Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Campaign launch and promises

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As we wait for the writs to be drawn up – and I wouldn’t hold my breath on it happening until at least Wednesday, because they want to ensure that the Manitoba election is over first – we’re ready to start seeing the official campaign launches. The NDP were supposed to have theirs on Sunday, but cancelled it out of respect for Hurricane Dorian hitting Nova Scotia and PEI, only to turn around and then do a “bus unveiling” in Toronto and then head to Ottawa to “open” the campaign headquarters – which was essentially launching the “official” campaign anyway. All of which is a bit of a fiction because the campaign has really been going on for months, because fixed election dates are garbage. (Side note: in the week following the point being made that Singh has not yet visited New Brunswick, and the high-profile defections, that he still hasn’t bothered to make a stop in that province).

Meanwhile, because the NDP have already released their platform, the Parliamentary Budget Officer is starting to cost some of their promises, and the first one was released regarding their pledge to eliminate interest charges on current and future federal student loans.

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Roundup: Underlying concerns amidst good numbers

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It was hard to miss all of the talk about the job numbers yesterday – particularly as pretty much every Liberal minister, MP and candidate started sharing pre-generated memes about how great the economy is doing under this government (with the caveat that there’s still more work to do). This, like news of much higher than expected GDP growth, are good headlines with some underlying weakness being masked, and as economist Trevor Tombe explains, those good numbers are masking some very real problems in Alberta.

The issue of young men in that province is one that I’m not sure enough levels of government are paying sufficient attention to, as the Alberta government seems to think that all that’s needed is for the oil patch to revive and it’s problem solved, but with world oil prices depressed and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, that means the prospect for these young men – many of whom are under-educated because of the lure of high-paying oil patch jobs – are not going to be good in the shorter term. That’s additionally a problem when you have a government that feeds the people a diet of lies and snake oil to keep them angry at imaginary reasons why they’re being kept down (currently Justin Trudeau), because angry young men can be a dangerous thing if allowed to fester. And for the federal government’s part, I wonder just how much their retraining programming is penetrating given that jobs they could be retraining for couldn’t necessarily match the promised paydays of oil jobs in a boom – but that becomes a problem of waiting for the next boom (where the money will get pissed away, like it does every time no matter how often they promise that this time it will be different – really!).

Some of this will come up in the election – not just the lies that Kenney and company are pushing, but the NDP and Greens are trying to make some hay here, as both want to retrain these workers for the “green economy” in some vague way, while the Greens in particular think they could put them to work capping old orphan wells as both an environmental and job-creation measure, but it’s also one that is both expensive, and if the government just starts doing this on its own, it essentially lets the industry off the hook and demonstrates that the “polluter pays” principle is for naught. Add to that, the promises of green jobs retraining falls back to the issue of some of them waiting on the promises of the bigger paydays in a future oil boom, so there is no guarantee that green jobs will be attractive to this cohort. Nevertheless, it’s good that there are at least some ideas, and we should ensure that it’s something that does get discussed during the election.

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Roundup: New Brunswick dust-up

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The situation in New Brunswick has turned to complete melodrama as it turns out that maybe it wasn’t fourteen former provincial NDP candidates who defected to the Greens, and that maybe it was only eight. Some said they were surprised to see their names on the list, others said that they were under the impression that this was really a discussion about merging with the Greens provincially to form a more progressive alternative party (given that the NDP were wiped out provincially, and it doesn’t help that their former leader crossed over to the provincial Progressive Conservatives and is now sitting as a cabinet minister). All the while, Elizabeth May is taking swipes at Jagmeet Singh for not visiting the province, while she also alleges that the NDP engaged in strong-arm tactics to force some of those former candidates to recant their cross to the Greens (which some deny). Amidst all of this are the allegations that some of this was because these NDP candidates felt that there are people in the province – singling out the Acadiens on the North Shore – would react poorly to Singh, and the howling that this is all about racism.

And it is possible that there is an element of racism in here, and we shouldn’t deny that it does exist in Canadian politics, even if it’s not overt. To that end, Andray Domise writes in Maclean’s that leftist parties in Canada don’t critically engage with issues of race because bigotry can be useful politically and economically, and it’s the kind of thing they should be engaging with but don’t. It’s a fairly damning condemnation of the state of leftist politics in this country, and nobody comes out looking good as a result (though, it should also be noted, that the Greens are not really a leftist party in most respects, and the NDP have turned themselves into left-flavoured populists over successive elections and leaders, so perhaps that makes the point even more trenchant).

