Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Affordability truthers

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As expected, talk of the cost of living crept up again online today, with some more hyperbolic nonsense coming from one of our favourite Conservative talking heads. But this time, economist Stephen Gordon stepped in to provide a reality check – only to find more StatsCan “truthers” coming out of the woodwork. Remember, for populists, they don’t like data that contradicts their narratives, so they try to insist that the data is somehow biased or wrong. Gordon sets them straight, and makes the even more salient point that if the Conservatives (and by extension the NDP) are so concerned about cost of living increases that are within the rate of inflation, then perhaps they need to articulate what their monetary policy goals are – which is what the targeted rate of inflation amounts to. Plenty to think about and remember here.

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Roundup: Sticking with the date

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You may recall that last week, the Federal Court granted judicial review to the Conservative candidate looking to change the election date because it clashes with a particular orthodox Jewish holiday, and lo, the Chief Electoral Officer set about to review his decision. Yesterday he announced that he’d reviewed it, and he was still confident that there wasn’t sufficient reason to change it – moving it back a week would put it in conflict with a bunch of PD days in schools that they needed to use for polling stations, and it would collide with municipal elections in Nunavut, and there were still plenty of options, be they advance polls or special ballots, for those affected by the orthodox Jewish holidays. That decision goes to Cabinet, who will make the final call later this week.

But then something curious happened – a couple of Liberal MPs tweet their dismay at the CEO’s decision, which is a little odd because, well, it’s not really his call. He’s making a recommendation, and Cabinet makes the final decision because the dissolution of Parliament for an election is a Crown prerogative, meaning that it depends on the Governor-in-Counsel (i.e. Cabinet advising the governor general) that makes the decision, regardless of our garbage fixed election date legislation. So if they’re tweeting dismay, they should direct their pleas to their own government rather than to harass the CEO.

This having been said, I am forced to wonder if this isn’t part of the fallout from the aforementioned garbage fixed election date. One of the justifications for said garbage legislation is that it’s supposed to help Elections Canada plan, rather than scramble in the event of a snap election call – but it’s starting to feel like perhaps those plans are also getting a bit precious, which is a bad sign for an institution that is supposed to be adaptable in order to accommodate the election call, whenever it may be.

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Roundup: What high cost exactly?

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As people talk more and more about the upcoming election, the notion about the “high cost of living” is a theme that keeps recurring, and it’s fairly interesting because it’s something that, well, doesn’t really bear out in the data. Inflation has held relatively steady for decades now, and in the past few years has remained within the target range (between one and three percent, with two percent being what they generally aim for), and was on the low side of it for a while, briefly flirted with the high side of the target range and has been back to two percent.

As part of populist rhetoric, all parties have been trying to make this a selling feature – the Conservatives with promises to cut carbon pricing (even though that has not had a significant effect on inflation or even gas prices) and the restoration of boutique tax credits (that don’t benefit low-income people), the Liberals through the Canada Child Benefit, and the NDP through promised massive spending programmes (that have zero details on implementation). So it’s worthwhile asking just what exactly they’re referring to when they rail about the high cost of living, because it can refer to specific things that have specific solutions that they may or may not be advocating.

Housing prices are one thing that are lumped into cost of living, but isn’t really, and again, that’s very dependent on which market you happen to be in. Toronto is coming back to normal after being on a housing bubble, but Vancouver is still high in part because of housing supply. Alberta and Saskatchewan are depressed because of the oil market, but other parts of the country? Not really an affordability issue, and some plans to deal with housing affordability will just drive up prices by the amount of the incentives and not deal with the structural problems (which is what the Liberals tried to circumvent with their shared equity plan in the last budget). Essentially, when the parties start talking about dealing with the “high cost of living,” we should be pushing back and asking what, specifically, they’re referring to. There is enough populist bilge out there that means nothing and promises snake oil, so unless you can get specifics, don’t trust that they will deliver anything of substance.

