Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Cowardly responses on MAiD expansion

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It was not a surprise that the majority of the special joint committee on MAiD recommended that the government “pause indefinitely” on expanding access to those whose sole condition is a grievous or irremediable mental illness. The fix was in on this committee from the start—the chairs were both anti-MAiD advocates, and the Conservative position going in was to be against, while many Liberals have become squeamish. It was also no surprise to see that there were five supplemental or dissenting reports to the main report, most of them from senators on the joint committee, four of whom were keen to call bullshit on the process that was torqued, ignored certain expert witnesses, and where the biased chairs put their thumbs on the scale all the way through.

To be frank, there was a lot of cowardice on display. Those senators and the Bloc members all wanted the matter referred to the Supreme Court of Canada, because once again, MPs don’t want to have to make an important decision without being dragged, kicking and screaming, by the Court to do the right thing. There is a well-established pattern in this country, and it should surprise absolutely no one that they want to continue it. In addition, the position that people with a grievous and irremediable mental illness cannot access the same remedy as someone who has the same condition plus a comorbidity is untenable, and is going to be found to be unconstitutional when this is dragged through the courts, which it inevitably will be because the government is cowardly.

Finally, the notion that the federal government shouldn’t legislate in their area of competence—the Criminal Code—because provinces refuse to provide the necessary healthcare and social services makes this whole debate infuriating. Just about as infuriating as the federal government tinkering with the law of bail in the Criminal Code because provinces refuse to properly resource their court systems, which is where the real problem lies. So once again, people suffer while the provinces get off scot-free for abdicating their responsibilities, while the Liberals continue to backtrack on their being the “Party of the Charter.” What a sorry state we’re in.

My Latest:

My column tracks the state of play in Question Period, and Mark Carney’s infrequent appearances and disappointing performance, even it’s his job to answer to MPs.

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Ham-fisted programming motions on bad bills

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As the spring sitting of Parliament winds down, the government has decided to be maximally ham-fisted in order to ram through several bills for no good reason at all. In the Commons, they put through a programming motion to speed through the lawful access bill (which, to be clear, is a very bad bill that is going to get struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada), but this motion was full of procedural fuckery, including retroactive deadlines on amendments, and no time to debate the amendments that they did have prepared, so they were going to be straight up-down votes, because they insist that this pass the Commons before they rise, even though the Senate is not going to look at it until the fall. Why the rush? Because they are reaching the kinds of arrogance that is the usual Achilles heel of the Liberals, and it’s going to cost them.

This is exactly the Liberal arrogance that always, without fail, comes to bite them in the ass.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-06-17T01:19:27.773Z

Over on the Senate side, they have also put through a programming motion on three bills that the government insists they need passed before the summer, but this motion essentially gives these complex pieces of legislation a single day of study at committee at which point they are deemed to have passed, no matter if they vote or not. That’s absolutely insane, and quite frankly abusive, and is contemptuous of the job the Senate is supposed to be doing. But this is how Carney and his crew have decided they want to treat Parliament. I would say it’s unbelievable, but no, we’ve come to expect this kind of behaviour, and it needs to be callsed out.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-06-16T19:08:17.950Z

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A privacy bill that takes away from the Privacy Commissioner

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The federal government tabled long-overdue privacy reform legislation yesterday, which is intended to work in concert with their Digital Asbestos For All Strategy, and while there are some needed updates within it, there are also some concerning aspects. For example, there will be more powers to demand deletions from online searches (“right to be forgotten” powers), and while they are going to give the federal Privacy Commissioner more powers like he’s been begging for, they are going to restrict him to only public sector complaints and hive off private sector complaints to this new Digital Safety Commissioner. They’ve also decided to jump on the “surveillance pricing” hysteria, which both lets Avi Lewis claim a victory, but they have no details on how this will work, to say nothing of the fact that consumer protection is a provincial responsibility!

