will be in these establishments during the compressed hours, which would seem to increase the chances of infection rather than decrease it. After all, Alberta’s public health insisted that people should socialize in a “structured setting” (i.e. restaurant or bar) instead of at home, so they’re really taking it seriously.

As for those who still insist on calling on the federal government to enact emergency legislation, Ford stated yesterday in no uncertain terms that he would not stand for it, and warned that other premiers would also fight back because they want to guard their own jurisdiction. So yeah, unilateral federal action would not fly (not that it really could under the terms of the Emergencies Act anyway), and we’d simply wind up in court over it. In other words, stop waiting for Trudeau to act (because he can’t) and pressure the premiers instead to quit worrying about businesses – especially since they have the power to help them out – and worry instead about the hundreds of deaths that are happening every week.

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Roundup: Ford ignored advice in favour of uncontrolled spread

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Surprising nobody, we find that Doug Ford rejected advice from his public health officials in releasing his colour-coded guidelines, because it’s all about business over human lives. And while there have been calls for a while to try and determine just who is giving him advice, this reinforces the point that these remain political decisions, and that it is Ford and his Cabinet who are the ones to be held to account for what has been happening with infections in Ontario. The fact that Ford put his “red line” figure so far above public health advice, to a level where you are literally dealing with uncontrolled spread rather than trying to stamp it out early, should tell everyone that he is not taking this seriously.

https://twitter.com/jyangstar/status/1326702217051729920

https://twitter.com/jyangstar/status/1326703779232755712

We’ve also been finding out things like Ford refusing to spend COVID funds on things like schools and long-term care homes, and have instead been sitting on the funds to pad the books – and we have the province’s Financial Accountability Officer confirming this. This should be no surprise. I mean, look at the autism programme, where Ford promised more money and then spent none of it, and the wait lists continued to grow and parents and families continue to suffer, and the long-term consequences of not getting early intervention therapies are going to balloon for years. But Ford doesn’t care. He cares about looking like he’s fiscally prudent because every gods damned pundit in this country still thinks it’s 1995 and will always be 1995 – and Ford desperately seeks their validation.

https://twitter.com/TheHerleBurly/status/1326619298060754951

And this need for validation has been a big part of why we’re at the state we’re in here in Ontario. Because Ford didn’t go full-Trump early in the pandemic, or throw tantrums at Justin Trudeau, everyone suddenly started giving him praise. He sounded avuncular, and suddenly everyone assumed he was doing a good job when he wasn’t doing anything but sitting on the COVID money and delaying any meaningful action about, say, getting schools back up and running, or increasing lab capacity for testing, or the contact tracing abilities of public health units across the province. None of it. But people still showered him with praise for how well he was behaving, and for striking up an unlikely friendship with Chrystia Freeland. And yet here we are, where he and his Cabinet have repeatedly lied about what is going on with the pandemic, about their response, and even the direction of the case numbers. Hopefully this piece in the Star that clearly demonstrates that Ford rejected the advice in favour of waiting for uncontrolled spread (because gods forbid he close down businesses) will start to open people’s eyes, but my optimism for that is waning because of all of the other scandals and distractions that his government has created only serve to scatter the attention necessary to force his hand.

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Roundup: Exasperation over provincial inaction

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You can almost see the exasperation creeping into prime minister Justin Trudeau’s weekday press conferences, as yesterday, he implored the premiers to do more to fight the pandemic and to stop trying to keep businesses open, because they will still fail without healthy populations. He also obliquely asked mayors and public health officials to use what powers they can if their premiers won’t. Because this is a matter of provincial jurisdiction, and the federal government has almost no levers. And the numbers are getting very serious in this country.

In Ontario and Manitoba, there are record high numbers, and Manitoba is going into a province-wide lockdown, while in Ontario, Toronto’s chief medical officer of health is imposing more restrictions on that region after Peel Region did the same earlier in the week. In Alberta, doctors are imploring the government to institute a “circuit-breaker” lockdown for at least a couple of weeks so that they can get infections under control before they completely overwhelm the healthcare system, but Jason Kenney says no, because he’s concerned about “civil liberties.” And you can tell just how seriously Alberta is taking this – their chief medical officer of health retweeted advice telling people to only socialise in “structured settings,” which means bars and restaurants. There are no words.

