Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: O’Toole’s “cancel culture” performance

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Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is making obligatory right-flavoured populist noises, decrying “cancel culture” because Queen’s University’s board voted to consider changing the name of their John A. Macdonald building, as is much the flavour of the day. It’s this juvenile, performative noise, but this is the kind of thing that O’Toole built his leadership around, without any critical thinking whatsoever, so here’s @moebius_strip to point out the sheer absurdity of it all.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1316454539596234753

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1316465701100552192

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1316465838468198401

Meanwhile, there is consternation because the Library and Archives websites haven’t yet updated their biographies of prime ministers like Macdonald and Laurier to adequately convey that they had racist policies, and lo, cookie-cutter journalism gets the same four voices to decry this that appear in every other story. Never mind that Library and Archives says that they are doing consultations in order to do the work of reconciliation, and that there will be updated versions coming – it’s not good enough because this all needed to be done yesterday.

Part of the problem here, however, is that it will take time to get a properly nuanced version of history that both acknowledges their contributions to building the country while also acknowledging the racism of the era – particularly because it’s not simply black-and-white, and anyone who has read Macdonald’s biography will find it hard to simply pigeon-hole him as some kind of cartoon racist, which is certainly what some of the online dialogue would have us do. Yes, he’s a complex and problematic figure, but he was also a moderating influence, and his racist policies were actually the less-bad ones that were being demanded by a lot of voices of the era, which I doubt is going to be acknowledged to the satisfaction of his modern-day critics. It’s not a simple conversation, but that seems to be what is being demanded.

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Roundup: Budget cuts and accountability for advice

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There was an interesting piece in the Globe and Mail yesterday where a couple of former top doctors enumerated some of the problems at the Public Health Agency of Canada that have been festering for years in spite of repeated warnings, which started creeping in with the budget cuts that started in 2011, and which were compounded with the loss of scientific capacity to the point where the president who just resigned had no scientific background at all. Which isn’t to say that you necessarily need someone with a science background in an administrative position like that (as opposed to the Chief Public Health Officer, which is a different kettle of fish entirely), but it points to some of the ways in which the civil service in this country has been losing capacity for a while. Suffice to say, it would appear to point to the fact that the current government wasn’t paying enough attention to what was going on at PHAC, though to be fair, there has been a fair bit on their plates, as they were dealing with medically assisted dying, legalised cannabis, and completely restructuring First Nations and Inuit healthcare delivery, which were all health-related files. The fact that emergency stockpiles weren’t being properly managed has come up repeatedly, but this does start with the cuts made under the Harper government.

Meanwhile in Queen’s Park (where premier Doug Ford made cuts to public health before the pandemic began), there is a piece in the Star that starts to ascertain just who is as the premier’s “health command table,” and ascertains that it’s Ford pulling all the strings and making all of the decisions. Which is as it should be – any “command table” should be merely advisory, because in our system of government, Cabinet makes the decisions, and Cabinet gets to wear them. I worry that trying to expose who is at this table will try to blame them for the advice they’re giving to Ford, rather than Ford making decisions on that advice – particularly when we’ve seen him ignore advice on things like school re-openings. There is a debate to be had about the transparency around the advice being given, so that we can ascertain whether or not Ford is actually following it, which I get, but I also wonder if there isn’t also a need for that table to be a place of frank discussion without it all coming out in the press – like why we have Cabinet confidentiality. And it’s a fair debate to be had, but again, let me reiterate that this is 100 percent on Ford, no matter what advice he may or may not be getting. That’s how Responsible Government works, and we need to quit finding ways to give Ford a pass, or an out on his shite decision-making.

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Roundup: A Thanksgiving stunt

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The Conservatives decided to use Thanksgiving Monday for their latest political stunt, which is to demand the creation of an “anti-corruption committee” that they intend to use to get to the bottom of the WE Imbroglio, and they’re ready to use every tool available to them in order to get there.

What makes this a stunt in particular is the abuse of the term “corruption,” which is overly loaded in the context of what happened in the penny-ante nonsense that surrounds the WE Imbroglio. They’ve already extracted more than the usual amount of blood that something like this would engender, both seeing the finance minister resign, and WE Charity’s Canadian operations themselves have largely folded (though not their international footprint) as a result of the spotlight that this put on them. The notion that there is something to hide because of the refusal to turn over the speaking fees collected by members of the Trudeau family, despite their being private citizens, is bordering on witch-hunt territory. And because the Conservatives are calling this an “anti-corruption committee,” any refusal to play along lets them shriek that those people are allowing corruption to happen.