I have regularly butted heads with the Privacy Commissioners we've had over the past 20+ years, but sidelining an organization with decades of experience to empower an as yet unconstituted body is frankly shocking. #BillC34

— David TS Fraser (@privacylawyer.ca) 2026-06-15T21:41:45.003Z

It's worth noting that there's nothing new in #BillC36 that has anything to do with "surveillance pricing". The provision that the Minister pointed to in his presser has been in PIPEDA since 2001.

— David TS Fraser (@privacylawyer.ca) 2026-06-15T22:42:03.453Z

The fact that they are taking the new Digital Safety Commissioner that is being created as part of the Online Harms legislation, and loading him or her up with these enormous new powers is concerning, as is the fact that this commissioner will report to government and not to Parliament. I worry about creating a new regulator with so much scope of authority that it will need to build an enormous bureaucracy off the start, meaning it will be slow to start up, slow to react, and eventually start empire-building, particularly given how much online regulation it is being asked to do in addition to privacy work. We will have to see if the government bothers to offer a justification for this model (which they may not!) but I suspect we’ve got a long summer ahead of Evan Solomon exhorting the opposition to pass this while pretending it’s the solution to all of our problems.

A modernized privacy law should be something that gets broad support, but I think the creation of this new super-regulator that reports to the government and not parliament may be this bill's undoing. #BillC36

— David TS Fraser (@privacylawyer.ca) 2026-06-15T23:09:34.362Z

https://bsky.app/profile/joshtabish.bsky.social/post/3moeciabcks2u

My Latest:

  • For National Magazine, I delve into Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada decision on why all future Lieutenant Governors of New Brunswick needs to be bilingual.
  • My weekend column on how the Liberals have shamelessly reversed their policies so many times under Carney that they are virtually just Conservatives now.

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A long-term food strategy

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Yesterday, before jetting off to the G7 in France, prime minister Mark Carney was in Toronto to unveil the details of his national food security strategy. The initial announcement was a couple of months ago, when he announced the rebranding and expansion of the existing GST credit, and the details for this new strategy could bear fruit (groan!) in the long-term, but I worry that he is raising expectations that these measures will lower food prices immediately. They won’t. Building up new food production infrastructure via greenhouses and vertical farms will take time and a lot of dollars to get off the ground, as will creating new domestic processing capabilities, which we may not even have the necessary labour for. Same thing with bolstering the rules around competition in order to attract new entrants into a marketplace dominated by oligopolies—you can’t unwind that in a day, and certainly not without just inviting in more American companies, which would go against the notion of trying to ensure food sovereignty.

Again—these kinds of investments and commitments to increasing domestic production and processing are good, and overdue. But in the vein of you can lead a horse to water, corporate Canada is not all that keen on investing in things, including productivity measures, because they are too accustomed to relying on trade with the US (which they keep pinning all of their hopes on normalising once more, as though there will be no lasting damage from the country descending into outright fascism), and their whole modus operandi is about getting monopolistic power and becoming a rent-seeker rather than investing in productivity or innovation. And yes, Canadian food prices are very high, and only part of that has to do with the fact that we’re a cold-weather country that needs to import a lot of what we eat. This is a strategy built for the long-term, and that’s great, but I know that by September, Pierre Poilievre will stand up in Question Period every day and declare that this new strategy hasn’t reduced food prices, so therefore we must burn everything down for the sake of tax cuts and going harder on trickle-down economics (and the government will respond by patting themselves on the back). They’re going to have to do the hard work of pushing this and then actually defending, and I have doubts that they are capable of doing just that.

Jennifer Robson has additional thoughts on the announcement.

My Latest:

My Xtra column points out how much Mark Carney patted himself on the back for doing the absolute bare minimum at this year’s Pride flag raising.

