Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Nail-biter by-elections

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The Liberals won the two Toronto-area by-elections last night, but with far less comfortable margins than before. While Marci Ien won Toronto Centre, Green Party leader Annamie Paul came in a not-too-distant second place, which was a surprise showing for her considering she was a far-distant fourth in the previous election. In York Centre, Liberal Ya’ara Saks pulled ahead at the very end, but it was a constant dance with the Conservatives most of the evening, and very close (and close enough there may yet be a recount). While it’s not good to read too much into by-elections, one supposes that this should be a bit of a warning to Justin Trudeau about going to a snap election, given how close it was. There should also be a warning for Trudeau in here about engaging his own party membership – one suspects that there are a lot of angry Liberals who are incredibly unhappy about the way that Trudeau short-circuited the nomination process and simply appointed candidates in both ridings, cutting out the grassroots membership to the detriment of democracy as a whole. Erin O’Toole will crow that he made progress in the GTA with nearly winning York Centre (though the Conservative candidate was almost a non-entity in Toronto Centre), though Maxime Bernier’s entry into the race in that riding ostensibly took enough votes away from O’Toole to lose the race. Hopefully O’Toole won’t take that as a cue to go even more extreme to try to attract those voters.

Fiscal anchor

At a talk for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, prime minister Justin Trudeau said that the government wouldn’t be setting a new fiscal anchor while the pandemic was still ongoing – but that there would soon be a “robust” fiscal update presented. This immediately gave the whole it’s-1995-and-will-always-be-1995 crowd the vapours, but there is credible economic thought that this isn’t the time for a fiscal anchor because it would simply be a signal to cut spending at a time when that spending is building resilience into the economy and is giving us a leg-up on recovery over other countries. Erin O’Toole followed up and handwaved that if his party was in charge, they would have done everything better, offering no evidence to that end.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1320794340747194369

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Roundup: Self-harm by way of platitude

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I try not to make a habit of re-litigating my Twitter disputes in this space, but in this particular case, I find it’s a perfect illustration of how this government’s inability to communicate its way out of a wet paper bag, and why that harms them. To wit: A Global News piece declares that Trudeau won’t commit to ending boil-water advisories on First Nations by 2021 as is the current promise. It uses the recent evacuation at Neskatanga First Nation as an illustration of problems with boil-water advisories. It quotes Trudeau giving a bland talking point about “more work to do,” and way down at the bottom of the story is reference to the fact that in Neskatanga, not only has money been approved and delivered, but the new water treatment facility is nearly completed construction.

So why is this a problem for the government? Because if they had the slightest bit of candour, they could have explained that capital projects like these take time, particularly in the kinds of remote and fly-in communities like these particular First Nations. Twitter is filled with people who are seriously asking why the government hasn’t solved these issues if they’re showering money around, without having the slightest clue about what he actual problems with these boil water advisories are, and accustomed to situations where they can simply throw money at a problem and it will go away. That’s not the case, and not understanding the logistical and capacity issues at play means that we get this ongoing confusion. For example, many of these reserves are only accessible to bring equipment up with ice roads for a couple of months of the year, which slows the ability to make timely solutions. (This is also an issue with housing on many reserves – small windows by which to bring in building supplies, and those windows are getting ever shorter because of climate change). This has been made even worse in the pandemic, because many communities won’t let the people who are building these new facilities into the community in an attempt to keep COVID out (which Trudeau made vague reference to, but folded it into his platitude so it gets lost). In some communities, it’s not a question of the equipment but of maintenance – as soon as they find and train someone local to do the work, they get headhunted and given a better offer, and the community has to start over again, as the equipment once again breaks down. And it would be great if Trudeau or one of his ministers could actually articulate these challenges, but they won’t. Instead, they fall back on their platitudes about “doing better,” and not giving people a clue about what the actual challenges are.

The government also assumes that these reporters will do the work to find out what the challenges are, but they won’t. Pressed for time, and under the constant pressure to produce, most of them will only both-sides the quotes and move on (as happened in this particular case). Most don’t understand the background or the actual challenges, so it doesn’t get reported – only the platitudes in face of the complaints. Actual candour from Trudeau and the Cabinet would fix this – easily! But they won’t do it. It’s maddening, and they’re just shooting themselves in the foot, over, and over, and over again.