The problem here is that this is nothing like actual corruption that happens in other countries. Hell, there is some pretty damning corruption that happens in some provinces in this country, where specific industries have bought and controlled provincial governments for decades. And by trying to posit that what happened with WE is capital-c corruption both demeans actual corruption that happens, but it imparts false narratives onto the kinds of wrongdoing that took place here, which was about recusals as opposed to shovelling funds to friends, family members, and business associates. But then again, the Conservative playbook has long-since left spin and torque behind in favour of bald-faced lies, so here is where we are.

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Roundup: The importance of keeping up democratic appearances

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As the most populous areas of the country head back into some form of lockdown (thanks in large part to the premiers being generally useless), prime minister Justin Trudeau said that the two by-elections will continue as planned, as it’s important for Canadians to see that democracy keeps functioning in spite of the pandemic, and said pandemic could be worse later if there are delays, so best to do it now. In case it wasn’t obvious, new Green Party leader, Annamie Paul, has calling for the delays, as though it would make any actual difference for her doomed campaign in Toronto Centre given that it’s a “safe” Liberal seat. (I mean, miracles can happen, but it would be just that – a miracle, if she didn’t come in fourth again as she did during the last election).

There is, however, a bit of irony to this as the Liberals are also looking to make it easier to forgo nominations in ridings that they currently hold, doing away with the actual grassroots democracy of letting members of the riding decide whether or not they want to oust their incumbent or keep them around. In the last election, the party decided that there was a relatively high bar for a nomination to be protected (which is an abomination, don’t get me wrong), but now they’re looking at making that high bar much lower. And given that Trudeau decided to forgo proper nomination processes for the two by-elections, in spite of the fact that there were declared challengers to those who ended up being chosen, it really doesn’t seem like he’s demonstrating that grassroots democracy can still function in spite of the pandemic. Funny that.

All snark aside, I will note that the one positive out of these changes is that the party seems to be taking the search for more diverse candidates a little more seriously, and ensuring that the riding associations in unheld ridings needs to document that they did search for candidates who were women, as well as Black Canadians, people of colour, people with disabilities, or members of the LGBT community. The party did have some success with recruiting more women when they adopted a system of having people search for potential candidates, forwarding the party their name, and having the party follow up with them several times (because there is documented research that shows that women need to be asked multiple times before they will say yes, often because they feel underqualified even when they are more than qualified), so perhaps they will see some more success by extending this to other underrepresented communities. Time will tell, of course – particularly if they start using the pandemic as an excuse not to keep the grassroots process going as it should be.

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Roundup: Absent other measures

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Yesterday, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report that unsurprisingly states that the federal carbon price will need to increase significantly, absent other measures. This is not news. We all know this is the case. We also know that the government is finalising all kinds of other non-price measures as part of their plans to exceed our 2030 Paris targets, including the Clean Fuel Standard, and we have Jonathan Wilkinson on the record stating that they are nearly ready and should be out before the end of the calendar year. Why the PBO and others feel the need to keep repeating that absent other measures the carbon price would need to increase significantly to meet those targets, I’m not sure, because all it does is start a new round of media nonsense about how awful the current prices are (they’re not), and that this is all one big socialist plot, or whatever. And there are more measures on the way, so the question becomes fairly moot.

Speaking of the Clean Fuel Standard, there was a bunch of clutched pearls and swooning on fainting couches over the past couple of weeks when a former MP and current gasoline price analyst indicated that said Standard would be like a super-charged carbon price, and a bunch of Conservatives and their favoured pundits all had a three minutes hate about it. What I find amusing is that these are the same people who a) claim to believe in the free market, b) oppose the carbon price which is a free market mechanism to reducing carbon emissions, and c) are calling for more regulation, which the Clean Fuel Standard is, even though regulations are opaquer as to the cost increases that will result. There is an argument to be had that the government should focus on increasing the carbon price over other regulatory measures (though I would disagree with the ones that say all of said measures should be abandoned in favour of the price), but getting exercised because the very regulatory measures you are looking for cost more money means that you’re not really serious about it in the first place.

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Roundup: Announcing a limited plastic ban

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The big news yesterday was that the federal government finally unveiled the first phase of their single-use plastics ban, focusing on six primary culprits – plastic bags, straws, stir sticks, cutlery, six-pack rings, and polystyrene take-out containers (though I’m not entirely clear if the can’t-recycle-in-this-country black plastic take-out containers would also be included). Most of these items are things for which there are alternatives that are fairly easily obtainable, and will likely become more affordable the more their production ramps up and they get scale in the economy that had thus-far been denied to them.

