It was Thursday, and neither the prime minister nor his deputy were present, which generally means a less exciting day. Erin O’Toole led off, script on mini-lectern, and poked out inconsistencies in the story around the Global Public Health Information Network, to which Patty Hajdu related early actions by the government and Dr. Theresa Tam, as well as citing that she would say more about the GPHIN soon. O’Toole tried to call out inconsistencies in early pandemic advice, to which Hajdu reminded him that it’s a novel virus that we are still learning about. O’Toole called the decision around GPHIN politically motivated, to which Hajdu said that when she was alerted to the changes, she ordered and external investigation, and she would have more to say about that soon. In French, O’Toole accused the government of losing control of the pandemic, and Hajdu listed federal actions. O’Toole then concern trolled about testing, to which Hajdu listed the rollout of new rapid tests. For the Bloc, Stéphane Bergeron trolled the prime minister about his call with the president of France, to which François-Philippe Champagne pointed out what was wrong about the premise of the question, and reminded him that Canada defends freedom of expression around the world. Bergeron asked when there was going to hold a debate on acceptable limits to freedom of expression, to which Champagne rebutted his assertions. Jagmeet Singh was up next to lead off for the NDP, and in French, he worried about the record profits of web giants, to which Steven Guilbeault reminded him at they are now treating web giants the same as traditional players in the creative market. Singh switched to English to rail about the Westons making profits in the pandemic, for which Sean Fraser said that they were supporting front-line workers, and that they raised taxes on the top one percent, which the NDP voted against.
Category Archives: Political Roundup
Roundup: Heading down the same road to destruction
As the American election results continue to grind along, there are a couple of things that have emerged that we should take to heart – one is that “Trumpism” wasn’t a fluke in 2016, and that it’s a real force that America needs to contend with honestly. The other is that the polarisation in the country has become so acute that adherents to each tribe party are now living in alternate realities, where facts don’t penetrate. This was punctuated by something that Gerald Butts has been saying over the past couple of days, that there are also two “information ecosystems” in the US, that perpetuate these alternate realities, in that each side’s news media is fairly disassociated from one another (and in some cases, facts and reality).
This is the real nub of it: https://t.co/DMMTzrfTwe pic.twitter.com/NPw0HKkHaj
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) November 4, 2020
Why do I think this matters in particular? Because I see elements of this culture war bubbling up in this country, in somewhat inchoate and fledgling forms, but it’s there. We may not have the alternate forms of media in this country, but parties – Conservatives in particular – are building it over social media instead of traditional broadcasting (though they did make an honest effort with SunTV). The complete disregard for facts has well and truly wormed its way into the party’s discourse, and we’re now on their second party leader for whom bald-faced lying is now a daily occurrence, and this gets built into shitposts for those social media channels that they are promulgating, in some cases presenting their own alternate reality versions of situations. The NDP aren’t much better, importing wholesale the rhetoric of a segment of the American democratic party, and their own adherents refuse to believe the facts of situations (such as the existence of federalism in this country), as their leader deliberately misleads or omits facts to present the image of a government that simply doesn’t care to do things rather than the truth of their not having the jurisdiction to do them.
This is a problem that we have been complacent about addressing in this country, because we insist that it’s not as bad as in the US – and sure, we don’t have the same level of tribalism and political duality as they do, but just because we’re not as far down the road as they are doesn’t mean we’re not on the road here. There was an attempt to create that duality here – it wasn’t that long ago that the Liberals were considered to be a spent force, politically, and the Conservatives and NDP spent early Question Periods of the 41st Parliament patting themselves on the back that there was finally a real contrast in parties in the House of Commons (while the whole of the pundit class demanded that the remains of the Liberals merge with the NDP, as though the parties didn’t have fundamental ideological differences). We keep adopting Americanisms in our political systems and structures, and way too many political staffers (and more than a few reporters) spend their days LARPing episodes of the West Wing. Too many Canadians are keen to import all of the same problems that are turning America into a failed state because we think they’re more “exciting,” or somehow enviable in other ways. We should be repudiating this and shedding these American affectations from our politics, but nobody wants to do that, and this is going to cause an increasing number of problems the longer we go down this road. America is a giant flashing warning sign to turn back – can we do so in time?