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Roundup: Pushing back against the committee order

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The credulous takes on the Conservatives’ health committee motion continue, and now industry is also starting to push back, concerned that commercially sensitive information is going to be released publicly which will affect them and the ability to produce PPE for the country. Of course, Michelle Rempel Garner is dismissing these concerns as “Liberal spin” and offering the assurance that the Commons Law Clerk will redact any sensitive information – except that there are no assurances that he knows what is and is not commercially sensitive information. (And this recent trend of making the Law Clerk redact documents under the howls that anything else amounts to a cover-up is worrying, because it’s once again piling work into independent servants of the House that is beyond the scope of their duties, which will soon become a permanent duty). Other manufacturers are saying it’s not about the information, but about the fact that they’re going to become political footballs for stepping up in the early days of the pandemic – and they’re right. Given how many falsehoods are being repeated about the Baylis Medical contract – which media continues to both-sides rather than call out – is going to keep happening, and we’ll see these company owners be grilled for any remote Liberal connections, because this is an exercise in the Conservatives fishing to “prove” that this was about the Liberals trying to pad the pockets of their “friends,” because they are determined to try and recreate a new Sponsorship Scandal. And I’m surprised that there aren’t more voices in the media who can’t see this, or the shenanigans in Rempel Garner’s motion.

Meanwhile, Patty Hajdu hasn’t exactly covered herself in glory over the past few days with her dismissive comments about Access to Information requests – comments that got the attention of the Information Commissioner, who sounded the alarm over them. I will note that having once worked as a contractor in Health Canada’s records department (I had to pay the bills while building up my pre-political freelance career), that they had one of the worst-kept systems across the federal government, and I have no reason to believe that things are much different now than they were then. This gets compounded by the fact that ATIPs are being slowed by the fact that government offices are closed because of the pandemic, and people aren’t being able to access the files necessary, which is making the situation worse. It would be great if Hajdu could actually say something other than the dismissive comment (which I’m fairly certain was off the cuff when caught flat-footed by the issue), and her haughty defence of civil servants, but as we all know, this government can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, and she proved it once again, in spades.

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Roundup: Another paralyzing motion

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In the wake of Wednesday’s confidence vote, Erin O’Toole was strutting around saying that his party was going to focus on “issues” instead of “playing politics” – as though the stunt of the so-called “anti-corruption committee” was anything other than playing politics, or the fact that he has to continually lie about non-issues in order to make people angry than focusing on some of the actual issues that this government is getting wrong. And to that end, O’Toole and Michelle Rempel Garner spent yesterday on another Supply Day motion, this time geared toward ordering the health committee to conducting a wide-ranging study on the federal government’s response to the pandemic. Rempel Garner insisted that this was “non-partisan” and free of the hyperbole of the previous motion (and the government is not treating this as a confidence motion), but I still have issues with it (and I do not agree with Kady that this is “100% shenanigan-free).

For starters, many of the items enumerated by the order are the kinds of things that the Conservatives have been engaging in a campaign of revisionist history around, so I absolutely do not consider their intentions to be pure and honourable regarding them, and I suspect there will be many a fishing expedition based on this order, particularly to satisfy the conspiracy theorizing that the Conservatives have engaged in around the role of China and the WHO. The motion also orders a massive production of documents going back to January 2018 in some cases – something that the government has warned would be physically impossible in the time allotted (because we need to remember that nobody is working from their offices, and access to many of their files is limited to non-existent because nobody can get to their offices for “health and safety” reasons). I don’t think that Patty Hajdu was being too hyperbolic herself when she said that this kind of order would grind the department to a halt. As Kady mentioned in her tweet, the protocol of ordering ministers to appear is bad and setting a terrible precedent, and I’m increasingly uncomfortable with orders that the Law Clerk handle redactions on a very limited basis, meaning that there is no room for Cabinet confidences under the order, and the fact that he may not necessarily have the right knowledge to know about national security exemptions, or commercial sensitivity as Anita Anand pointed out yesterday around some of the negotiations for contracts, whether it’s PPE or vaccines, and publicly releasing that information could undermine ongoing negotiations with other suppliers.

The vote on this won’t be until Monday, and it looks like the other opposition parties are lined up in favour of supporting it, as they have with most other Supply Day motions (that weren’t declared confidence). I do worry that these kinds of motions are going to start becoming commonplace, and that very bad precedents are being set for the future.

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Roundup: Confidence maintained, control wrested

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It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the government survived the confidence vote – it was very much an example of Wells’ First Rule – and the NDP and Greens voted to keep parliament going. Of course, the narrative that both the Conservatives and NDP adopted was that the Liberals were pushing for an election – the Conservatives (and Bloc) claiming it was because the Liberals really wanted to cover something up, and the NDP self-righteously declared that they weren’t going to give Trudeau the election that he wanted, but would keep parliament going to get things done for Canadians. Of course, if Trudeau really wanted an election (which he doesn’t), he could just head next door to Rideau Hall on any given morning and ask Julie Payette to dissolve Parliament, but he won’t, because that’s not what today was about.