But there is immediate push-back. The Chemistry Industry Association of Canada bristles that in order to achieve the ban, the government is using the toxic substances mechanisms available to them, and the industry is aghast that they are in the same category as asbestos and lead – err, except that the proliferation of microplastics, particularly from plastics that break down, would quite probably fit that bill very well. The Alberta government is also grousing because they think this will affect investment in their petrochemical industry, even though the ban is quite limited and wouldn’t affect high-quality plastics which are will still see broad use, nor would it really affect their plans to turn Alberta into a hub of plastics recycling (which is important because there is very little plastics recycling in North America as we had relied on off-shoring the work to places like China, which shut their borders to it). The province’s energy minister also found it “ironic” that this announcement was made a day after Jason Kenney made his own announcement on plastics and recycling being part of Alberta’s “diversification” efforts, even though a) it’s not actually ironic, and b) this has been something the federal government has been talking about for over a year, did the necessary consultation process required under the Toxic Substances Act, and as a minister, she knows that these kinds of announcements aren’t dreamed up overnight but take some fair amount of planning and coordination. But Alberta is going to Alberta, whatever happens, so this is nothing new.

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Roundup: An escalation of props

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The moment that “remote sittings” began, which morphed into “hybrid” sittings, MPs began with the stunts. First it was signs in their backgrounds – which were ruled out of order as props, then it was dress code violations, and during the first “hybrid vote,” we saw MPs have their kids and dogs in the frame, and one of them was conspicuously driving while he voted. None of this is good for the practice of parliamentary democracy (and no, I don’t care what people say about how great it is they had their kids with them). And of course, one MP decided to take it to the next step.

https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/1313542759727484929

How this particular stunt wasn’t declared a de facto prop I’m not sure, but you can expect that this sort of thing is only going to escalate the longer it goes on unless the Speaker puts his foot down right now and stamps it out. And to be honest, when I’ve been cautioning against the problems that normalising “hybrid” sitting was going to bring, I didn’t think to include that MPs would start pulling stunts in the name of being “first” or “historic,” as they keep patting themselves on the back for these days, and yet they found new ways to surprise me. This is not a good thing. And because the Speaker didn’t say anything yesterday, I can only imagine how many more locales we’ll start seeing in the coming days, ever-escalating until someone comes to their senses and declares this to be the same as using props. Because honestly – this is going to be a very bad precedent.

Rideau Hall

In an unusual move, Governor General Julie Payette has contracted the services of former Supreme Court of Canada justice Michel Bastarache to be a “constitutional advisor” in the ongoing saga of the investigations of her office for harassment and bullying issues. It’s very odd and problematic, and here is professor Philippe Lagassé to provide some added context:

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1313577963565322240

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1313578978368802820

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1313581941103493121

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Roundup: Conflating the “leader’s courtesy”

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New Green Party leader Annamie Paul is running for a seat in the upcoming Toronto-Centre by-election, and this has already caused a bit of a friction between outgoing leader Elizabeth May and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Why? Because May argues that Singh should repay the courtesy that the Greens extended him when he was running for his own seat in a by-election in the previous parliament and not run a candidate to oppose him. The problem? That May’s conception of “leader’s courtesy” is not really what she thinks it is.

First of all, “leader’s courtesy” largely only existed when it came to government or official opposition – third, fourth, and fifth-place parties are not really owed any particular courtesies. Second, what this particular courtesy involves is a member of the new leader’s own party voluntarily resigning their seat so that the new leader can run there in order to get into the Commons as soon as possible – it’s generally not about unheld ridings, even if it just happens to coincidentally be the same riding where Paul ran in the last federal election. The Liberals are certainly not obligated to not run to keep their own seat for the sake of giving Paul a seat, no matter if she is a Black woman. Hell, they’re running a Black woman of their own in the riding. Not to mention, less than a year ago, during the election, Paul came in a distant fourth place in the riding with a mere seven percent of the vote-share. Bill Morneau, incidentally, got 57 percent, and the NDP came in second at 22 percent – even if Singh did the “classy” thing, as May demanded, and didn’t run a candidate, it’s still unlikely that Paul would win – especially when she’s running against a legitimate media personality like Liberal candidate Marci Ien.

I would also add that demanding that the other parties surrender their candidates so that Paul can win it because she’s a Black woman leader smacks of tokenism, and is an implicit declaration that she couldn’t win the seat on her own. Not to mention, it deprives the voters of the riding the chance to make the decision on who they want to represent them. Again, the historical “leader’s courtesy” was about a riding that the party held, and it was usually intended to be a short-term measure so that the leader would have a seat, and would then run in their intended seat in the next election and return the riding to the MP who stepped aside for the leader. This is clearly not what is happening in Toronto Centre, so unless May wants to resign her own seat so that Paul can run there, she’s conflating just what exactly this “courtesy” really is.