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Roundup: An expedited process

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The Federal Court of Appeal ruled yesterday that of the twelve challengers to the government’s decision to approve the Trans Mountain pipeline a second time, that they would grant leave to hear from six of them, on an expedited basis, and on the very narrow question of whether or not the government has actually complied with the previous FCA ruling, particularly when it comes to the issue of appropriate consultation with Indigenous communities as it pertains to Section 35 of the Constitution. Immediately there was a bunch of wailing and gnashing of teeth that this would be some kind of delay, and others demanded that the government start using magic wands apparently hidden in the text of the constitution (never mind that they don’t actually exist). Worth noting as well – there is no injunction against continued construction, so that will continue to ramp up in the weeks ahead as this expedited hearing gets underway.

This having been all said, there were a number of questions as to why the federal government didn’t file any materials in defence regarding those leave applications in eleven of the twelve files (though, curiously, the Alberta government did even though they’re not the defence). We didn’t get much of an answer – Amarjeet Sohi (who is not the justice minister) saying that they would mount a defence at the right time, but I have to wonder if this was simply about giving the appearance that they weren’t trying to constantly take Indigenous communities to court. Or, they may have simply felt confident that their position was self-evident, that they fulfilled the conditions from the previous FCA ruling and filing something to repeat exactly that wasn’t worth the time or energy because they didn’t think the Court would grant leave on that basis. Either way, it’s not the “rolling over” that certain opposition MPs have railed in the media about because this is a leave application, and not the actual defence.

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Meanwhile, energy economist Andrew Leach debunks the myths about what is holding back investment in the oilsands, and lays out the four real reasons, which are very different from what industry lobbyists and Jason Kenney are trying to sell to Canadians. Some of the big takeaways are that corporate tax cuts won’t help, and carbon pricing isn’t hurting it, never mind that those are the kinds of things that Kenney is focusing on, and it’s all snake oil – none of it will make investment come flooding back to the sector because the reasons are bigger and more complex.

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Roundup: Equalization and Spending

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Over the long weekend, one of the best things that I read was an exploration by economist Trevor Tombe about Alberta’s misplaced anger over the so-called “unfairness” of equalization, as the real issue is the fact that they have disproportionately higher salaries (and fiscal capacity) than everyone else in the country. Meanwhile, Tombe also has a good thread on the history of federal transfers to and from Alberta, and it’s interesting to get some of that perspective.

Meanwhile in Alberta, the McKinnon Report on public expenses was released yesterday, detailing that there needs to be some $600 million in cuts if the budget is to be balanced between 2022-23, and while it notes that it the province needs more stable revenues (*cough*sales tax*cough*), though it didn’t get into their revenue problems, as it wasn’t their mandate. That means that there are going to need to be cuts to healthcare and education. Here are three surprising tidbits from the report (but also ones that I think need to be drilled down into – for example high public servant salaries are not because of cost of living, but competition with the private sector, and high college drop-out rates are likely to do with jobs in the oil patch). More in this thread from Lindsay Tedds.

In reaction, Jason Markusoff points to the fact that the report’s conclusions were predetermined, given that it was created specifically to find cuts as raising revenues was not an option they were allowed to present, and it bears reminding once again that Alberta is in deficit because it chooses to be so – they could raise their revenues and not rely solely on oil royalties anytime they wanted, but they don’t want to (so all of those pundits taking this report as proof that the province has a spending problem are being a bit too cute about it). On a broader perspective, Max Fawcett argues that if Alberta wants to send a message that if they really want to have their issues taken seriously, they need to stop voting Conservative – and then enumerates all of the ways in which the federal Conservatives have taken the province’s votes for granted as they did things that disadvantaged them.

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Roundup: Profiles in courage

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After avoiding the media for over a week while questions about his personal positions on abortion and LGBT rights were being debated, Andrew Scheer called a press conference yesterday to say that Justin Trudeau was lacking in courage for not agreeing to the Maclean’s and Munk debates (well, he hasn’t agreed yet, but he also hasn’t said no). Mind you, the guy talking about courage and showing up has been avoiding the media for the past week, so that’s no small amount of irony. Oh, and he also accused the Liberals of trying to deflect from their record by dredging up Scheer’s statements on “divisive social issues.” That said, Scheer hewed strictly to talking points that continued to make cute distinctions between a hypothetical future Conservative government and backbenchers, and essentially said that they could put forward any bill they wanted and he wouldn’t stop them – only he wouldn’t say so in as many words. To that end, it’s also worth reminding people that as Speaker, Scheer went out of his way to ensure that anti-abortion MPs got speaking slots when the Conservative leadership was trying to keep them under wraps, so that might be a clue as to how he’d treat possible future private members’ bills.