Part of what has irked me in this is the way in which the Conservatives’ motion was being described, which is innocuously. One writer went so far as to call it a “pedestrian motion,” which it was anything but, and I highly suspect that nobody actually read through it except for the two other procedural wonks in the Gallery. Aside from the inflammatory title of “anti-corruption,” or the proposed alternative whose four-letter abbreviation would have been SCAM (both instances that demonstrate that it’s a group of juvenile shitposters running O’Toole’s office who are treating the Order Paper as a game of who can be the most outrageous), the proposed committee’s terms of reference would have put the government at a structural disadvantage with three fewer members (generally committees in the current parliamentary composition are split, and on committees where the government chairs it, the opposition has the votes to outweigh the government), but it would have given the committee first priority for all parliamentary resources, and compelled production of all documents they wanted and witnesses to appear, no matter who. This essentially means that both ministers and the civil service would be at the committee’s beck and call, and that they would have to drop everything to attend it – which is what Pablo Rodriguez meant by the committee being meant to “paralyze” government. They could go on unlimited fishing expeditions with little to no ability to push back, and given the fact that there aren’t any smoking guns here, it would be constant wild goose chases while Parliament was unable to get anything else accomplished. More than that, it would also have enshrined that the prime minister’s extended family – meaning his mother and brother – would be considered legitimate targets, and have their financial information put into the open for no good reason. And funnily enough, not one story from yesterday mentioned these facts – not the Star, not the National Post, not CBC, nor The Canadian Press. Yet this seems like some pretty vital context for why the government would so strenuously object to this “pedestrian” motion.

There was another consideration, that former Paul Martin-era staffer Scott Reid expounded upon, which is control of the agenda. That’s a pretty important thing in a hung parliament, and under the current circumstances. Trudeau hasn’t been able to make much progress on any file (admittedly, much of this is his own fault for refusing to bring parliament back in a sensible way, followed by his decision to prorogue), but being hamstrung by that motion was going to make things moving forward near impossible. Now that he’s stared down O’Toole, I suspect he has some breathing room again.

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Roundup: Blustering through a climbdown

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It was a day full of bravado, as Erin O’Toole began the day with a bit of a climbdown, saying they would change the name of their proposed special committee from the blatantly inflammatory “anti-corruption committee” to the “special committee on allegations of misuse of public funds by the government during the COVID-19 pandemic,” which is exactly the same thing (and whose first four letters – which committees abbreviate to – would be SCAM, which is yet another one of their childish tactics). Government House leader Pablo Rodriguez was not mollified, quipping “If you write a book about Frankenstein and call it ‘Cinderella,’ it’s still a book about Frankenstein.” O’Toole then tried to say they would amend their motion to insist that a vote for it was not a vote for an election, to which the government said no dice – you’re saying you don’t have confidence in us, so you get to put your money where your mouth is as this is going to be a confidence vote. And then O’Toole tried to say that he doesn’t have confidence in the government, but doesn’t want an election, and sorry, that’s not how this works. You’re accusing them of corruption and misusing public funds – which is a loss of confidence in a system like ours – and then saying you don’t want an election? Yeah, no. You have confidence and the government governs, or you don’t, in which case the government falls and you go to an election.

There is going to be a monumental amount of chest-thumping and testosterone being hosed across the carpet between the aisles in the Commons today as this comes to a head, but frankly, the government is calling O’Toole out for his bluster and tough talk. The Bloc are also blustering about being in favour of an election, leaving the NDP holding the bag. Jagmeet Singh insisted that this was a “farce” and “stupid” to trigger an election in a pandemic over creating a committee – omitting that the title of the committee implied corruption, which should be a de facto loss of confidence, and the fact that said committee’s terms of reference would give it priority over all other government business, including having ministers, the prime minister, and civil servants being expected to drop everything and appear or produce documents at the committee’s beck-and-call, in the middle of a pandemic where everyone is already stretched. (There was also Conservative sniping that Singh didn’t seem to have a problem with John Horgan calling an early election in the middle of a pandemic). I know the NDP want to play the grown-ups in the room (somewhat ironic after Charlie Angus’ histrionics and theatrics on the WE Imbroglio file), but at least represent the situation for what it is.

Meanwhile, Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column explains just how the motion on creating that special committee can be considered a confidence matter. Paul Wells offers some intense snark over the current confidence showdown, and how Trudeau may not be gambling if he’s likely to win another election. Heather Scoffield sees utility in the government’s proposed pandemic spending oversight committee – assuming that it is set up as advertised.

