Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: The “filibuster” that wasn’t

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A particular level of self-aggrandisement seems to be taking hold in the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, as he describes things that are not reflective of reality. Yesterday morning, he summoned the media to a speech he delivered to caucus—something that is not uncommon for the last caucus meeting before the summer break, but we are still two weeks away from that. There, he promised that he was going to rise in the House of Commons at 7 PM and begin a filibuster of the budget bill, and that he wouldn’t stop until the government backed down and acceded to his demands.

Except it was all bullshit.

There wasn’t going to be a filibuster. The House had already passed a programming motion, thanks to the NDP, that laid out just how many hours left of debate there were before the final debate, and Poilievre couldn’t just talk and talk past he expiry of that clock. It was already set in stone. So, after another attempted abuse of remote voting as a procedural tactic (which the Deputy Speaker lost all patience with), Poilievre got up to give his five hours of allotted time. But again, this isn’t actually a filibuster because the leader of the opposition gets unlimited speaking time to certain items on the Order Paper, and this was one of them. He wasn’t filibustering anything. He was showboating.

While Conservatives flooded social media with effusive praise about how he was standing up for defenceless Canadians against the predations of the government, and they kept praising how long he was speaking, he wasn’t actually accomplishing anything other than playing to his own backbenches. It’s not like anyone other than a few shut-ins and reporters who drew the short straw were watching. He didn’t stop the budget bill, because it was already the subject of a programming motion. He just talked for the sake of it, and was even finished before midnight hit, when the time would have expired automatically. There was nothing heroic about this action, and it accomplished exactly nothing at all.

https://twitter.com/a_picazo/status/1666653154694266880

Ukraine Dispatch:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is calling for international assistance in dealing with the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, as they continue to evacuate people from floods, and local authorities rush things like drinking water to the affected area. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have gained more ground around Bakhmut, but insist that this is not part of any ongoing spring offensive.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1666417873776959489

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Roundup: Johnston’s day at committee

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As expected, David Johnston’s testimony at the Procedure and House Affairs committee was largely a three-hour exercise in partisan showboating, most especially typified by the fact that Jagmeet Singh decided to make a personal appearance at committee so that he could get clips of himself haranguing Johnston, like he tried to do with Galen Weston (and looking like a fool for the most part considering he made the big song and dance about getting thousands of questions from Canadians and asking none of them). In fact, there were almost no actual questions on foreign interference over those three hours, because of course there weren’t.

Once again, Johnstone disputed the claims that he is biased, or in any number of conflicts of interest, and further made the point that he believes the vote in the House of Commons about him was based on false information. (Also, the House of Commons has been known on several occasions to hold these votes on risible matters, especially if they think they can embarrass the government, while the only votes that really matter are confidence ones, and that’s not going to happen). He said that he didn’t reach out to MP Han Dong before he cleared him in the report, in part because of Dong’s lawsuit and because he read intelligence that countered what had been reported. (I’m also not sure why that would have been necessary if the point of the exercise was to review the intelligence). He also made it clear he didn’t see every single document, because that would be impossible, but that the intelligence services were entirely forthcoming.

One of the things we ultimately need to grapple with in this story, which media outlets are incapable of doing, is that this is a process story. It’s almost entirely a machinery of government issue in terms of intelligence dissemination and consumption, and that’s unsexy and difficult to explain, so instead, the focus remains on Johnston himself, and making details about what the government did and didn’t know as lurid as possible, helped along by the fact that the leaker(s) is shaping the narrative in a particular way, using draft documents that contained items not found in the final documents that were pushed up the chain, and there is almost certainly intention behind that, which again, there has been absolutely no self-reflection around on the part of the media organisations doing the reporting. Instead of stopping to ask if they’ve been played, they rationalise and justify. And because this is a process stories, and mainstream outlets are allergic to those, this whole affair just spins further into both-sidesing the meathead partisanship on display.

