Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: The bitumen-soaked petard

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Probably the most important piece you could read from yesterday’s offerings was this analysis from energy economist Andrew Leach, who dismantled much of the logic behind the Conservative environmental “plan” that Andrew Scheer was so proud of. Aside from the fact that it lacks detail, it’s full of contradictions (such as eschewing carbon taxes, and yet does largely the same thing with large emitters), and a lot of things that don’t make sense. Leach not only calls out the fact that the “plan” is full of straw men and distractions (such as the focus on raw sewage), but probably most devastating is that he punches holes in the plan for the Canada Clean Brand™ that Scheer is trying to promote – the notion that Canadian products are “cleaner” and should displace those abroad, thus keeping Canadian jobs and still (ostensibly) lowering emissions. And while that may be true enough with aluminium, it’s certainly not for our oil exports, which kind of blows the whole thing out of the water. Oops.

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Roundup: On feeding the loons

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I try not to do that hackneyed “slow news day?” thing, however I am forced to question the editorial judgment at Global’s Calgary bureau after they reported on a supposed new “separatist” group meeting in Alberta, who are shaking their fist at clouds – err, I mean throwing a temper tantrum about some perceived slights. The apparent “newsworthiness” of this event is the fact that there was a bullshit poll out last week that said that as many as a quarter of Albertans could support separation, and Jay Hill, one-time Alberta separatist, says that Justin Trudeau being re-elected could make that fifty percent.

That sound was my eyes rolling so hard. And then again when John Ivison tweeted this gem.

What could possibly different about Scotland than Alberta? Could it be that Scotland once used to be its own country? Could it be that they have a distinct language and culture? That they already field their own sports teams in international competitions? That they’re not landlocked? Colby Cosh wrote about this not two weeks ago – there is no coherence in the argument for Alberta separatism, and they can’t even take their own argument seriously.

Let’s call this what it is – extortion, blackmail, and a campaign of lies fomented by the likes of Jason Kenney who is stoking it to keep his base angry, because the moment they realize that they’ve run out of external enemies to blame their problems on, the moment they’ll turn on him because he hasn’t been able to deliver on any of his snake oil promises. And Kenney is using these swivel-eyed loons as a straw man – the whole “I’m not a separatist, but Justin Trudeau is stoking the sentiment” defence. It’s just more lies, and We The Media don’t have to keep giving them oxygen. We don’t have to pay attention to these loons – especially if they’re going to call themselves moronic things like “Wexit Alberta.”

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Roundup: Whinging on the way out

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Once again, the brave political culture of Ottawa manifests itself with another column featuring anonymous MPs complaining to credulous columnists about how terrible their lives are, this time courtesy of John Ivison, who transcribes the miseries of Liberal MPs who aren’t running again about how everything is centralized in the PMO, that they’re being placated with busywork in committees, and the humiliation of being forced to memorize softball scripts to read in QP. And it’s all just so tiresome, because the vast majority of this is just learned helplessness.

I have increasingly less patience for this kind of anonymous whinging from MPs because they have all the power to change their situation if they wanted to do anything about it, but they instead learn to simply accept their situation even though they can change it. They don’t have to take the orders from the PMO if they think it’s humiliating or degrading. They don’t have to ask the questions prepared for them by PMO for QP – they can ask their own. The key is that they need their fellow backbenchers to back them up, and behave similarly. If you think the prime minister is going to throw a tantrum and threaten to not sign the nominations of his whole backbench, well, you’d be mistaken. They have this power. But instead they whinge to columnists about how unfair their lot in life is, never mind that they made this bed, and if they really wanted to change things, they would take back their power and stop electing leaders in quasi-presidential primaries that only serves to give them a false sense of “democratic legitimacy” at the expense of MPs. Again, they have the power to change this if they really wanted to.

As for these columnists, I would add that they need to get over this jejune notion that just letting MPs do more private members’ business will solve things. It won’t. In fact, it will probably just make things worse, because it will just bottleneck in the Senate, and MPs will spend more of their time working on these hobby horses rather than doing their actual work of holding government to account. That’s not how Parliament is supposed to work.

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Roundup: Not what parties are for

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As part of a longer piece (linked in the section below), the campaign director of the Liberal Party offered a loathsome sentence yesterday, and it’s just so completely disheartening.

