Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: The PBO’s update won’t stop the disinformation

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The Parliamentary Budget Officer’s revised report on the distributional impacts of the carbon levy was released yesterday, and lo, it reconfirmed that indeed most households are better off with the rebates than what they pay—most especially the bottom 40 percent of households by income. It also showed a much, much smaller impact on the overall economic impact when broken out per household, which is a significant change from his initial report, and what the Conservatives in particular weaponized. They still are—Question Period was full of those same figures being mendaciously framed as costing individual households when it’s talking about the impacts on GDP when broken out into the abstract figure of per-household costs, which is not how the economy works, and yes, any climate action is going to have an impact on GDP, but inaction is also going to have an even larger impact. But lying liars are going to lie about what these numbers mean, because nobody will actually explain the difference to them.

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1844402178200670530

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1844402188518605295

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1844402192742269299

With that in mind, take a look at the varied headlines, and guess the outlets:

As you can gather, at least one of those headlines is incredibly misleading, and unsurprisingly, some were framing this in explicitly the same terms the Conservatives are.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1844551195257446581

As well, Yves Giroux went back on Power & Politics to talk about his updated report, and thankfully David Cochrane gave him the gears for it, because he continues to refuse to take responsibility for the state of confusion and disinformation that his previous report has left the country and the political discourse in. I was also struck by the fact that he kept saying that these are the government’s own numbers—so what exactly is his office doing if they’re not independently coming up with their own figures as is the whole gods damned point of why the office was created? It just keeps reiterated how Giroux is completely unsuited for this job, and needs to resign because he’s clearly making the case for why this office needs to be abolished.

Programming note: I am taking the full long weekend off, so have a good Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you on Wednesday.

Ukraine Dispatch

Overnight attacks by Russia and those into Thursday hit civilian and critical infrastructure in cities like Mykolaiv and Kherson. There is also fierce fighting in the strategic city of Toretsk as Russians increase pressure on the eastern front. Ukrainian forces hit an ammunition depot in a Russian airfield in the Adygeya region, about 450 km from the front line.

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Roundup: Inappropriate behaviour but no traitors

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Of the testimony at the Foreign Interference committee yesterday was the prime minister’s current National Security and Intelligence Advisor, who spoke about the allegations surrounding MPs in the NSICOP report. She stated that, having seen that intelligence and its updates since the report, she’s seen no indication of “traitors” in our Parliament. What she saw in the intelligence was inappropriate conduct and a lack of judgment in certain individuals, but no espionage, sabotage, or putting of Canadian security at risk.

This brings us back to the next steps in terms of any bad behaviour by MPs or lack of judgment, and what should be done about it, and once again, the answer is and always has been that the party leaders need to get involved. That means security clearances, and full briefings on the materials, so that they know what has been alleged, and that they can take corrective action in some fashion. (And before you say anything, yes Poilievre has a clearance as a former minister, but he has refused to be briefed under the specious reason that if he gets briefed, he’ll be “gagged,” which is nonsense and he knows it).

But as Philippe Lagassé points out, the chair of NSICOP also should have done more to be transparent than simply say what was in the report is enough, and leave it at that. Most people didn’t and won’t read the report, and media outlets taking those two or three sentences without context elsewhere in the document didn’t help either. Elizabeth May demonstrated that he could have gone further and said more without breaching any kind of confidentiality, but he chose not to for his own reasons, and so we’ve had months of suspicion for little reason.

#cdnpoli, all day every day.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2024-10-09T13:27:43.894Z

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian missile hit the port in Odesa, killing six, injuring eight, and damaging a Panamanian-flagged container ship. A further drone attack in the same region hit an apartment building, injuring another five. A Ukrainian drone strike has hit another Russian arms depot, which includes arms provided by North Korea.

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Roundup: Committee as clown performance

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Because we no longer really have a Parliament, but merely a content creation studio that occasionally passes legislation, we find ourselves in yet another series of events where the institution is being weaponized for social media content. It’s not just the privilege filibuster happening in the House of Commons, though that definitely is happening (the Conservatives are taking the opportunity to get the words “corruption” and “Liberal insiders” in all of their talking points so they can create clips from them, never mind that the word “Liberal” was nowhere to be found in the Auditor General’s report on SDTC). Today, Jagmeet Singh has decided he needs another stunt for his own socials.