This having been said, I now wonder if the strategy for the Liberals isn’t to just bring social progressives and Red Tories to their side, but to try and goad Scheer into painting himself in enough of a corner with trying to assure Canadians that no, he would squelch any anti-abortion or anti-GLBT private members’ bills – really! – in the hopes that it would discourage the social conservatives in Scheer’s base into staying home, thus driving down their voter turnout. It would be novel if that’s what it was, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives put out a fundraising video yesterday featuring Stephen Harper, which is kind of ironic considering that they keep accusing the Liberals of dredging up Harper, only for them to do the very same thing. And with this in mind, I will often note that political parties these days have pretty much all hollowed themselves out into personality cults for their leaders, but with the Conservatives, they remain a personality cult for their former leader, Harper – that Scheer has had such a lack of personality or willpower to change the party to reflect him (though he did campaign on being Harper with a smile in the leadership, so that’s not too unsurprising). Nevertheless, bringing out the old leader in advance of the election is an odd bit of strategy that can’t speak too highly of the current leader.

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Roundup: Flashbacks about prorogation

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It was a day of flashbacks to 2008, as Boris Johnson asked the Queen to prorogue the Parliament in Westminster, and social media had erupted with cries of “coups,” “dictatorships,” and wannabe constitutional scholars ignoring nearly two centuries of Responsible Government as they tried to implicate the Queen in granting Johnson’s request. Of course, there are some fundamental differences between now and the 2008 prorogation, such as the fact that there will still be a “washing up period” of a few days, as is traditional with UK prorogations, and time where the opposition can still try to move some kind of motion to try and stop a no-deal Brexit, though I’m not sure what mechanism they would use. A private member’s motion would be non-binding (and would carry only the symbolic weight of the Chamber), while a private members’ bill would try to impose some kind of negative obligation on the government – even if it could be sped through in those final days – and if there is no no-deal option on the table, it would then impose the necessity to have some kind of deal, which the Commons has already rejected. There is also the option of moving a non-confidence motion in those remaining days, which could topple Johnson’s government, ostensibly. The prorogation is also for a couple of weeks, and will return Parliament by October 14th, which still leaves it time to do something about Brexit before the October 31stdeadline. Johnson’s move may be dubious – and a dick move – but it could have been much worse. It’s not a coup. It’s not demolishing democracy. And it’s not eliminating parliament as an obstacle to Johnson – in fact, it may have only made it worse, as the move signals his desperation.

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All of this being said, we need to also remember that some of the received wisdom of the 2008 prorogation crisis needs to be challenged. For example, people keep insisting that Michaëlle Jean was wrong to grant Harper the prorogation (ignoring that if she refused the advice of her prime minister, he would have been obligated to resign, which would have created a whole other constitutional crisis), that an opposition coalition would have been able to take over. The problem is that said coalition was never really viable, and pretty much everyone knew it. And this was proven correct by the fact that it did not survive the prorogation period. Had it done so, had they banded together and moved a motion of non-confidence, then formed a coalition, then sure, it would have proven that it was viable, and it would have reinforced that the system was working (as it did in when Sir John A Macdonald did not survive a prorogation to avoid a confidence vote around the Pacific Scandal). But the coalition fell apart, proving that Jean was right to simply grant the prorogation – making Harper stew about it for a few hours – and doing her job in acting on the advice of a first minister. But you’re going to hear a rehash of the coalition fanfic of the day, and we need to remember that it was only that – fiction.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt offers her thoughts on the prorogation, the disconnect between parliaments and the outside world, and the idle speculation about whether Stephen Harper’s 2008 prorogation may have inspired Johnson.

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Roundup: Dubious studies on populism

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A study out of Simon Fraser University shows that a rising number of Canadians are only “moderately convinced” that we should be governed by a representative democracy – nearly 60 percent, which is up 15 percent since 2017. As well, 70 percent of those surveyed don’t feel that government officials care about the concerns of “ordinary Canadians,” along with rising support for populism and anti-immigrant sentiments. This shouldn’t really surprise anyone who has paid the least bit of attention to what is going on in the world, but let’s first of all get out of the way that these percentages are fairly shoddy reporting once you dig into the study, which finds that Canadians are still very much in favour of democracy, and that the representative democracy still figures better than the other alternatives (direct democracy, rule by experts, strong ruler, military rule), and much of the reporting on the anti-immigrant sentiment is fairly torqued.