No. The role of the party is not just to win elections and to fundraise. In fact, this kind of attitude is why the political system in Canada is in the state that it’s in. Parties are just seen as election vehicles rather than the grassroots organizations that deal with ground-up policy development, selection and nomination of candidates, or holding either their local representatives or the party itself to account. There is a whole structure that parties are supposed to play in the political ecosystem of being the interlocutors between ordinary people and the caucuses in the capital – it’s not just about mobilizing volunteers to make phone calls and knock on doors during a campaign. It’s not just about election machinery. It’s about the lifeblood of politics.

But this is where we are – our bastardized leadership selection process, twisted into a parody version of American presidential primaries, has centralized power, and hollowed out parties so that they are no longer performing the functions they were designed to do, and instead are merely vassals to the personality cults that have added brand recognition. It’s utterly debased how the system is supposed to work, and campaign guys like these help to fuel the demise.

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Roundup: Partisanship and thoughtlessness

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There was an interesting piece out yesterday about a study that showed that those with strong partisan leanings were less likely to be able to correctly identify current events, and are likely using news to confirm their existing views rather than being well informed. It’s not too surprising in the current milieu, where partisanship it turning more toward tribalism as we are apparently trying to import America’s culture wars into Canada out of some misplaced sense of envy, however I worry that this will be the kind of study that will simply turn into an exercise in confirmation bias by all sides – partisans and supposed non-partisans alike.

Let us first recall that partisanship is not actually a bad thing – it’s fundamentally about a contest of ideas and values, which is a good thing in politics. While everyone likes to talk about “evidence-based policy” and doing what’s best for all, there are fundamental philosophical differences about what that may be – and that’s okay. That’s good for democracy! Let us also recall that party membership is of fundamental importance in our system of government, and it’s one that has been gradually been debased as leaders have grown too strong and have hollowed out their parties – in part because memberships have allowed it rather than jealously guarding their own powers. We need more people to be party members, because that’s where grassroots engagement happens. We should resist the temptation to turn this kind of a study into an excuse to debase this kind of engagement in the political process.

We should also note that a big part of the problem is a lack of media literacy – particularly as the study also points to people being unable to locate where how their partisan biases line up with media outlets (which is also not a surprise, because people will paint an outlet with bias if they don’t like a story that makes their team look bad). So long as people don’t have these media literacy skills, any partisanship gets conflated with their preference for their own “teams,” and that helps magnify the kinds of problems that this study points to. It’s a complex problem overall, but we can’t simply say “partisanship makes you stupid,” as will be the temptation. Partisanship on its own doesn’t make you stupid – but if it’s mixed with other kinds of ignorance, it adds fuel to the fire.

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Roundup: Explaining the costing process

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With the writ period drawing ever closer, a good thread appeared over the Twitter Machine from someone who used to work in the Parliamentary Budget Office, and who has some insights about the PBO’s new mandate for costing parties’ election platform promises. It’s good to keep in mind – particularly when it comes to ensuring that the parties are accountable to voters.

https://twitter.com/twitscotty/status/1158741889798946818

https://twitter.com/twitscotty/status/1158741894530125825

https://twitter.com/twitscotty/status/1158741897780666368

https://twitter.com/twitscotty/status/1158741901693992960

https://twitter.com/twitscotty/status/1158741905301094401

https://twitter.com/twitscotty/status/1158769782331625472

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Roundup: Kenney’s latest salvo

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Over the weekend, Alberta premier Jason Kenney put out a video over Twitter that was an explicit declaration that he plans to campaign against Justin Trudeau in the upcoming federal election, but it was couched in the language of provincial separatism. Or rather, Kenney claimed that Trudeau was trying to “push Alberta out” of the Canadian federation, but he would rather “separate Trudeau from the office of the prime minister.”

For Kenney to claim that Trudeau is the source of Alberta’s woes is frankly ridiculous, and to say that Trudeau has been stoking separatist sentiment is laughable. Last I checked, Trudeau wasn’t the cause of the plunge in world oil prices, nor was his the government that has been blocking progress on the Keystone XL pipeline or Enbridge Line 3, and he not only bought the Trans Mountain pipeline to de-risk it, but ensured that the Federal Court of Appeal’s concerns were addressed so that it could begin construction without further court challenges. And if Kenney wants to throw Energy East or Northern Gateway in the mix, well, the former was withdrawn because the economics of the project were insufficient, and the Harper government’s inaction and lack of proper Section 35 consultation ensured that Northern Gateway would not go ahead.