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Reversing themselves on age verification

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The government’s online harms bill dropped yesterday, and while there are some good parts to it, there are some very, very bad parts that I am absolutely outraged about. Because this government has developed a real penchant for major omnibus bills, this contains parts of the previous online harms bill, such as the duty to act responsibly for platforms around safe design for sites and apps, which is the good part. It dropped the hate crime provisions that included restoring some of the functions of the Human Rights Tribunal around hate, which were controversial to begin with, but was also about trying to respond to the increasing amounts of hate being seen online. It seeks to create a Digital Safety Commission as the regulator in charge of the online harms scheme, who will oversee enforcement and implementation. It has a partial social media ban for youth under sixteen, but is also incorporating the age verification scheme of that Senate Public Bill, S-209, which has failed time and again, and which the Trudeau government opposed for all of the right reasons, including the fact that age verification cannot work without becoming mass surveillance (and yes, this is the part that I am absolutely livid about). (More from CBC here and here).

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3mnxuplffys2b

Part of what is so infuriating is that they are putting the age-gating into this legislation, but there are no details on how that is going to work, other than mention of “age estimation,” which is poor technology when it can have trouble distinguishing between a fifteen and a sixteen year-old, and doesn’t work well for anyone who is racialised or trans (and certain age estimation technologies have been easily thwarted with fake moustaches). And remember, this is technology that everyone on the internet is going to be subjected to, which is inevitably going to involve mass surveillance, and the loss of internet privacy writ-large. The Liberals have reversed themselves yet again, shamelessly. (For more, here is Michael Geist’s first impressions of the legislation).

My Latest:

My column highlights remarks that Louise Arbour made about diversity during her installation speech, given we are at a time of increasing ethnic/white nationalism.

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Expecting an online harms disaster

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The federal government will be tabling their online harms legislation today, and it looks like it’s going to include some form of ban on social media for youth under the age of sixteen, which is going to be little more than an invitation to create mass online surveillance, because everyone will need to verify their ages and identities in order to access social media or adjacent sites. Meanwhile, that will do very little to actually deal with the harms, and it’s likely going to be unconstitutional in the first place.

here’s me from earlier on power & politics talking digital safety act (tldr: age appropriate design codes + duty to act responsibly > age bans)

— Supriya Dwivedi (@supriya.bsky.social) 2026-06-10T00:48:36.353Z

As we anticipate a social media ban to be proposed by the Canadian government tomorrow, it's worth noting in the Charter of Rights: "everyone" includes young people and "media of communication" includes social media.

— David TS Fraser (@privacylawyer.ca) 2026-06-09T21:59:05.964Z

This being said, the Liberals are already going past Helen Lovejoy and going directly to “children are dying,” which makes me suspect that they are going to try and use their majority to ram this through, in spite of what are likely to be massive problems with it, and the fact that the problems that they are having with their lawful access bill are likely to be magnified. Any kind of online age verification is bad news no matter how it’s dressed up, and this is going to be no different in the end. I do not have confidence that they will be able to pull this off without a lot of hand-waving and “just trust me,” and “surely these companies can figure out a way to do it” when that way is more mass surveillance and siphoning even more data.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-06-09T19:08:01.734Z

My Latest:

For National Magazine, I recap what Chief Justice Richard Wagner had to say during his annual press conference, particularly on defending judicial independence.

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Political blackmail under the guise of a unity speech

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Pierre Poilievre kicked off his supposed “unity campaign” in Calgary yesterday (as he skipped the installation of the Governor General to do so), and gave a speech which was little more than a remix of the same campaign speech he’s been giving for three years now. And not even a good remix, but a shitty extended dub mix that is mostly just a lot of electronic noise. In it was the usual litany of invented grievances that Albertans have been touting for years—pretending that the federal government is somehow interfering in their jurisdiction, or that Justin Trudeau’s environmental policies were somehow strangling the province’s resource sector and that the global oil price crash of 2014 didn’t happen (just like the oil price crash of 1981 didn’t happen, and all of their woes were the fault of Pierre Trudeau). It’s a tired mythology that is not true, but is so intrinsic to the core of the invented grievances that have dominated Alberta politics for more than four decades.