As for Doug Ford, he made his own swipe at Trudeau’s remarks, insisting that if Trudeau is talking about him, that they need more financial support for businesses, which is ridiculous at this point. The federal government has been shovelling money out the door – not always in the most effective manners, mind you, because they have very limited levers, whereas provinces have more direct levers that they refuse to use. And Ford here, playing the victim, is just engaged in buck-passing so that he doesn’t have to look like the bad guy when things go into lockdown, and they’re going to have to sooner than later. He keeps saying he’ll act when things get “out of control,” but by then it’ll be too late. Positive tests are a lagging indicator. Hospitalisations are a lagging indicator. Deaths are a lagging indicator. If you’re waiting for things to get “out of control” rather than stopping the exponential growth when it presents itself, that’s negligence. But then again, Ford’s apologists seem to think that there is greater political cost for him to closing businesses than there is in preventing hundreds, if not thousands of deaths, and if that’s the calculation, I can’t even with these people.

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Roundup: A question of political accountability

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An issue that I am getting tired of writing commenting on over, and over again, is this story about the supposed political vetting of judicial candidates. The reporters on the story fail to mention the crucial constitutional details underpinning the story, Erin O’Toole lies about what the justice minister has said in response to the constant allegations, and now the president of the Canadian Bar Association is writing to the government to express his concerns that this whole thing threatens public faith in the judiciary. And here I go again.

For the eleventieth time, let me reiterate that the prime minister is politically accountable for judicial appointments under our system of Responsible Government. That means that if another bad one gets through the selection process, he has to wear it politically if things come to light – kind of like what happened around now-former Justice Robin Camp (who you may remembered wondered why a sexual assault complainant didn’t keep her knees together). This is one of the reasons why once the candidates have made it through the initial non-partisan vetting process, that they are subjected to a political screen – to ensure that nobody is aware of any particular skeletons in these potential judges’ pasts that could come around to bite them in the future. Some of the confusion here is because one of the ways in which the government has been doing this vetting has been through their voter identification database, which has been interpreted as seeing if they are donors or had lawn signs – which is a false reading of what these databases do, which is to build voter profiles, and they consume vast amounts of data to do so (which is also why there are concerns that they are not subject to federal privacy laws). But this is being deliberately framed as looking for partisan manipulation. (This is not to suggest the motives of these reporters is partisan – only that they are looking to embarrass the government, and it wouldn’t matter which party is in charge).

I am more concerned by the fact that someone is leaking to the press, and the French press especially seems to be targeted about revelations concerning a particular staffer, which suggests to me some internecine fighting within the Liberal ranks that they are willing to do damage to themselves in order to hurt this staffer in particular. But why worry about motive or the fact that you are being played when you have a potentially embarrassing headline?

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Roundup: Hopes and fears for Biden

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And there we have it – it has been declared that Joe Biden has been declared the winner of the presidential election in the United States, and with that declaration, Canadian leaders of all stripes sent their congratulations over the weekend. While our foreign affairs minister hopes for some more stability and predictability in the new administration, the energy sector in this country is nervous that Biden had pledged to rescind the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline (thought it has been held up in American courts).

But as much as everyone is celebrating and sending out clips from the end of Return of the Jedi over social media (an odd choice considering that the Empire didn’t fall after that battle, but kept on kicking for another year, and its remnants metastasised into the First Order that decimated the New Republic), I feel the urge to be a bit of a wet blanket to point out that some 70 million Americans still voted for Trump and everything that he stands for, including racism and the march toward a fascist state, and he’s still in office for nearly three more months. The American impulse tends to be that politics is to be treated as a spectator sport, where they cast their ballots once every four years and then watch the show in between, rather than actually grappling with the real issues that face their country – particularly given that their Congress is largely unable to as the real likelihood that the Republicans have maintained their hold on the Senate will mean that virtually nothing will get done for the next couple of years. Not to say that civic engagement in Canada is a whole lot better, but at least our Parliament is actually built to move things through rather than for gridlock, as evidenced most recently by the fact that we could get pandemic supports for people and businesses out the door, whereas they are stalled in the US Senate. The lure of Trump and his ethos is not far gone, just because Biden won the White House, and that should remain the cautionary tale rather than people thinking the problem is solved and returning to complacency.