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Roundup: A carbon reality check

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A couple of weeks ago, Paul Wells did one of his CPAC interviews with Elizabeth May, the transcript of which is now available, and she talked a lot about how she thinks Canada can transition to a cleaner economy, and said a bunch of things about the oil and gas industry as part of that. The problem, of course, was that she was wrong about pretty much all of it, as energy economist Andrew Leach demonstrates.

Leach, meanwhile, also takes Jason Kenney’s rhetoric about carbon pricing to task in this Policy Options piece, and lays out the danger of that rhetoric, which has a high probability of blowing up in Kenney’s face. And as a bonus, he proposed a tool for conservatives to check their policy instincts against.

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Roundup: Enumerating promises

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CTV had a two-part look at the government’s record yesterday, both in terms of what they accomplished that changed Canada, and what they did not accomplish as promised. The accomplished list is not quite as interesting – gender balance, more refugee resettlement, restoring the long-form census, legalising cannabis – I’m not sure their “reforms” to the Senate are as much of an accomplishment as people may think given the broader unintended consequences.

The other list, however, strikes me as requiring a bit more nuance than was really offered in some cases. For example, not balancing the budget was in part because there was an oil crash at the beginning of their mandate that affected their figures, and it wasn’t really balanced when the Conservatives lost power (particularly given that they booked a bunch of fictitious savings for things like the Phoenix pay system and Shared Services Canada, which the Liberals had to clean up). That said, they did increase spending once revenues increased, so it is a bit more complex than the piece offered. Electoral reform? It wasn’t one of their biggest campaign promises, but one of a myriad that was simply overblown in many instances, but that aside, it again doesn’t quite capture that the attempt to explore consequences resulted in a hot garbage report that was unworkable at best, and was based on a stupid promise that evidence showed was not feasible (leaving aside that the Liberals stupidly didn’t bother to promote their own preferred system until it was too late). The Indigenous file is still rocky? If anyone thinks that centuries of colonisation can be reversed in four years, well, that’s fantasyland, but it’s not as though there hasn’t been significant progress. The final, more nebulous point about scandals and “doing politics differently” is one of those unicorn promises that lets people’s imaginations run wild. For the most part, he did things differently than Stephen Harper did, but it wasn’t different enough or utopian enough for some people, and it qualifies as a failure, which I’m not sure is fair to anyone.

Speaking of stupid promises, the Ontario government is having to walk back on their promise to end “hallway medicine” in twelve months, and yeah, that’s not going to happen and it’s hey, it’s a complex and intractable problem that not even shovelling money at the problem is likely to solve. But it’s not like people believed anything Ford promised because it was only about their anger at Kathleen Wynne, right? But that’s what you get with populist blowhards – snake oil promises pulled out of their asses with no ability to implement them, but hey, so long as you keep them angry about the other guy/woman, then that’s all that matters, right? And nobody ever seems to learn.

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Roundup: Dire warnings about MPs’ jobs

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Another day, another apocalyptic warning that the workload and schedules of MPs are going to wind up killing somebody someday, and I just cannot even. This isn’t even the first time this particular argument has been made by MPs, but it boggles me even more that journalists aren’t pushing back more, and at least giving an “Oh, come on,” and it leaves the impression that there is an expectation that parliamentarians go in thinking it’s a nine-to-five job. And it gets even more ludicrous when you realise that MPs are not only sitting fewer days than they used to, but we already eliminated evening sittings three days a week in order to make the days more “family friendly” (which, as it happens, made congeniality worse because they stopped eating dinner together three nights a week).