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Roundup: The coded language of “social experiments”

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There was an analysis piece published over the weekend that wondered about why Erin O’Toole is talking about “social experiments” as part of his rejection of the Throne Speech, but while the piece went on to look at polling data and so on, it merely said that O’Toole didn’t exactly say which part of it was the “social experiment.” Of course, you’d have to have been living under a rock to not realise that small-c conservatives have been using this language for a while, particularly when it comes to things like gender equality.

Much of the thinking around this language is that the “social experiment” is the disruption of the so-called “natural” state of family life – that women in the workforce and childcare outside of the home is going to be some kind of sociological destabilizing force – and much of that line of reasoning also goes hand-in-hand with some garden-variety homophobic nonsense about same-sex marriage somehow “devaluing” regular marriage (as though straight people weren’t already doing that on their own). And let’s face it – the Throne Speech was heavy on inclusive growth and the need for childcare as part of its main themes. Of course, this isn’t really “experimental” at this point either – we have plenty of data to show the economic benefits of women in the workforce and what subsidised childcare can do to facilitate it. And if O’Toole is really that concerned about the deficit and economic growth, you’d think that he would be enthusiastically supporting plans to expand subsidised childcare and early learning because it’s been proven to have far greater economic returns than what it costs a government.

But we also need to remember that O’Toole is beholden to the social conservatives in his party for his leadership win, and he’s spent his time as leader trying to play both sides on a lot of issues – talking about the importance of free trade while promoting protectionist “Canada First” policies, or saying he’ll go to Pride – but only if they allow uniformed police to march, or that he opposes conversion therapy but won’t support that particular bill because of hand-wavey discredited reasoning. I am not unconvinced that this isn’t more of the same – O’Toole winking to his social conservatives using their own coded language about “social experiments” without actually saying what it is out loud so that he can’t be called out on it by those who know that things like enhancing childcare is sound economic policy, and that this recession, which has disproportionately affected women and minorities, won’t be solved by the same tired bro-recovery that provides stimulus for bro-jobs. To dismiss the kinds of inclusive policies that this economic recovery demands as “social experiments” gives a clue as to who O’Toole is pandering to.

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Roundup: Learned helplessness sets into the Senate

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News that the Senate has been suspended until the end of the month, and that they have only met fourteen times since March, is deeply irritating to me on numerous levels. My primary irritation is that the Senate has work it can do, but hasn’t been doing it both because they’ve been unable to get their committees up and running, and because there have been virtually no government bills that were not COVID-related or Estimates that have headed their way. On the committee front, it would seem that much of the drama that happened in the early part of the year in the Selection committee has largely resolved itself because the Progressive Senators Group has been revitalized and is now a viable caucus again, meaning that Senator Yuen Pau Woo’s attempt to exclude them from committee seats has been for naught, and they should be able to come to an agreement about equitable distribution of seats now that he’s not able to screw them over. As for government bills, this has largely been a question of timing – bills in process did not advance very far before the pandemic hit – but the government has a very full agenda and should introduce one or two of its bills in the Senate as they are capable of doing, in order to get the ball rolling on them. There is no excuse for them not to.

As for the lack of sitting days, this is largely the prerogative of the Leader of the Government in the Senate, and in the current pandemic state, I find that a kind of learned helplessness has been setting in, in both chambers. The Senate, disadvantaged on the part of resources, particularly when it comes to thinks like IT and video capacity, has taken a back-seat while the Commons has been gobbling up those resources to get its own operations going remotely, and yet the Senate could very well have come up with ways to meet in-person safely. The concerns about travel could be mitigated by just having senators stay put, but they have thus far refused to make allowances in their Internal Economy committee to let them do so that won’t cost them out-of-pocket if they don’t already have an apartment or condo in town. The current demands for “hybrid” sittings, in spite of the problems that have developed with them in the Commons, seems to be barrelling ahead in spite of the objections of the Conservatives, and despite the fact that simply creating a parliamentary bubble is the cheaper, easier, and better option.

The bitter irony in all of this is that for all of Justin Trudeau’s talk about a more “independent” Senate, the last eight months have turned the Chamber into one big rubber stamp, as process gets abused time and again in the name of emergency legislation because they refuse to create a parliamentary bubble. People should be angry about this, but most everyone is just shrugging and playing into the learned helplessness that has set it, making me all the more irritated by it all.

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