Singh plans to attend the Natural Resources committee meeting after Question Period, so that he can “stand up to big oil and gas,” by which he means the CEO of Cenovus Energy and the vice president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, both of whom are appearing by video conference as part of the study on the Trans Mountain Expansion. To drive home the point, party leaders don’t appear at committees (Elizabeth May occasionally accepted, because hers is a party of two, and she occasionally wants to participate in a committee meeting). Singh, however, is going tomorrow for the sole purpose of putting on a dog-and-pony show for the cameras.

This isn’t Singh’s first time doing so, mind you. He did it with the grocery CEOs, where he comically brough in a huge stack of papers, claiming they were questions from Canadians to those CEOs, but he didn’t ask a single one, but merely soliloquized for the cameras in the NDP’s designated spots. It was a pure clown performance for the sake of clips, but the NDP fell all over themselves to insist how great it was, and now Singh wants to do this again. Why now? Well, probably because he slit his own throat and immolated what little credibility he had when he walked away from his agreement with the Liberals in bad faith, and played into Pierre Poilievre’s hands, and now he wants to redeem himself and play up his precious illusions about sticking it to corporations. You can bet this is going to be another clown show that he’ll pat himself on the back over, and absolutely everyone’s time will have been wasted.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian shelling killed one and injured five in the Kherson region, and guided bombs killed two and inured thirty in Kharkiv. Russian forces have reached the frontline city of Toretsk, and they are advancing to the centre of the town. Ukrainian forces are maintaining “sufficient pressure” on Russian troops in the Kursk region of Russia, as they hold captured territory for a third month.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1843704158240821371

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Roundup: Unserious about monetary policy

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Amidst party leaders making boneheaded tax promises in the three provincial elections going on right now (no, BC, you can’t forgo taxes on tips without trying to change federal tax authorities), economist Stephen Gordon has decided to revisit Pierre Poilievre’s promise to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada—something he doesn’t have the power to do—and looks at the supposed reasons why. Unsurprisingly, they don’t add up.

In other words, Poilievre is performatively trying to once again blame inflation on someone other than the global supply chain crunch, or the climate-related droughts that impacted food prices (to say nothing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), and has been pursuing bullshit attacks as a distraction. Those attacks included trying to bring the Bank under the purview of the Auditor General so that they could order her to do “performance audits” on their decisions during COVID (something she has no expertise in doing), because they are not serious people, and get all of their ideas about macroeconomics from crypto bros on YouTube. It’s really, really depressing that anyone thinks they are remotely qualified to govern.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian shelling killed one person and injured six in the eastern city of Sloviansk. A Russian missile also struck near a major Ukrainian airbase, while Russians fired missiles at two grain vessels on the Black Sea. Russian forces have also entered the outskirts of Toretsk, which is another frontline settlement. Ukrainian forces took credit for the strike on an oil depot in occupied Crimea, which has been fuelling Russia’s war effort, as well as sabotaging a Russian minesweeper in its Black Sea fleet.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1843234630754836742

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Roundup: Peter Julian’s age of innocence

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Over the weekend, I kept finding myself going back to this interview with NDP House Leader Peter Julian, who is trying to act like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth when it comes to the current state of the House of Commons. Oh, they want to get work done, but if other parties make that impossible, they may have to factor that into our voting considerations.

My dude. Your leader’s decision to walk away from the deal with the Liberals in bad faith led to this situation. Your party’s decision to vote for this banana republic production order that has led to the current privilege standoff has led to this situation. Your decision to stop supporting the government in the face of relentless procedural warfare has led to this situation. You can’t just pretend like you’re the adults in the room and above it all when you were a direct contributor to this situation, and now you expect the government to pick up all of the pieces while you sit back and pretend the chaos you unleashed has nothing to do with you? Are you kidding me?