To that end, Susan Delacourt warns about Trumpism and the lure of “ordered populism” in Canada, as it is not a phenomenon contained solely to the United States. Likewise, Aaron Wherry notes that it was not a landslide for Biden, that Trumpism is still around, and that America needs to reckon with itself on this fact. I will note that Chris Selley did try to grapple with what Trumpism is without Trump, but I think that when Delacourt quoted pollster Frank Graves about “ordered populism,” that it may be the more accurate handle once Trump is out of the picture.

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Roundup: Such a serious country

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The country is fixated on the election south of the border, while we’re failing to effectively deal with a global pandemic, but what shiny thing caught everyone’s attention yesterday? The fact that Whole Foods’ uniform policy forbade employees from wearing poppies. The horror! The horror! Politicians from all stripes across the country were outraged – outraged! Doug Ford leapt into action to declare he would pass legislation to make it illegal for businesses to prohibit employees from wearing poppies, which is more than he’s done about dealing with the pandemic in his own gods damned area of jurisdiction, so make of that what you will. Erin O’Toole got worked up and posted a video calling on people to boycott “Woke Foods,” which is not only not clever, but not even close to a reflection of the situation – in fact, Whole Foods came under fire for not allowing their employees to wear masks that said “Black Lives Matter” on them, so that’s hardly being Woke™. (Then again, when you wield a shitpost-shaped hammer, everything is a woke-shaped nail). It was the lead question in QP. Three separate unanimous motions were passed in the House of Commons after Question Period to condemn Whole Foods, to encourage all businesses to let their employees to wear poppies, and to summon the Whole Foods CEO to the Veterans Affairs committee to explain himself. Everyone needed a piece of their outrage pie.

A couple of hours later, the veterans affairs minister, Lawrence MacAulay put out a release saying that he spoke to said CEO and everything was okay – employees would be able to wear poppies after all. Phew! Of course, we got all parties on-side for the most useless and ridiculous of symbolic controversies, because that’s just how serious we are as a country. Well done, everyone.

Meanwhile, there’s still a pandemic where the second wave is spiking in Canada, and none of the premiers seem to want to do anything about it. Doug Ford is set to loosen restrictions on some of the most hardest-hit regions of Ontario, while his promise to hire thousands of more long-term care workers lacks any details, which sounds about right for Ford. Jason Kenney is calling on people to voluntarily stop having house parties, but won’t make any actual restrictions, nor will he sign onto the federal contact tracing app. You’d think that we’d be spending the day raking these premiers over the coals for their unwillingness to do anything (because it’ll hurt small business – when they have the capability of offering supports for them), but no, we can’t even do that either.

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Roundup: Expediting another bill

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If you were to judge by the mainstream political shows in Canada, there wasn’t anything happening here – well, unless you count the budget in Ontario, which got a brief mention, but these are federal politics shows. But hey, it turns out there was something pretty major happening, which was an extended debate on the new pandemic relief bill.

In order to pass it by tomorrow, the parties agreed to skip committee hearings and have a four-hour Committee of the Whole session instead, where Chrystia Freeland got to field questions for the duration, and wouldn’t you know it, Pierre Poilievre was consumed with questions about the state of the deficit and how the government planned to repay it once the pandemic was over. Never mind that the point of this spending is to bridge businesses so that fewer of them fail, which will ensure that when the pandemic ends, we will have a faster and stronger recovery, and that economic growth will help deal with the deficit, but that’s not Poilievre’s schtick.

The Bloc, for their part, haven’t been without their own shenanigans, as they are proposing an amendment to the bill that would ban political parties from using the wage subsidy. (The Conservatives have pledged to repay what they used, for what it’s worth). I doubt it’ll pass, because the Liberals, NDP and Greens have also availed themselves of the subsidy, but the Bloc will make their point – and it likely means additional votes which will probably keep the Commons later than usual tomorrow as a result (as the agreement was to have it passed before end of day). Even though the point of this was for swift passage, neither Chamber is sitting next week because of Remembrance Day, but the Senate’s national finance committee has agreed to meet over the week to do what amounts to pre-study of the bill (even though pre-study is technically before the Commons passes it so that they can pass along amendments before it is agreed to), but that will expedite it somewhat so that it will almost certainly get royal assent before the 19th, and then we’ll see how long it takes to actually implement so businesses can get their rent subsidy in place.

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