https://twitter.com/garry_keller/status/1150587736736317441

Part of what has triggered this wave of pearl-clutching are the number of voting marathons that we saw in this current parliament, but we need to pour a bit of perspective sauce on the situation here. First of all, the opposition needs to have some tools to apply pressure to the government when they feel it’s necessary, and eliminating those tools would be a major problem. That said, I’m not sure that these particular marathons were appropriate uses for those tools, particularly as they were pegged to issues that were fairly minor on the scope of things, if not outright ridiculous, and yet the Conservatives made a big song and dance about these vote-a-thons, which wound up coming across as a temper tantrum. It became routine that estimates votes were coming up, so they were going to force a vote-a-thon to express their outrage of the day, and then blame the government for “forcing it” to happen. That’s…not how this works. And if MPs are opposed to those tactics, well, they can let their party leadership know that they’re opposed and do something about it internally. Otherwise, I’m not sure what their suggestions are for making life easier for MPs, because the alternatives – such as time allocating all business by means of programming motions and the like – is not healthy for democracy either. Perhaps they need to think about that as they complain about the jobs they chose.

Speaking of workloads, there was some angry debating over Twitter over the weekend about the Senate not sitting later to pass the bill that would add CBSA to the new civilian oversight body created for the RCMP (the accusation that they wanted to go on vacation). While I have my doubts about that bill (I think the earlier Senate bill to create an Inspector General for CBSA held a lot of promise, but the government refused to debate it), it’s pretty unfair to lay the blame on the Senate as a whole. Rather, it’s the government’s fault – both in introducing the bill so late, and sending it to the Senate at the very last minute, and in their Leader in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, who controls the agenda. He could have ensured that the Senate sat long enough to pass it, but we’ve seen over the past three-and-a-half years that Harder has been absolutely allergic to staying later than the Commons does, even though the Senate is actually scheduled to sit for an extra week at the end of each sitting, like they always do. Harder, however, has steadfastly refused, and the Independent senators haven’t pushed back. If you want someone to blame, start there.

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Roundup: Frivolously calling in CSIS

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Because there is nothing that the current strategic geniuses in the Conservative leader’s office won’t do to turn an issue into some kind of cartoonish conspiracy or a theatrical production, they decided yesterday to write an open letter to CSIS to demand that they open an investigation into John McCallum, citing that he was trying to direct the Chinese into interfering in the Canadian election. No, seriously.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1149729121230045185

To not put too fine of a point on this, calling in national security agencies over a partisan issue is not only highly unserious, it’s dangerous because it not only politicises CSIS, but it also fuels the current rage by those on engaging in illiberal populism of accusing those who engage in legitimate political disagreement of being treasonous. And while Lisa Raitt would take to Twitter to try and defend this with overly cute legalistic justifications, the broader point stands. Leave CSIS out of your political theatre. This should be a no-brainer. And yet…

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149745283825315840

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149748705395904517

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149819453124894721

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149819454878035968

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Roundup: The hollow discontent

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The Council of the Federation meeting has concluded, and Jason Kenney is again giving warnings about national unity, but given that his thesis is a house built of lies, one should probably take it with a grain or two of salt. There were the usual demands of higher healthcare transfers (ironic given that the premiers are largely conservatives, at least one of whom was in Harper’s Cabinet when he reduced the rate of increase on those transfers), and federal assistance with pharmacare, and the platitudes about increasing labour mobility – for which we’ll see if Kenney’s theatrical moves around unilaterally reducing a handful of the province’s trade barriers will get any traction. It was noticeable that he didn’t decide to join the national securities regulator, and for as much as Andrew Scheer tried to swoop in with press releases about how Justin Trudeau had “failed” on interprovincial trade, the reality is quite the opposite – after achieving the trade deal with the provinces and the negative list of barriers, they have made substantial progress on chipping away at it.

There was some disagreement – François Legault continued his opposition to pipelines (which throws a giant wrench into their visions of “national energy corridors” that are being used as code-words for pipeline access routes), and Brian Pallister and to a lesser extent, Doug Ford, sniped back at Legault about his province’s “secularism” bill, that the other premiers mostly didn’t say anything about.