In the meantime, remember when the NDP kept saying that they don’t want to go to an election before the Foreign Interference Inquiry submitted its report, and that the government had time to make changes? What happened to that when you walked away from the deal in bad faith? The bill to implement some of those changes is still up for debate. Do those not matter anymore? Has nobody reminded you of your own words while you continue this particular fact like you didn’t cause the drama you are currently lamenting? How are you a serious political party? Honest to Zeus, you guys.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russians attacked Ukraine overnight Saturday with 87 drones and four different types of missiles. Ukrainian forces shot down another Russian plane, while Russian forces claimed they took over the village of Zhelanne Druhe.

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Roundup: Another threatened frivolous lawsuit

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There is a weird little case of monkey-see-monkey-do happening between different conservative parties around the country that has accelerated with the three provincial elections, and Danielle Smith’s upcoming leadership review, and it would all be childish if the stakes weren’t so high. A few days ago, Scott Moe started claiming that the federal carbon levy was costing the jobs of teachers and nurses in the province—a transparently bullshit claim—but the talking point got picked up in Question Period by Pierre Poilievre, and soon other premiers were doing it, including Danielle Smith. Yes, it demonstrates an intellectual and moral bankruptcy that is stunning to behold, but also just how little imagination there seems to be among parties on the right in this country (not that the NDP has much imagination of their own, as they crib the notes of the “justice Democrats” in the US with alarming frequency).

After Blaine Higgs declared that he was going to launch a fresh legal challenge against the federal carbon levy—which will immediately be thrown out of court—Danielle Smith decided she couldn’t let that one go either, so she is now threatening a new legal challenge of the federal Impact Assessment Act, which has just been through changes after the Supreme Court ruled that the earlier version did not pass constitutional muster. And just like Higgs’ challenge that has no new legal arguments to draw on, Smith is also citing things that are not legislative in nature as she plans to challenge the amended law.

The federal government isn’t having it, and Steven Guilbeault has called her out over this, but I’m not sure her behaviour will change too dramatically once she’s on the other side of her leadership review because, well, she needs to prove to her base that she is doing more than just listening to them, but acting on their batshit crazy desires as well, so we’re going to see more of this nonsense going forward.

Applies to the vast majority of #cdnpoli.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2024-10-04T23:00:28.266Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian force shot down nine out of nineteen Russian drones targeting critical infrastructure overnight Thursday. Russian advances have knocked out about 80 percent of the critical infrastructure in the logistics hub of Pokrovsk, which they are trying to capture. President Zelenskyy visited the Sumy region, which borders the captured areas in Russia’s Kursk region. Reuters has a photo gallery of the all-female anti-drone mobile air defence unit known as the “Bucha witches.”

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Roundup: Filibustering their own motion

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The current privilege fight has ground business in the House of Commons to a complete halt, thanks to the tactics of the Conservatives, and they are trying to use this as some form of blackmail on the government, particularly as the government has been unable to move the legislation around the capital gains changes. Andrew Scheer even tried to be cute during the Thursday Question yesterday and said that if the government can’t conduct its own business, then they should call an election. Because of course he did.

While I won’t relitigate why this is an abuse of privilege that sets a terrifying precedent, it has been called out by the Government House Leader that the Conservatives are filibustering themselves because the whole point of this is that it’s supposed to go to the Procedure and House Affairs Committee so that it can be decided upon what should happen, but that’s inconvenient for the Conservatives. They would rather put up every single MP to speak to this issue to run out the clock, and so that they can all recite prepared scripts that scream “Liberal corruption!” even though that’s not what the Auditor General found. (Yes, there were conflicts of interest, but the government was not implicated in this at all). Gould asserts that the Conservatives are trying to keep it away from committee because the moment that committee starts calling witnesses, legal experts will point out the abuse of the parliamentary privilege powers and that this is banana republic behaviour, and she’s not wrong, but the bigger issue here is that the plan  of the Conservatives is to make the House of Commons as completely non-functional as possible through abuse of this privilege debate (which again, should have been over in a couple of hours at most with the matter sent to committee) so that they can claim further justification for an election.