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Roundup: Supply Day showdown

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There is going to be a looming showdown over the duelling motions on special committees, and it’s the Conservatives’ Supply Day today, and their demand for an “anti-corruption committee” is going to be the motion they put forward, barring any last-minute climbdowns, with Erin O’Toole planning a press conference early in the morning to justify the position. The Liberal House leader, Pablo Rodriguez, has been more than hinting that this could very well be considered a confidence motion, as he describes said committee as an attempt to “paralyze” the government. The Bloc are on-side with the Conservatives, but the NDP are undecided, though they had a bit of a climbdown of their own yesterday as Charlie Angus said that they would limit their demands for the records of the speaking fees of the prime minister and his family to just him and his wife – documents which the Liberals provided yesterday (despite the fact that they were already in the public domain). So we’ll see how much of a performance all of the parties put on regarding these competing motions later today.

Meanwhile, WE Charity turned over a bunch of new documents on the speaking fees of the Trudeaus, and well, they don’t all match what had been disclosed before. Here’s Janyce McGregor with more:

There were also a couple of new revelations about the trip with WE that Bill Morneau repaid, for what it’s worth.

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Roundup: A spineless premier in the centre of a dispute

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The suspicious fire of a lobster pound used by the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia is the latest escalation in the fisheries dispute in that province, which prompted a number of calls over the weekend for the federal government to do something. But when you ask for specifics, people tend to come up with a bunch of hand-waving and not a lot of answers. As a reminder, policing is a provincial responsibility, and in Nova Scotia, the RCMP are contracted to the province. This means that it’s the province’s responsibility to ensure that the RCMP are doing their jobs and protecting the Mi’kmaq people from the mobs of angry commercial fishers that are threatening them, and not just standing there and watching it happen like they did during the swarming of a lobster pound last week.

Of course, the premier keeps trying to insist that he can’t solve the problem and demands that the federal government define what a “moderate livelihood” for the Mi’kmaq people is under their treaty rights (which, to be clear, the government has been at the negotiation table about for weeks now), which is a cynical exercise in buck-passing from a premier who make a big song and dance about admitting that the province was mired in systemic racism. Funny that when it’s in his face, he doesn’t want to do anything about it. On Saturday, the province’s attorney general finally requested additional support for the RCMP from the federal government, which Bill Blair immediately granted, days after he publicly stated that there were resources waiting to be deployed to the province upon request, which they had not done up until that point. A bunch of people (including Jagmeet Singh) also started chirping over Twitter that this attack was “terrorism,” except that it’s not – the Criminal Code has a very specific definition, and a mob is not it. One of the Indigenous chiefs at the centre of the dispute also mused over social media that the military should be called in, but again, this can’t be done without the request of the provincial government, and I cannot stress this enough, but you do not want the military to conduct law enforcement. It’s a VERY, VERY BAD THING.

Meanwhile, both the fisheries minister and the NDP are now calling for an emergency debate in Parliament over this, which seems to me to be the most useless thing imaginable, but what can you do? Erin O’Toole is also trying to pin the blame on the federal government, insisting that they should have had the negotiations over by now (how? By imposing a solution?) and blaming the federal government for not properly resourcing the RCMP in the province (who are under provincial contract and jurisdiction), but then again, truth hasn’t exactly been his strong suit of late. But this shouldn’t be an issue about the treaty – the government has signalled that they will protect those rights, and are just figuring out the details. Protection of the Mi’kmaq fishers and their property should be a police matter, which is provincial jurisdiction, but so long as the premier is too afraid of the white voters, I don’t see him exactly taking a strong stand on this issue anytime soon, and while all eyes turn back to Justin Trudeau to do something, anything, he doesn’t exactly have the levers at his disposal.

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Roundup: Special committee games

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The competing offers for special committees got even more crowded yesterday as the Liberals suggested their own possible special committee to examine pandemic spending, in a bid to jam both the Conservatives and NDP as they make their own offers. The Conservatives, you may recall, are employing a stunt to call for a special “anti-corruption committee,” as though the penny-ante bullshit that happens here were actual corruption that happens in other countries, and called explicitly for the purpose of decrying any lack of support for this committee idea as being in support of corruption. The NDP have their own proposal for a pandemic spending committee, but it was intended as a kind of super-committee to draw in not only the WE Imbroglio, but to revisit other non-scandals such as the Rob Silver affair (which the Ethics Commissioner declined to investigate), or the fact that one of the many pandemic procurement contracts went to a company whose owner is a former Liberal MP (whose departure was a bit huffy and drawn out at the time, one may recall).