When all was said and done, however, it became noticeable how hollow Kenney’s attempt to build some kind of coalition of discontent was – while he was trying to insist on a brewing unity crisis, all of the other premiers were pretty much “one or two disagreements, but we’re good otherwise.” Which kind of blows Kenney’s narrative out of the water – especially when he was forced to admit that the province doesn’t really want to separate. It’s a tacit admission that once again, this is just using lies to try and keep people angry because he thinks he can use that to his advantage, but not enough other premiers want to play with that particular bonfire.

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Roundup: Weasel words on conversion therapy

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In the wake of the Liberals announcing that they were looking at what measures they could take at a federal level to ban “conversion therapy,” the question was put to Andrew Scheer if he opposed it. Scheer responded that while he opposes “forced” conversion therapy, he will wait to see what the government proposes around banning it before if he’ll support it. The Conservatives quickly cried foul that the Global news headline was that “Andrew Scheer will ‘wait and see’ before taking a stance on conversion therapy ban” was just clickbait that didn’t reflect his actual quotes (and Global did update their headline), but not one of them pointed out the fact that Scheer’s own words were, to be frank, weaselly.

Scheer said that he opposed “forced” conversion therapy, and that he’s opposed to “any type of practice that would forcibly attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation against their will or things like that.” And you note the weasel words in there – about only being opposed to “forced” therapy, or to change it “against their will.” The giant implication that not one conservative rushing to defend Scheer is that there are types of “voluntary” conversion therapy that he is okay with, and that is alarming because any kind of so-called “conversion therapy” is torture, whether entered into voluntarily or not – and it ignores that when people enter into it voluntarily, it’s because they have such a degree of self-loathing that they have deluded themselves into believing that they can change their sexual orientation in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and a lot of that self-loathing comes from the sorts of violence, whether physical, mental or spiritual, that has been inflicted upon them. And it does look entirely like Scheer is being too cute by leaving a giant loophole in the window for his religious, social conservative flank to not feel threatened by his position, because it lets them carry on with the mythology that there is such a thing as “voluntary” conversion therapy, and that this is all about their “love the sinner, hate the sin” bullshit that asserts that homosexuality is just a learned behaviour and not an intrinsic characteristic. So no, I don’t think Scheer has been at all unequivocal.

Meanwhile, Scheer’s apologists will demand to know why the government refused to act on a “conversion therapy” ban when presented with a petition about it in March, but again, this is an issue where there is a great deal of nuance that should be applied. The government response was that these practices tend to fall under healthcare or be practiced by health professionals, which makes it provincial jurisdiction, and that while there can be some applications of the Criminal Code with some practices, it required coordination with the provinces to address, which they have been doing. What the Liberals announced this week was that they were seeing if there were any other measures they could take federally, which might involve the Criminal Code. Again, it’s an issue where it’s hard for them to take a particular line, so they’re trying to see what it is possible to do – that’s not a refusal, it’s an acknowledgement that it’s a complicated issue.

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Roundup: Attacking his own plan

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Andrew Scheer’s sudden denunciation of the planned clean fuel regulations got some reaction yesterday, partly from the government, and partly from economists who deal with this kind of thing for a living. Scheer’s labelling it a “secret fuel tax” is more than a little odd, because it’s exactly the kind of thing he’s proposing by removing the transparent federal carbon price and replacing it with more costly regulations, which would get passed onto consumers in a hidden way without any of the rebates that the current federal backstop programme provides – in other words, doing exactly what he’s accusing the Liberals of doing. The government noted that Scheer’s 4¢/litre figure are just a guess because the regulations haven’t been finalised yet (though some economists say it’s about right based on current projections), but again, it needs to be driven home that this is exactly the kind of thing that Scheer himself is proposing, but without the added “technology is magic” sheen attached.

To that end, here’s economist Andrew Leach’s mock open letter to Scheer.

Meanwhile, Heather Scoffield points out that this latest attack by Scheer risks boxing him in, and attacks his credibility on the climate file.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1148609609424429057

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