Ukraine Dispatch:

With the explosion at the Kakhovka Dam, there is now an evacuation effort underway as the region begins to flood, with 22,000 people in areas in most danger. It could also have repercussions for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which uses that water for cooling operations. There is concern that this could forestall any Ukrainian counter-offensive in the region. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the dam attack is an “environmental bomb of mass destruction,” and  has already approached the Hague about the incident. Zelenskyy also said that Ukraine is awaiting the final agreement on acquiring F-16 fighter jets. Russian, meanwhile, have been shelling an ammonia pipeline in the Kharkiv region, which has been part of the Black Sea deal around exporting grains and fertilizers.

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Roundup: Declaring war on the budget for no reason

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The Conservatives have declared war on the budget, and have begun a campaign of procedural warfare over it. It began on Friday, with the abuse of remote voting, where they abandoned the Chamber for a vote and instead all voted remotely, after which they claimed there was a “technical problem” and each of them requested that their vote be verified, thus slowing down the process immensely. (Seriously, end remote voting. It’s anathema to our system).

Yesterday they announced that they had a campaign of hundreds of amendments and other tactics at their disposal unless their demands were met—balancing the budget, and ending increases to “all carbon taxes,” meaning the federal carbon price and the clean fuel standard (which is not a carbon price, and may never see an increase in the price at the pumps if the minister has his way). Their justification for this—that these deficits are inflationary and driving up interest rates—is illiterate nonsense, and the kinds of misinformation/disinformation that we have come to expect from them. And yet, we have a bunch of pundits who insist this is “good politics.” I’m not sure how, but here we are.

More than anything, one has to wonder why they are going nuclear over this. These kinds of tactics are generally reserved for when the government crosses a line, does something that attacks Parliament, or seriously undermines Parliament or democracy. Using them for bullshit theatre continues this pattern of all tactics, no strategy that the NDP became famous for during their stint as official opposition, and it’s just abusing Parliament more than anything the government is doing. I simply cannot fathom how they feel this is going to help them, rather than simply looking like they are wasting everyone’s time.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces appear to have blown up a dam on the Dnipro River near Kherson, which could lead to mass flooding. Ukrainian forces appear to be attempting to punch through Russian lines in the south-eastern part of the country, which could be a sign that the counter-offensive is underway. Russians also launched yet another early-morning attack on Kyiv, where air defences have shot down at least 20 missiles so far.

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Roundup: Involving Elections Canada?

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The Chief Electoral Officer is talking about approaching parties about monitoring nomination races, which I have some mixed feelings about. While the impetus around this is of course the ongoing paranoia about foreign interference and the notion that Chinese agents are trying to stage-manage these contests, that’s really the least of our concerns, because more often than not, the real problem is party leaders gaming these races in order to get their own preferred candidates on the ballot. Mind you, that is increasingly becoming a quaint notion as many parties are increasingly just foregoing nomination races entirely, and the leader is simply using their powers to appoint people to nominations, which betrays the whole mechanism of grassroots politics, and the Liberals have become some of the absolute worst about this.

But seriously—Samara Canada did a study on this a couple of years ago, and it’s shocking just how much parties have put their thumbs on the scales of these contests. (It’s actually worse than the report describes because the researchers credulously believed the NDP around their own claims around open nominations, ignoring everything that had been printed about all of their paper candidates who won in 2011, who absolutely did not even visit the ridings they had been assigned to beforehand, let alone face an actual nomination battle). The drama with the current by-election in Oxford is because the retired Conservative MP is outraged that Poilievre and Scheer put their thumbs on the scale to get their friend parachuted and nominated against someone from inside the riding, which is why he’s now supporting the Liberal candidate.

The big drawback, however, is that Elections Canada monitoring these contests is likely to become even more intrusive, because parties are essentially private clubs, which is not an especially bad thing. But we also have a huge volume of registered parties in this country who will never win a seat, and if Elections Canada has to monitor all of their nominations as well, that could be a giant swelling of their bureaucracy in order to have people who can monitor every one of these contests, particularly in advance of an election call, and in the time between the election being called and the cut-off date for names to be on the ballot. I’m not sure how feasible that’s going to be. The way our laws are currently structured were done in a way to explicitly keep Elections Canada from getting involved (which is why we developed a system of leaders signing off on nominations, which in turn became abused and a tool of blackmail). So while I’m cognisant that we have a problem with nominations in this country, I’m not sure that involving Elections Canada is the right solution.