Roundup: Some key differences
There wasn’t a winner in the US election declared before this blog post was put to bed, but I will make a couple of points about why elections in this country are not such a gong show. Number one is that we have an arm’s length federal elections agency that administers elections, whereas the Americans let each state run their federal elections, resulting in an inconsistency in rules and even methods – some states using only electronic voting machines, others using paper ballots, and there being a confusion around mail-in ballots, not to mention that the fact that we have more than enough polling stations so that lines are rarely more than ten minutes, if that. In Canada, we have arm’s length quasi-judicial processes to draw riding boundaries that have virtually eliminated gerrymandering, whereas political considerations have created such skewed, gerrymandered districts in the US, and their Supreme Court refuses to do anything about them. Attempts to disqualify voters in Canada have been struck down or punished electorally, whereas it’s a voter suppression tactic in the US with hugely racial overtones. And more than anything, we have a monarch and a governor general who act as a constitutional fire extinguisher if everything goes awry in the results. We’re pretty damn lucky to live here, in a functional democracy.
#Election2020 pic.twitter.com/aDiyTVw79w
— Oliver Cooper (@OliverCooper) November 3, 2020
Roundup: Preparations at the border?
Everyone is going to spend the day obsessing about the US election, and while I just can’t, I figured that I should at least make the point that I’m hoping that in this government’s preparations, there includes some for the border because if there is a Trump victory (or violence that breaks out if the result is unclear or a narrow enough Trump defeat), I would expect a rush of would-be asylum seekers heading for our borders, particularly vulnerable minorities who are already in precarious situations in the US and are likely to become targets of violence if things degenerate. That means that this government is going to need to have proper quarantine protocols in place, as well as hopefully a plan that involves more than simply turning them back as they have been since the border closure in March, because a deteriorating situation in the US would mean that sending them back would almost certainly be unconstitutional – this as the government is already fighting with a Federal Court decision that says that the US is not a safe third country and that the agreement to turn these claimants back violates the constitution. This may all be for naught, but the US is on the verge of becoming a failed state, and we need to be ready for how that will affect us, in the short and long term.
Roundup: Mischief with a reasonable goal
It may be a bit of mischief, but it’s certainly well-deserved, as the Alberta NDP are moving a motion in the legislature to have the government condemn separatism. The ostensible goal for the denunciation is because talk of separatism is bad for the economy – it drives away investment, no matter how low corporate taxes are (and you only have to look to Canadian history to see how the two referendums in Quebec saw the country’s financial capital move from Montreal to Toronto, even though Montreal was a more tax-advantageous environment). If Alberta hopes to diversify their economy, they need to ensure that they aren’t driving away investment in a similar way.
It’s also about jamming Jason Kenney to an extent, because while he has stated in the past that he’s not a separatist, he’s also winked and nodded to them in a fairly constant fashion, and used his own rhetoric to fuel their arguments, up to and including his ridiculous “Fair Deal Panel.” But with the rise of separatist parties, both federally and provincially in the prairie provinces, there are concerns about them gaining political traction – particularly as the so-called “Buffalo Party” gained a fair number of votes in last week’s Saskatchewan election, and it may have some people in Alberta worried. Granted, the Conservatives in the province should likely be more worried because they’re likely to peel voters away from the Conservatives, which may allow the NDP to come up the middle provincially, but there should also be no doubt that letting these separatists get any kind of political traction – even a handful of seats – would be sending the wrong signals to markets. Having Kenney denounce them in a way that they can’t spin as winking or nodded to them may be a way to take some of the wind out of their sails – but it could also expose divisions in Kenney’s own caucus (which is partly where the mischief comes in). Nevertheless, even if the movement is headed by a bunch of swivel-eyed loons who have no chance of success, they can cause a lot of damage along the way, and should be taken down at every chance.
Roundup: O’Toole’s conversion to the labour movement
Conservative leader Erin O’Toole addressed the Canadian Club of Toronto yesterday, and the more I read of his speech, the more curious I become of just what it is he’s trying to say. For example, he spent part of the speech bemoaning the collapse of private sector union membership in the country, talking about how it was part of the balance between what was good for the economy and what was good for workers. That’s surprising considering that when he was in Cabinet, O’Toole supported anti-union legislation that the party put forward (under the guise of private members’ bills, naturally), and the party was having a field day before the last election trying to accuse the government of stacking their media bailout fund by allowing Unifor – the country’s largest private sector union – to have a seat at the table (given that Unifor also represents a lot of journalists). I’m sure the labour movement in this country has whiplash from this sudden reversal – though I would note that in his mouthing about the importance of unions the past couple of months, he is careful to distinguish between private and public sector unions, the latter he still continues to be evil. (And before anyone says those two anti-union bills were “about transparency,” you all know that’s a lie and can stop insulting our intelligence).