If the other opposition parties wised up and stopped playing along with the Conservatives in their desire to embarrass the government for their own partisan aims, Parliament could be functioning a lot more smoothly and things they want to get passed could, but none of them seem to care much about the long-term implications of their actions (like the banana republic precedents) because scoring points is too much fun. There also remains that the government could prorogue Parliament for a day or two in order to kill the privilege motion, but that could set them up for bigger headaches, particularly as they want certain bills out of the Sente and prorogation would reset the clocks on them. In any case, the dysfunction is intentional, and the Conservatives need to be called out on the lies they are spreading to justify this behaviour.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched a major drone attack over Ukraine, targeting 15 regions; casualties included two adults and a child after a drone struck a fuel truck in Chernihiv. Ukraine did hit Russian radar stations inside the country with long-range missiles, while Ukraine’s top commander has ordered defences bolstered in the east after the loss of Vuhledar. New NATO secretary general Mark Rutte visited Kyiv as his first trip in his new role.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1841746253052321929

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Roundup: Setting a precedent in this privilege fight

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There was a privilege debate in the House of Commons yesterday, and it’s expected to carry forward through today, on the subject of the refusal by certain entities, including the Auditor General, to turn over documents related to Sustainable Development Technologies Canada with the intention that they be turned over to the RCMP, even though the RCMP says they don’t want them, in part because it could be tainted evidence that may not stand up in court. This has been an abuse of the Commons’ privilege around the production of papers, in large part because they’re not for the benefit of the Commons or its committees, but to turn them over to the RMCP, which is also interference in their independence. Having politicians direct the police in terms of who they want investigated is the stuff of banana republics or authoritarian regimes, and it amazes me that neither the Bloc nor the NDP could recognize that fact in their quest to use any tool at their disposal to embarrass the government.

The government’s counter-argument to this abuse of privilege is not only that this erodes the independence of officers like the AG, or the RCMP, btu this becomes a dangerous precedent when it comes to Canadians’ Charter rights, particularly around unlawful search and seizure. The Conservatives mock this argument in saying there is no Charter right for government documents, but that’s the thing about precedents when you have a party who is willing to use the authoritarian playbook to their own ends. Today it’s government documents, but how long before it’s a private individual whom they want to embarrass or to encourage police intervention? We watched the Conservatives (with the assistance of the Bloc and the NDP) haul one of the partners from GC Strategies before the bar of the House of Commons, against his doctor’s wishes because he was in the midst of a mental health crisis, because they wanted to embarrass him publicly. It looks like we’re about to get something similar with Randy Boissonnault’s former business partner, who is the subject of the second privilege debate that will be taking place, possibly later today, who has also not turned over demanded documents to the committee as they are on a witch-hunt to find “corruption” that the Ethics Commissioner has repeatedly found no evidence of. And as a reminder, there has been no evidence of any criminal behaviour with the SDTC allegations, but they are trying to find that evidence using the most ham-fisted and abusive methods possible.

Having parliament go after private citizens because they’re on private little crusades, mostly for the benefit of social media clicks, is a terrifying prospect for the future, and yet we are careening down that pathway. Speaker Fergus has been useless in putting his foot down against the abuse of Parliament’s powers in this way, and we may yet be in for another Supreme Court of Canada showdown on defining these powers and when parliamentary privilege because state-sanctioned harassment. But in the meantime, we’ll see the Conservatives drag out these privilege debates in order to derail the government’s agenda, because that’s the level of absolute dysfunction we’re at.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian guided bomb struck an apartment block in Kharkiv late Wednesday, injuring at least ten civilians. There were also drone attacks on port infrastructure in Odesa and attacks on power systems in Sumy region. Ukrainian forces are withdrawing from Vuhledar after two years of grinding combat, which some describe as a microcosm of the current state of the conflict.

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Roundup: A promise to waste millions of dollars

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There are a lot of stupid, performative things being said right now, particularly in those three provincial elections, but one of the dumbest yesterday was courtesy of incumbent New Brunswick premier Blaine Higgs, who promised that if re-elected, he will mount a new legal challenge of the federal carbon levy. And to make that worse, several Conservative MPs picked that up and declared during Question Period that the challenge was already underway (it’s not), as though it were a devastating argument for their demands to “axe the tax” or to call an election.