Ukraine Dispatch:

There was another round of fire against Kyiv early on Sunday, which was largely repelled in the city but a regional airfield was hit. Russian forces struck the city of Dnipro, killing a child and wounding at least 25 others in what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says have been five hundred child deaths so far. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces keep up their operations around Bakhmut, preventing Russian forces from solidifying gains in the city itself. Russians claim to have thwarted Ukrainian attacks in Donetsk province. This as Zelenskyy says that they are ready to begin the spring counter-offensive. Elsewhere, that survey of air raid shelters across Ukraine found that a quarter of them were locked or unusable, which is resulting in some charges.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1665267153778401280

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Roundup: Proactively calling in Navigator

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There was some late-in-the-day excitement in the political sphere last night as it was confirmed that David Johnston has hired crisis communications firm Navigator to help with his media relations, because of course he has. Now, there is some context here in that he hired them off the start and not only in the last week as the toxic bullshit that surrounds his report has been cranked up to eleven, but that would also mean that they were likely the ones who advised him on how to handle the allegations of the conflict of interest, which doesn’t actually exist, but the fact that he spent so much time on it during his press conference didn’t seem to help matters any.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1664764909974896640

Yes, Navigator has become something of a punchline in Canadian politics, particularly of late, and someone remarked over Twitter that it’s on par with people hiring former Supreme Court of Canada justices to burnish their reputations. (And lo, Johnston did just that as part of his ensuring he didn’t have an actual conflict of interest). And if I were to hazard a guess, I would say that this blind spot that people in politics seem to have around Navigator’s waning reputation is in part because of their clubbiness with the people who work there. It’s full of people who spent a lot of time in politics and who are still actively involved, and everyone knows them, so they feel they can trust these people they know, never mind that their reputation as a whole has taken a beating. And yeah, that blind spot is a problem.

Nevertheless, I’m not sure this news changes anything. Johnston pretty much has to keep on working because frankly, there is no one else who can take over at this point. The field has been flooded with bullshit, and the opposition attacks have made this poisonous for anyone to step into the role, either to take over from Johnston as a special rapporteur or to head a public inquiry. (I have a column on this that should be out later today).

Ukraine Dispatch:

The total air barrage countered overnight on Thursday was 15 cruise missiles and 21 drones, while President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is ordering an audit of air raid shelters after three people died after being locked out on the street during a raid. Zelenskyy has also acknowledged that NATO membership is impossible until after they win the war against Russia (for reasons that should be immediately obvious). Meanwhile, top US military officials say that Abrams tanks and F-16 jets are long-term plans for Ukraine, and training is being organised, but they won’t happen for the upcoming spring/summer counteroffensive.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1664615530215485443

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1664600643305193472

https://twitter.com/anitaanandmp/status/1664582278897434627

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Roundup: No single point of failure

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It was another big day at the Procedure and House Affairs committee as both the National Security and Intelligence Advisor, Jody Thomas, appeared, as did Bill Blair, both on the subject of what they knew about the “threats” against Michael Chong and his family. What we got was a bit more of the corroboration from the Johnston report that the process of pushing intelligence up to senior levels hasn’t been working, which is why these things weren’t noticed or acted upon earlier. Blair in particular offered more clarity about the issue with the top-secret emails and how it’s being misconstrued that he didn’t have passwords to it. No, it’s that he doesn’t have access to that system period, and CSIS prepares a package from him and brings it to him physically. He did also take a bit of a swipe at CSIS, saying that the Chong information was determined to be something that they didn’t think the minister needed to know, which is a bit petty.

What stood out for me the most was Thomas saying that there wasn’t one single point of failure here, or one link in the chain, but a flaw in the process, which is consistent with what Johnston put in his report. This is why I can’t believe that anyone who says that the report is some kind of cover-up has actually read the report because it’s quite clearly pointing to these appalling failures on the part of senior levels of government, and that is on the government to have done something about. They are responsible, and they need to fully own it in order to make the necessary changes.