Of course, Kenney is also perpetuating his campaign of lies and snake oil, such as his complaints that the province is getting a “raw deal” from equalization – remembering of course that Alberta doesn’t sign a cheque to other provinces, but that it comes from everyone’s federal income taxes, and Alberta has the highest incomes in the country by far, nor will a referendum on the programme do anything other than further inflame sentiment in the process that Kenney has been lying about. And he knows that he needs to keep the population angry at outside forces so that they don’t start turning on him given that he can’t fulfil the promises he made to them. This video was not only bizarre, but it also perhaps gives a hint of the kind of increasingly desperate measures that Kenney will have to resort to in order to keep stoking anger.

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Roundup: The source of the complaints

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Carrying on with yesterday’s theme, Bill Morneau decided he would try and be too cute by half and release an open letter of his own, questioning Andrew Scheer’s promise to premiers to maintain the current health and social transfer system, and claimed that he was still advocating a cut. I’m not sure that it was quite right, but it was a novel attempt – and something Morneau rarely does, so there’s that. Scheer, meanwhile, keeps on his affordability message, claiming that he’s the only one worried about it while the Liberals keep raising taxes, etc.

The thing is, Scheer is wrong about that. He is fond of citing that Fraser Institute report that treats the cancellation of boutique tax credits as “raising taxes” – as it also ignores the tax-free Canada Child Benefit offered to most families as a replacement, and a more targeted one that will actually benefit low-income households at that – much like he’s fond of ignoring that the climate rebates will make most households better off in jurisdictions under the federal carbon pricing system. But beyond that, the data clearly shows that the federal taxes as a share of federal revenues also continues to decline under the Liberals. Scheer’s affordability narrative as it comes to taxes is bogus. Well, except for one particular group, who is not better off under the changes that the Liberals have made. And yet, as Kevin Milligan demonstrates with data and receipts below, it’s certainly not the average Canadians that Scheer claims to be fighting for. But then again, illiberal populists claiming to be looking out for average people while benefitting the wealthiest is getting to be a tired game by this point – and yet people still keep falling for it.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157388641385062401

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157390752697085952

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157394371806785536

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157396798412976128

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157439654120923136

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Roundup: Cuts and capacity

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Andrew Scheer made a defensive manoeuvre yesterday by sending letters to each of the premiers promising that he wouldn’t cut health or social transfers if he formed government – his way of heading off attacks from Justin Trudeau that are trying to paint Scheer with the same brush as Doug Ford, as Ford continues to make ill-considered cuts across Ontario without regard for logic or reason (while, oddly enough, his government’s spending continues to increase). There is an added bit of significance to this in that Ford has spent the past year trying to sell the message that Ontario’s books are such a basket case that the province is in the road to bankruptcy – which is a complete and total fabrication. While yes, Ontario does have a high debt-to-GDP ratio, we also have to remember that the previous government was borrowing money where interest rates are below the rate of inflation – essentially they are getting free money that they could use to invest in the province.

Enter Kevin Carmichael at the Financial Post, who wrote a must-read contemplation of the state of the federal books yesterday. It’s an adult conversation about the actual state of our finances – contrary to Scheer, our books are in great shape and the deficit is miniscule, and contrary to Trudeau and Bill Morneau, the deficits are coming in smaller than projected and growth is greater than projected and with no new increases in spending, we could be back in surplus before the 2023 election (thought that is always this government’s problem). And with that in mind, he poses the question – do we need to sock away surpluses in anticipation of a future recession even though we already have the capacity to deal with it, or do we spend our current capacity on something that would have lasting changes for our economy, like national childcare? It’s the kind of grown-up conversation that we should be having, but we’re not as parties snipe at one another over who is more “divisive.”

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157119930434609153

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Roundup: Figures without context for outrage

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You may have noticed that the Conservative Party’s Twitter feed recently is trying to make “100 days of Trudeau fails” a Thing – because their overriding narrative has been to put “Trudeau” and “fail” in the same sentence for the past two years now, but it still feels a lot like trying to make “fetch” happen. But as they essentially regurgitate old headlines as part of this campaign, you will find that most of the posts are missing key context, which ensures that it’s often a big figure with nothing to support it. Given that We The Media have trained Canadians with our fixation on cheap outrage stories, I’m sure this is a tactic that they feel is a slam dunk, but in any case, here are a few examples from the past few days. In other words, don’t take anything at face value, but remember that there is context (that is easily Googled) to what they are posting, and most of it makes them look pretty petty – particularly the repairs and upgrades to the official residence at Harrington Lake, given that Trudeau has been entertaining foreign leaders there as they can’t do it at 24 Sussex.

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