The Liberal plan is to offer a “serious committee” to do “serious work,” which is a political gambit in and of itself – citing that if the other parties don’t agree to this particular committee (whose terms of reference one expects will be fairly narrowly circumscribed), then it proves that they are simply motivated by partisan gamesmanship rather than helping Canadians. And they’re not wrong – that’s exactly what both the Conservatives and NDP are looking for, at a point where they can only expect diminishing returns the longer that they drag on the WE Imbroglio (though, caveat, they do have a legitimate point in the Finance committee about producing the unredacted documents because that was the committee order that the government didn’t obey, and risks finding themselves in contempt of parliament over; the Ethics Committee demands are going outside of that committee’s mandate).

To add to the possible drama, the Liberals are also contemplating making the Conservatives’ upcoming Supply Day motion on their committee demand a confidence vote, which will wind up forcing the hands of one of the opposition parties into voting against it because nobody wants an election (and that could mean a number of Conservative MPs suddenly having “connectivity issues” and being unable to vote on the motion to ensure its demise). Of course, there is always the possibility of an accident – that seat counts weren’t done properly and the government could defeat itself, though that’s highly unlikely in the current circumstances. Nevertheless, this game-playing is where we’re at, seven months into the pandemic.

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Roundup: Poilievre attacks the central bank

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I am generally tolerant of MPs taking on ministerial or critic portfolios without first requiring a background knowledge in the subject matter, because for ministers, what matters is your ability to manage the department and act on advice that you’re given (as well as being accountable for those actions), while critics are playing an accountability role, and don’t exactly need subject matter expertise in order to do that. This having been said, sometimes ignorance is damaging, and we saw a very real example of that yesterday, where the Conservative finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, started taking shots at the Bank of Canada, saying that their quantitative easing programme is a “pyramid scheme” that is enabling the Liberals’ deficit spending (because we’re in a global pandemic!), and in doing so, is threatening the independence of the central bank. Poilievre also raised the spectre of runaway inflation if the Bank keeps printing money, err, except that we are currently facing deflationary pressure – not inflationary.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316702304867946497

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316703965585833984

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316854251826683904

There are plenty of economists who can explain these concepts to Poilievre, except we know that he’s not interested. He was given the portfolio in order to be a shit-disturber, to knock Bill Morneau off his game (and Morneau was fairly easily rattled by this kind of partisan buffoonery), and presumably kept in the role because Erin O’Toole thought he was doing a good job of it. Mind you, Chrystia Freeland is not Bill Morneau, and she’s not affected by Poilievre’s antics, and frequently puts him in his place in QP. But the fact that this is the state of the discourse on the economic recovery is both disappointing and dispiriting. We should be having reasonably conversations about what is happening with the economic recovery, not this kind of performative baboon jeering and hooting that we’re getting from a party that claims to be the better economic managers.

Good reads:

  • The Chinese ambassador has implicitly threatened Canadians in Hong Kong if Canada grants asylum to Hong Kong protesters. So that’s going well.
  • The new commercial rent subsidy will be retroactive to October 1st, but will require legislation to pass before those funds can roll out.
  • Indigenous Services minister Marc Miller says the raid on the Nova Scotia lobster pound on Tuesday was an attack on all Mi’kmaw people.
  • The Mi’kmaq chief involved in the fishery dispute says that the RCMP inaction on the scene as their property was destroyed in the raid is systemic racism in action.
  • The federal government is investing $20 million in helping bring small modular reactors to market as part of the goal of reaching net zero emissions.
  • The RCMP’s union is back in talks around salary increases, after they were delayed for the pandemic.
  • The government’s COVID Alert app has a bit of a glitch on Apple phones running older iOS, where it’s telling them they have potential conflicts when the app doesn’t.
  • The Bank of Canada is preparing to have a digital currency at the ready in the event it’s needed should Facebook’s planned Libra get blocked by regulators.
  • Pharmaceutical companies are threatening not to launch new medicines in Canada if new regulations come to force that would lower some prices.
  • Liberals on the finance and ethics committees are continuing their filibusters to avoid resuming the investigations into the WE Imbroglio.
  • Economists Andrew Leach and Blake Shaffer consider Alberta’s shift away from coal-fired electricity to be a success story for tools like carbon pricing.
  • Susan Delacourt recounts a political scientist’s attempts to interview women MPs about their experiences, and how that translates into changing the political culture.

Odds and ends:

Colin Horgan gives a wake-up call that the end of 2020 won’t bring relief, but will probably make things worse because we’ve exposed the problems in society.

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