O’Toole argued that we have somehow completely de-industrialized as a country, which is news to the rest of us, and then went on an extended tirade about China, because he’s trying to frame this as a national security argument and not just populism hollowing out his party’s political ideology. He claimed that the Liberals were using the pandemic to launch a “risky experiment with our economy” around green energy, which is…not really true, and ignores how markets have moved to green tech with better economic outcomes for doing so. He also continued his protectionist bent, and made a few deeply curious statements like “Free markets alone won’t solve all our problems” (erm, his party is the one that rails about the evils of socialism, no? Is he proposing nationalizing industries? Or does he simply mean global trade when he talks about “free markets”?), and adding that that GDP growth is not the “be-all and end-all of politics” – which is odd because nobody has actually suggested that it is (but his predecessor was fond of attacking straw men as well). I’m also a bit puzzled by what exactly he’s getting at when he says “We need policies to shore up the core units of society — family, neighbourhood, nation. We need policies that build solidarity, not just wealth.” Some of this is thinly-veiled Thatcherism, but where it’s building in terms of his populist rhetoric I am a bit troubled.
And make no mistake – this is full-throated populism, particularly when he starts railing about political and business elites selling out the country (with mention about political correctness in there) – which he’s oddly making to an audience that is thought of as Canada’s business elites. But it’s also deeply hypocritical because of just who O’Toole is. He is the son of a GM executive (which he tries to obscure when he says his father “worked for GM” as though he were blue-collar), who went on to be an MPP. In fact, earlier in the week, O’Toole was tweeting about how he built himself up to leadership, conveniently omitting the huge leg-up he was given along the way. It’s like the “self-made” tech millionaires who got their start with loans from their millionaire fathers, and getting those fathers to buy their tech at their companies. More to the point, after O’Toole left the military, he was a Bay Street corporate lawyer, which is not exactly the image of the middle-class guy he’s painting himself as. When he rails about “elites,” he needs to look in the mirror because that’s exactly what he is. Of course, we’ve seen this story so many times in populist politics, where rich white guys turn themselves into the heroes for the “oppressed underclass” (of mostly straight white guys) who somehow believe that said rich white guy is a “man of the people.” And no doubt O’Toole is hoping he’ll dine out on this as well, but make no mistake, this speech was hypocrisy of the highest order.
Roundup: A gesture toward pettiness
There are a lot of symbolic gestures that politicians do that I cannot abide, but one of the most obnoxious and corrosive ones is the insistence on cutting their own pay when times get tough – and lo and behold, we have an Ontario senator who is moving a motion to do just that, asking both MPs and Senators to forgo statutory pay increases (to meet inflation) as a gesture. This is not really a symbolic or empty gesture – it is a signal to populist impulses that serve to devalue public life, and treats what they do as somehow being less valuable than people in the private sector – which is ironic considering how much less MPs and senators make than professionals and executives in the private sector.
Without entirely relitigating what I wrote on this before, I wanted to point out some of the fairly offensive characterizations of such gestures that were in the National Post piece, which describes the gesture as “important” for private sector and low-income workers, and the usual suspects at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation trying to insist that politicians aren’t making sacrifices when people are losing their businesses.
The problem with this line of logic is that these gestures don’t do anything. If anything, they come with a dose of schadenfreude, that if I’m suffering then watching politicians or civil servants being forced to suffer as well is satisfying, even if it ultimately makes things worse overall. What good does it serve to make everyone miserable or worse off? How does that make the situation better for everyone? It doesn’t. There are enough trade-offs that go with public life or public service that often make it a fairly unappealing to many people, so why pile on? Pettiness won’t solve the economic crisis or make people’s businesses reopen, and it certainly won’t make COVID go away, so why indulge it?
Roundup: The slow part of the economic recovery
It was a big day for economic news – the Bank of Canada stating that they expect interest rates to continue to be at near-zero until 2023, as the economic recovery moves into a much slower phase as we wait for a vaccine for the pandemic. They also stated their plan to change how they buy bonds going forward. A few hours later, Chrystia Freeland gave a major speech wherein she stated that the government was going to keep spending until the pandemic was over, because they can at a time of such historically low interest rates, and because it provides businesses and households a necessary bridge through the economic turmoil until the pandemic is over. And for those of you in the back, it’s not 1995, and even with all of this added spending – which is time-limited – is not going to create a debt bomb. It’s just not.