I would also add that while this testimony was good to have, I still don’t see how this relates to Chong’s privileges supposedly being breached, and what remedies should be applied. There seems to be an effort to make this into a bigger issue around foreign interference, and not on the specific issue of Chong, and what the House of Commons should do if his privileges as an MP were specifically breached,  and I’m not seeing much of that.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians fired over 30 missiles and drones against Ukraine overnight, and all appear to have been shot down. The Russians also claim that they destroyed Ukraine’s “last warship” in a strike on Odessa, but Ukraine won’t talk about whether it’s true or not. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Moldova for the NATO meeting, calling for security guarantees if Ukraine can’t get NATO membership until the war is over. The European Court of Human Rights also ruled against Ukraine in denying same-sex marriage licences, which is going to need to be part of Ukraine’s hoped-for European integration.

https://twitter.com/internewsua/status/1664252937156059140

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1664311594858299402

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Roundup: Johnston carries on with the job

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As expected, all of the opposition parties voted for the NDP’s motion to call on David Johnston to step aside and for the government to call a public inquiry, and it passed. It’s a non-binding motion, and so it doesn’t have much weight, and Johnston put out a reply shortly thereafter saying that his mandate comes from government and not Parliament, so he’s going to keep doing his job. (Of note, only government and not Parliament can call a public inquiry as well, so the notion that Johnston is “not independent” because his mandate comes from government is stupid, illogical, and made in bad faith). The NDP motion also ignores one other crucial bit of reality, which is that there is almost zero chance that there would be a suitable replacement who would actually want to subject themselves to ongoing character assassination and harassment, whom every party leader can also agree to because they have no conflicts of interest, real or invented (and there are a hell of a lot of invented ones at play).

I will note that David Cochrane put these questions to Jagmeet Singh on Power & Politics last night, and Singh just flailed and kept repeating his talking points about the “appearance of bias,” and accusing Johnston’s lawyer of being biased because she has been a Liberal donor (never mind that she doesn’t actually make any decisions here), and kept saying that he wasn’t casting aspersions on Johnston when he obviously was by repeating the false accusations of bias.

Meanwhile, here’s Jessica Davis on how untenable this situation has become, which is why Johnston unfortunately remains the best-placed person to finish the job (click through for the whole thread).

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians have kept up their air attacks on Kyiv, and at least three people were killed overnight as a result. Russians are claiming that Ukrainians shelled one of their towns, and that their drones struck two oil refineries (the veracity of said claims remains untested).

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1663786012164734977

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Roundup: O’Toole claims privilege over foreign interference

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Yesterday in the House of Commons, Erin O’Toole rose on a point of privilege to say that his briefing from CSIS warned of “active” campaigns against him from China in four categories—that they are funding operatives to build propaganda campaigns against him, funding networks to amplify it, using WeChat for that purpose, and run voter suppression against his party and one MP in particular. His claim is that the government’s inability or unwillingness to act on the intelligence of foreign interference impacts his privileges as an MP.

I’m dubious that this constitutes an actual breach of privilege, because frankly, if disinformation campaigns, social media amplification and voter suppression are happening, well, his own party is just as guilty as the Chinese regime of doing exactly the same thing. I also fail to see what the House of Commons can do about addressing this supposed breach of privilege other than vote on sending a strongly-worded rebuke to the regime in Beijing. I also don’t necessarily trust that O’Toole is giving us all of the relevant details because he seemed to be very selective with what he wrote about his meeting with David Johnston on his Substack, and I cannot stress this enough, Erin O’Toole is a serial liar. Unfortunately, because he does it with a solemn tone and not, say, a clown nose and a unicycle, he manages to bamboozle a swath of the pundit class who are convinced that he’s the upstanding guy that they all want him to be rather than who he proved himself to be during his leadership, and that somehow, now that he’s no longer the leader, he’s gone back to being the guy they all want him to be. I don’t get it.

Meanwhile, the NDP used their Supply Day to call on David Johnston to step down so that the government will call a public inquiry. This while Pierre Poilievre is daring Singh to bring down the government, and Singh saying he won’t until trust is restored in elections (which is tactically stupid). The government insists they have confidence in Johnston, but it does raise the point that if everyone but the Liberals vote for this, it becomes politically untenable for the government to maintain the current course of action, even if it’s the right thing to do (because I remain unconvinced that a public inquiry will do absolutely anything more in this situation other than take three years, cost $180 million, and create a media circus with a daily drip of “revelations” that will amount to nothing but will nevertheless fuel said media circus). But this may wind up backing the Liberals into a corner and forcing them to call an inquiry, lest the damage get worse.