But what is particularly dangerous about this kind of tactic is that it hijacks a potential national unity crisis for partisan ends. It makes unity conditional on the conservatives, federally or provincially, getting their own way as though there aren’t political considerations in the rest of the country either. As Andrew Coyne puts it, this message posits that the rest of the country needs to “prove” that it’s worth saving, and if that means dismantling what little federalism we have in this country, then so be it. The notion that the only Canada worth having is their narrow vision of the country, which is exclusionary and frankly mean, is not a unity message. It’s little more than the same kind of blackmail that Danielle Smith and Jason Kenney before her were trying to use in leveraging separatist sentiment to hold a knife to their own throats to force concessions from the federal government because they think it worked for Quebec. (It did not, and Quebec’s economy has never actually recovered). It’s fundamentally undemocratic, and shows them to be little more than crybabies who can’t handle the fact that sometimes democracy means you lose at politics.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-06-08T19:08:01.492Z

My Latest:

  • My latest for National Magazine on Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada decision and the warning they gave to judges about how to do a credibility analysis.
  • My weekend column takes note of the way in which Poilievre’s rhetoric tends to catastrophize what is happening, along his tendency to rewrite history.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take on that Conservative MP trying to refuse his raise, and why that kind of populism is poisonous to democracy.

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Digital Asbestos For All!

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The prime minister and his minister of digital asbestos, Evan Solomon, released their “Digital Asbestos for All” strategy in Toronto yesterday, which involves giving half a billion dollars to firms to scale up their adoption of said digital asbestos, and doing a lot of back-patting about sovereign capability—or at least laying the foundations for it—and there were some utterly fantastic estimations of just how many jobs this will create. And by fantastic, I mean it looks an awful lot like fantasy. But it’s also a lot about trying to get people hooked, through giving access to ‘trusted [digital asbestos] agents” to all post-secondary students, which is not what professors want and is going to make their lives more difficult as they already have a hard enough time preventing cheating using these tools. They are also promising a “National [digital asbestos] Literacy Initiative” that involves training and tool-kits available to educators, which feels a lot like giving pot to high school students and telling them it’s good for them.

"Provide access to trusted AI agents for every post-secondary student – from the arts and commerce to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and medicine."I'm pretty sure that nobody who teaches in a post-secondary institution asked for this, and this makes their jobs even harder.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-06-04T15:46:27.206Z

If this wasn’t bad enough, there was a whole lot of handwaving from Solomon about “building trust” and “safety” without actually saying how they’re going to ensure that these platforms can be trusted, or what kinds of safety measures they’ll put into place. On Power & Politics, David Cochrane was giving Solomon the gears about how he can possibly make these kinds of promises when the tech bros controlling these companies have more money than many economies at their disposal so fines won’t be of any use, and they have the weight of the Trump administration behind them, so trying to force them to build any kinds of safety features that they don’t want to build are extremely unlikely to happen. And Solomon wouldn’t answer, but just kept repeating his lines. “Trust” is a whole lot of “just trust me,” and I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough. But that’s all that this government is going to offer, because Mark Carney and Solomon have guzzled all of the tech bro hype, and they’re going to pour all kinds of money into this just as the bubble is about to burst. We’re going to lose so much money, while this government is already cutting spending to programmes that need it, and we’re all going to pay the price because they couldn’t stop guzzling the hype.

My Latest:

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Roundup: Capitulating to the streaming giants

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Just days after the CRTC outlined the obligations under the Online Streaming Act that web giant streaming services would need to abide by when it comes to a portion of their Canadian revenues to be sent to Canadian content funds (which, to be clear, they could then draw from in order to develop shows and put on their platforms), and a day after Dominic LeBlanc was in Washington for more trade talks, the government decided to try and walk back these CRTC obligations. Minister Marc Miller ordered the CRTC to review the decision (as he can’t outright ignore it, as the CRTC is a quasi-judicial body) but with a “focus on affordability” as the claim is that these streaming services will simply raise their prices and Canadian households are already hit hard. Oh, but they’ll devote $600 million to Canadian media in lieu of these funds.