To be clear, I have a great many concerns about the methodology of the study, which offers some fairly torqued binaries for participants to choose from and then tries to draw conclusions from that, leaving no room for the kind of nuance that many of these positions would seem to merit. As well, their definitions of populism are too clinical and don’t seem to really reflect some of the attitudes that those who respond to the sentiments, so I’m not sure how much utility this methodology actually has in a case like this (or in this other study which looks at pockets of “forgotten workers,” which at least admits there are no obvious answers to stemming the tide of this sentiment). Nevertheless, there is some interesting regional breakdowns in where certain attitudes are more prevalent than others, and which identified populist sentiments register more strongly in some regions over others.

This having been said, the questions on people feeling frustrated with how democracy works are pretty much why I do the work that I do, particularly with the book that I wrote, which is all about identifying where things are breaking down (reminder: It’s not structural, but rather the ways in which people are not using the system properly), and showcasing how it should be operated, which is with the participation of voters at the grassroots levels. But if we’re going to get back to that system, that requires a lot of people at those grassroots demanding their power back from the leaders’ offices, and that also means needing to get out of the thrall of the messianic leader complex that we keep falling into, going from one messiah to another once the current one loses their lustre (which I do believe also feeds into the populist sentiments, who also latch onto messianic leaders). This can’t just be people complaining about the quality of the leaders out there – it’s about how we feed the system. If we input garbage, we get garbage out of it, and this hasn’t connected in the brains of enough voters yet. One day, perhaps, it might, but we don’t appear to be there yet, and the torqued binaries of a survey like this don’t help us get any better of an understanding of what it will take for people to wise up and get serious about our democratic system.

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Roundup: Misleading his recruits

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After some confusion in the Conservative ranks, Andrew Scheer’s Quebec lieutenant, Alain Rayes, is apologising for misleading candidates in the province when he insisted to them that the party considered abortion a settled matter and that they wouldn’t allow any attempt to change the laws. Not so – Scheer’s actual pledge is that the government – meaning Cabinet – would not bring forward any bills, but the backbenches are free to do so, which is why anti-abortion groups have been busy trying to get their supporters nominated as candidates. And now the party and Rayes are saying that he just misheard Scheer’s pledge, which could put some of those Quebec candidates that Rayes recruited in a sticky position because some of them are saying that they decided to run for the Conservatives because they were assured that they weren’t going to touch abortion. Oops.

And this dichotomy of a hypothetical Conservative Cabinet pledges versus its backbenchers is one of those cute ways that Scheer can try to mollify the Canadian public while at the same time assuring his social conservative base that yes, he’s still the party for them, and he’s going to ensure that they have space to put forward legislation. From there, depending on whether or not they have a majority government and if so, how large it is, it comes down to counting votes to see if these kinds of bills have a chance of making it – and the current move in anti-abortion circles is to use backdoor attempts at criminalization through means like trying to create jurisprudence by means of laws that give a foetus personhood status through bills that treat them as such when a pregnant woman is murdered, for example, which they then plan to slowly extend to abortion services. It’s a long-term plan, but one that begins with getting enough anti-abortion candidates nominated and elected, so even though Scheer says his Cabinet won’t introduce these bills, as private members’ bills, they are unlikely to be whipped, and that leaves him to free his caucus to “vote their conscience.”

Of course, if he’s planning to be like Stephen Harper and assert pressure to ensure that these kinds of bills don’t make it through, then his courting of the anti-abortion community is hollow, and he’s lying to them, which will also be something that his base will have to contend with. But the clarification that only a hypothetical Cabinet wouldn’t introduce any anti-abortion measures is too cute by half, and relies on the fact that not enough people appreciate the difference between Cabinet and the backbenches, and why that distinction matters.

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Roundup: When the leaders are away…

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Pride in Ottawa came and went this weekend, and surprising nobody, Andrew Scheer didn’t show up. But then again, not a single leader, federal or provincial leader, showed up either. Trudeau gets a pass because he was off at the G7 meeting in France, but he’s also only ever showed up to a single Pride in this city. And the only time any of the leaders showed up was the year Trudeau did – a one-off which is a bit of an insult to the city which is seat of government, and the second-largest city in Ontario (for those absentee provincial leaders), which essentially tells us that we’re not worth the effort. (For the record, Jagmeet Singh was in Edmonton to campaign in the NDP’s sole riding in that province).

Meanwhile, here’s a look at why Scheer shouldn’t have shown up at Ottawa Pride without an invitation – or an apology – and more than one person has remarked that straight people shouldn’t be inviting people to Pride on behalf of the LGBT community.

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