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Roundup: Danielle Smith stays, Alberta still a one-party state

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Well, Alberta has decided that it remains a one-party state, no matter how corrupted that party is, or how completely awful the leader is, and just how utterly unsuited Danielle Smith is for office, and that she has embraced all manner of conspiracy theories, or behaved in ways that imperilled democracy. While I have a full column on this coming out later today, there are a couple of things not mentioned therein that I did still want to mention.

One is that I cannot fathom how the whole “Take Back Alberta” narrative persisted. Take it back from whom? From what? You’ve been a one-party state for nearly fifty years, minus the four-year NDP interregnum that came about as a result of a perfect storm that in no way could be replicated this time around.

The NDP ran a weak campaign, and they are now comforting themselves with the fact that they have the largest official opposition in the province’s history, for what little it matters because Smith still has a majority, and they have no actual leverage to make any particular difference in the legislature. I am feeling some flashbacks to 2011 when the federal NDP formed official opposition and felt like they won the election, when they also handed the Conservatives a majority and they had no actual ability to make change or have leverage.

There is also still a particular ugliness in this election, as exemplified by the fact that the UCP candidate who compared trans children to faeces in cookie batter won by a landslide. Smith claims that she’s out of caucus “for good,” but I don’t actually believe her, and I have no doubt that after a few months in that penalty box, she’ll be welcomed back into the party because Smith believes in forgiveness, or some bullshit like that. And not nearly enough people will do any soul-searching over this, and this ugliness will fester.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Another night, another massive air raid against Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine, with more than 20 drones shot down as of this writing, and at least one high rise is being evacuated as falling debris has caused a fire. The constant nightly air attacks against Kyiv are taking a toll on its citizens (which is of course why the Russians are doing it). Russians did also allegedly hit a Ukrainian air base, plus port infrastructure in Odessa. There was also a Russian attack on the city of Toretsk in the Donetsk region, which killed two and injured at least eight.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1663350609385254912

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1663176973793861633

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Roundup: A rare Harper appearance

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Former prime minister Stephen Harper was recently at a Fraser Institute event in Vancouver, where he said that Chinese foreign interference is probably “far worse than we think,” and is calling for an end to what he calls “naïve globalism,” which is a pretty loaded term. On the former, one has to ask just what exactly Harper did about said foreign interference when he was prime minister, because all indications are that it was probably close to zero, as he weakened oversight over national security and intelligence agencies and put no electoral safeguards in place (as he was trying to make it harder for groups like students to vote), while he went over to Beijing to grovel before Xi Jinping for the sake of opening up trade after his earlier tough-guy stance on China wasn’t getting him anywhere. And hey, he got a panda out of it (for a little while, anyway).

On the latter, this whole “globalism” thing is pretty cringey because that’s frequently code-word for “the Jews,” and falls into a number of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Harper was a big fan of the whole “somewheres” versus “rootless cosmopolitans” view of the world, but again, the “rootless cosmopolitans” also falls into those same antisemitic tropes. This fear over “globalism” or “globalists” is pretty big in far-right circles, and Harper is using those same dog whistles.

I would also point out that in the same speech, he mentioned that his activist investment fund is located in Florida because “Florida is booming,” citing its “low taxes, low regulation, lots of spending on police and falling rates of crime.” Again, red flags because Florida is also engaging in fascistic behaviour, targeting minorities and most especially the LGBTQ+ communities, and it’s particularly alarming that he’s glossing over this while offering praise to Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith, who has also been praising Ron DeSantis as part of her campaign. (And no, the IDU is not a fascist organization, and Harper is not some Bond villain, so don’t even think about commenting on that, because I have zero patience for it).

Ukraine Dispatch:

On the anniversary of Kyiv’s founding, Russia launched its largest air assault yet on the city, with 58 out of 59 drones being shot down, the debris causing some damage including to an institute for the blind. Meanwhile, Russian attacks have eased in and around Bakhmut, possibly because of the Wagner Group handover.

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1662337489334419458

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