They insist it’s not a capitulation, but that’s exactly what it feels like, particularly since Trump mouthpieces were grousing that this levy was “discriminatory” (it’s not—it levelled the playing field with Canadian broadcasters and streaming services), and that it was yet another “trade irritant” as though they are allowed to throw up whatever tariffs they want (this week: New ten percent tariffs because of forced labour, but don’t look at their own deals with China, or the forced labour that comes from American prisons). Miller also insists that because the funds collected to date were frozen due to court challenges also seems to be beside the point. The point was that these web giants are taking Canadian money and giving nothing back (and no, treating our production studios as a resource colony is not exactly giving back), so having them contribute the same way a Canadian broadcaster contributes was both fair, and, I stress again, gave them the option to use these same funds that they contributed in order to create their own Canadian content that they could put up on their platforms.

I’m not going to engage in any kind of elbow discourse, but when you consider just how much these web giants and the tech bros that own them are integrated into Trump’s fascist regime, capitulating to them yet again is not exactly giving the impression that we’re protecting Canada’s cultural sovereignty, or that all the talk about Heated Rivalry and how much of a success it’s been is hollow if we keep letting the web giants dictate our own cultural policy. Where is the self-respect that should be a bare minimum in this conversation?

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-06-03T13:08:04.315Z

My Latest:

My column on legacy columnists opining about the “condescension” of central Canadians when it comes to Alberta separatists and their crybaby tendencies.

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Davies’ go-nowhere bill to ban floor-crossing

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Perhaps out of a need to feel a sense of relevance as his party disappears into the woodwork, the NDP’s Don Davies tabled a private members’ bill yesterday that would ban floor-crossing and require an MP to run in a by-election before changing parties. This is little surprise for the NDP, who have declared their dislike of floor-crossings, probably because people like to cross away from them, as was most especially the case in the post-2011 caucus when Lise St. Denis saw the illegal stunts they were trying to pull with their “regional office” scheme and demanding parts of her office budget to do so and said “Nope,” and crossed to the Liberals, while another one of their MPs joined with a former Bloc MP to try and start a new Quebec party that went nowhere. Lori Idlout is just the latest who decided there was no future in the NDP.

“The power to decide who governs belongs exclusively to Canadian votes [sic],” Davies concluded.This fundamentally misunderstands parliamentary democracy, which is frankly on-brand for the NDP.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-06-02T17:39:49.995Z

The NDP, at least federally, fundamentally believe that party trumps individual—they are the most whipped caucus in Parliament, and they have an internal culture that demands “solidarity,” so MPs that stray from those lines face bullying, and if they vote against the party line, they face punishments. This is long-standing. (It’s also not just federal—there were allegations of internal bullying in the Rachel Notley caucus as well, and Wab Kinew kicked someone out of his party for the most dubious of reasons). Davies’ press release, however, also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of parliamentary democracy, which is that voters elect a parliament, and that parliament decides on who forms government. Yes, we have reduced this to a bunch of shorthand around the party with the most seats, etcetera, but fundamentally, we elect individual MPs to a parliament, we don’t elect governments. Electing individuals means that they get to make their own choices including whether they want to continue to sit with the party they were elected under, and then voters can hold them to account in the next election.

The NDP doesn’t understand or believe in that, instead espousing a bunch of nonsense about being elected under a team banner so therefore that team is more important than the individual. What they are instead saying is that MPs don’t matter—they shouldn’t have rights, and they shouldn’t have their own agency, because the party is everything. That’s the thing that is actually fundamentally undemocratic, and that’s why Davies bill should go down in flames—not that it will ever see the light of day, because he’s near the bottom of the Order of Precedence, and it is mathematically impossible for his slot to come up before the next election.

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