https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1321497252783775744
https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1321498671389777920
https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1321498708551241729
https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1321507072773685250
https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1321499588683948032
https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1321496597000323080
https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1321500584046784512
She also noted that debt payments as a share of #cdnecon is the smallest in a century. This is also true! One has to go back to the WW1 period to see lower shares. Here's all the data since 1867. (Note: 2020 is a forecast.) pic.twitter.com/YjTiYDRrBM
— Trevor Tombe (@trevortombe) October 28, 2020
Of course, conservative pundits set about clutching their pearls that the government is taking on the debt instead of households, apparently not comprehending that they have more tools and levers at their disposal than households – but these are the same chuckleheads who equate government debt with credit card debt. The Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report noted that much of the recovery to date has been on the back of consumer spending, which is one more reason why allowing households to go insolvent and enforcing consumer austerity would only harm the economic recovery – we saw this in the Great Depression, where consumers who had money but didn’t spend it because of the social stigma prolonged the depression for years. And yet, we keep hearing “taxpayer dollars!” and “leaving debt to our children,” as though leaving them a weak economy is any better – particularly if that debt is affordable and is treated as an investment with programmes like childcare, that creates more economic returns. This should not be a difficult concept to grasp – and yet…
Meanwhile, here is Kevin Carmichael’s parsing of the Bank of Canada’s rate decision and Monetary Policy Report, while Heather Scoffield gives her own thoughts on Freeland’s speech.
Roundup: Flirting with unconstitutional legislation
The bill to mandate sexual assault training for judges was a bad idea from the start, when Rona Ambrose first tabled it years ago, and the current iteration that this government is putting forward is little better, especially now that MPs have decided they need to start amending it to add other things. While Ambrose’s initial bill was blatantly unconstitutional (that the Commons passed on a whim because of the political syllogism: Something needs to be done, this is something, therefore we must do this), and needed to be gutted in the Senate to make it acceptable, the current version was more or less acceptable (barring one or two possible issues), but it seems that MPs want to make it blatantly unconstitutional again.
I see the Greens are flirting with making the training bill for judges unconstitutional again… #cdnlaw #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/DGBfd64Qf6
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) October 27, 2020
Former Supreme Court of Canada executive legal officer Gib van Ert warned back in February that this bill would be an invitation to demand that judges take training in other areas than just sexual assault, and lo and behold, we are there, with demands for the “social context of systemic racism.”
https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1321246603781570560
van Ert makes the point that if judges need to be seen as independent, then bills like this, where politicians appear to be giving them marching orders, is a bad look and will undermine the justice system. But since when to populist impulses consider the consequences of their actions? They don’t.
QP: Reaching on a false premise
The prime minister was in attendance today, though his deputy wasn’t. Alas. Erin O’Toole led off, script on his mini-lectern, and he noted the two American CEOs who crossed the border without quarantines, and that if the public safety minister didn’t have the power to approve them, it must have been the PMO — a blatant reach based on a false premise. Justin Trudeau reminded him that these were decisions made by CBSA officers at the border in error — then congratulated the victors of last night’s by-elections. O’Toole then asked about the public inquiry into the Nova Scotia mass shooting, and Trudeau gave a somewhat platitudinous response about moving ahead with the inquiry at the behest of the families. O’Toole wondered just who was in charge of the RCMP if there were differing opinions in Cabinet about calls for her to resign, and Trudeau read a script about acknowledging systemic racism in the Force. O’Toole switched to French to lament rapid tests and the early numbers that came from China, and Trudeau explained everything they did to help families, which was what mattered. O’Toole then worried that the prime minister was blaming provinces for inaction and demanded they get to work, to which Trudeau reminded him there are areas of provincial jurisdiction and that he working with provinces to ensure that all Canadians were taken care of. Yves-François Blanchet was up next and raised blackface and the Indian Act as racist, while trying to defend that University of Ottawa professor. Trudeau reminded him that they were working with the First Nations to get past the Indian Act, but it can’t be done by decree. Blanchet went on a meandering path about what was nation-to-nation relations, to which Trudeau reminded him that there is a diversity of opinion among First Nations, which is why they were talking at the nation’s pace. Jagmeet Singh was up next that for the NDP, and in French, he demanded universal pharmacare, to which Trudeau recited his practiced lines about how nobody should be forced to choose between food and medicine, and that they were working with the provinces. Singh then raised that the federal government as a landlord raised the rent on a daycare facility forcing it to close, to which Trudeau said they would be looking into what happened.