Higgs’ promise is premised entirely on bullshit. There is no basis for him to mount a new challenge because nothing about the programme has changed since the Supreme Court of Canada already ruled that it’s constitutional and within the powers of the federal government, particularly because of the existential challenge that climate change poses to Canadians. The fact that the price is increasing or that we have been though a bout of higher inflation—which has already stabilised and returned to target, and for which the carbon levy did not actually cause any of said inflation because that’s not how inflation works—don’t change any of the legal bases or arguments around the levy. And because the Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled, any lower court that Higgs tries to mount a new challenge in is going to tell him to go pound sand.

Higgs is essentially promising to waste hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, because you know that when the courts tell him to go pound sand, they’ll also tell him to reimburse the legal costs of the federal government because they wasted everyone’s time and money in bringing such a frivolous suit in the first place. But there is a political calculus, particularly on the right, where they are prepared to waste millions of dollars in doomed legal challenges because they think that it’s good electoral calculus to show that you’re fighting. Federally, Conservatives have made this argument a number of times when the government didn’t pursue doomed appeals and just made changes, and no doubt Higgs figures that this will work the same way for him. But then again, I guess they’re not bothered by the cognitive dissonance of “we need to balance the budget” and “we need to waste millions of dollars on a doomed legal crusade,” because that might require introspection or self-awareness, both of which are in incredibly short supply in politics these days.

Pretty much all of #cdnpoli. It's really hard to be optimistic about any of it right now.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2024-10-01T14:21:44.377Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Six civilians were killed and more wounded when Russian artillery struck a bus stop in Kherson. Russian troops have also reached the centre of Vuhledar, a Ukrainian bastion in the strategic high ground of the Donbas region, which is significant because of where it borders and the supply routes it controls. Ukraine is also investigating an apparent shooting of sixteen POWS by Russian troops.

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Roundup: A double standard on barring speeches

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There was a story in the Star yesterday that I hadn’t actually noticed happening, which is that Liberal MP Yvan Baker has been barred from speaking in the House of Commons until he apologises for saying that the “Putin wing” had taken over the Conservative Party on March 20th. Baker says he has no intention of apologising for what he considers to be the truth, and the Speaker, as usual, makes little tut-tut noises about what Baker said, never mind that there is a giant double-standard at play.

If Fergus is concerned about MPs alleging that their colleagues “stand four-square behind dictators,” it’s funny that the consequences only seem to apply to Baker. After all, Conservatives on a frequent basis have said that Trudeau is in the pocket of dictators, and that he allowed foreign interference on their behalf because it benefitted his party. (There is absolutely no public evidence of this). And most egregious was that Conservative MP Rachael Thomas has said on the floor of the Commons that Justin Trudeau is a “dictator,” and she faced absolutely no censure for saying it, which makes it really hard to see why Baker is being singled out for being hyperbolic—the point was about which elements of the party’s base that Poilievre is pandering to as opposed to saying that Poilievre is under Putin’s sway—when nobody else is. (I will note that Conservative MP Mark Strahl was barred from speaking for several weeks because he refused to withdraw the remarks that someone was lying, which is a big no-no under the rules of Parliament—rules which are now being absolutely abused—but he did eventually do so).

What is perhaps the most galling in all of his was the statement that Andrew Scheer gave to the Star, in which he says “Liberals should not whine and complain because they were caught spreading disinformation and lies to divide Canadians and cover for their own total failures on Ukraine.” Erm, serial liar and promoter of conspiracy theories Andrew Scheer is lecturing Liberals on the subject, when he faces zero consequences for lying in the House of Commons on a daily basis. We already knew he had absolutely no sense of shame, but it definitely extends to a complete lack of self-awareness as well. Just utterly ridiculous.

Ukraine Dispatch

It was another bloody weekend in Ukraine which saw waves of drone attacks targeting Kyiv last night, the pounding of Zaporizhzhia with guided bombs earlier, the death of a top judge after an attack on Kharkiv, and an attack on a hospital in Sumy that killed ten. President Zelenskyy says that the front lines are “very, very difficult” as autumn descends on the conflict.

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