Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Andrew Scheer, media critic

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In the wake of Bill C-11 receiving royal assent, Conservatives have been doing a full court press on social media to denounce this supposed “censorship” bill (which is nothing of the sort—it obligates web giants and streaming services to report Canadian revenues and pay into media creation funds based on a percentage of those revenues). And because he’s a wannabe fourteen-year-old shitposting edgelord, Andrew Scheer is taking shots at the media about the reporting on this.

What you might notice is that Scheer is calling The Canadian Press newswire “CBC’s news service” because CBC is one of CP’s clients and the content they buy from the wire funds its operations. This, of course, taints CP in the Conservatives’ estimation, and Pierre Poilievre bullied a CP reporter about this at a press event a couple of weeks ago, and tried to insinuate that this means that they somehow fit stories to the government narrative in order to get that CBC money. It’s a complete fabrication, but it’s intended to be—this is all about flooding the field with bullshit.

Scheer goes on to complain about how the story is covered—because he’s a media critic, don’t you know. The story doesn’t quote a Conservative source, but it cites their (misleading) position that the bill is “censorship” (again, this is a lie), but because it’s CP, it rather obsequiously both-sides everything. It doesn’t actually call out the Conservative position as the bullshit that it is, but because it’s not complete stenography of the Conservative line, it must be “bought media” and advances this farcical notion that the government is “shutting down dissent.” Hardly.

But truth doesn’t matter to Scheer. He’s been trying to delegitimise mainstream media for years now (recall that he called True North (aka Rebel Lite™) and Post Millennial “credible” sources, which should tell you everything you need to know about Scheer’s media literacy skills and judgment). Even though the Conservatives have learned how to manipulate mainstream outlets with their persistent both-sidesing, and knowing that it lets them get away with lying, it’s not enough, because occasionally, that both-sidesing can showcase how much the Conservative narrative is full of falsehoods, and they couldn’t possibly have that. Best to have their own stenographers and ensure that only their narratives get out.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians made an overnight attack against civilian targets in a variety of cities, leaving at least five dead. Russian forces are also trying to cut off supply lines to Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, but the Ukrainian forces have managed to resist these attacks, and take back some other sections of the city that Russians have been occupying. Ahead of the spring counteroffensive, some 98 percent of promised NATO aid has arrived in Ukraine, amounting to over 1550 armoured vehicles, 230 tanks, and “vast amounts” of ammunition. Here’s a look at mental health supports available for Ukrainian soldiers.

https://twitter.com/gerashchenko_en/status/1651785146142453765

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1651456287408832512

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Roundup: The choices around Basic Income

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Because I saw some news stories floating around this week yet again around Basic Income and the desire for the federal government to implement it, I wanted to point out that economist Lindsay Tedds has co-authored a book which was released yesterday on how to move beyond that discussion into better alternatives, drawing on her experience from the BC Basic Income panel that she was a part of.

To that end, here is Kevin Milligan providing some back-up on why this conversation involves choices that nobody likes to ever talk about. Funny that.

And yes, most Basic Income models keep gutting the supports for those who need them the most, and that is a problem.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1651260056866811904

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces pounded Bakhmut yet again, trying to destroy buildings so that the Ukrainians can’t use them as fortifications. Elsewhere, Ukraine was able to retrieve 44 POWs from Russian company, two of whom were civilians. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had an hour-long call with Chinese president Xi Jinping, which included talk of what role China could play in the peace process with Russia.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1651129503056379905

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Roundup: The campaign leaders testify

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Yesterday was the big day when top campaign officials from the Liberals and Conservatives appeared at the Procedure and House Affairs committee to talk about foreign interference allegations in the previous two elections, and we learned a couple of things. One of which is that Fred DeLorey, the Conservative campaign director, is eminently reasonable and acknowledges they don’t know if there was any actual interference in those ridings they lost, or if it was the result of other factors, like their hard-line rhetoric on China, or gun-control measures (as the Liberal campaign insists). Another thing we learned is that the reporting on the CSIS “warnings” about MP Han Dong were not described accurately, and that they didn’t insist the party drop him as a candidate—which never did make sense if you listened to the actual intelligence experts who said at the time that that didn’t sound right.

There was also talk about how it takes an incredibly high threshold for a party to be able to drop a candidate, so if intelligence agencies had concerns, they would need to come up with something pretty tangible for the parties to exercise that kind of power (and don’t forget that their spending caps are determined by how many candidates they’re running, so if they need to drop one after the cut-off point to replace a name on the ballot, that creates even more headaches). There was also talk about how there needs to be more ongoing dialogue between national security agencies and parties, particularly between election cycles, because these agencies didn’t seem to understand how parties operated, which makes it hard for them to be making determinations about how any interference might be happening (and again, considering that the reported leaks had a bunch of details that didn’t make any sense, this could be the reason why).

Suffice to say, these were the people who should have been testifying the whole time rather than the dog and pony show we had with Katie Telford, which was just a waste of time and resources.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Russian missile struck a museum in Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region, killing one civilian and wounding ten others. As well, a woman died from shelling in nearby Dvorichna, and two others in the eastern Donetsk region. Elsewhere, Ukrainian forces staged raids on the east side of the Dnipro river in order to degrade Russian capacity, particularly in their shelling of Kherson, in a sign that the counter-offensive is near. Ukraine is planning on a “complete transformation” of six war-torn cities that were badly damaged in the invasion, to be rebuilt under an experimental programme according to “new principles.”

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1650769182286331905

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Roundup: No authority to examine

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It was not unexpected, but the Auditor General did confirm yesterday that she wasn’t going to be looking into the Trudeau Foundation’s private donations because it’s not within her wheelhouse. Which is what I’ve been saying for over a week now—the Foundation isn’t a Crown corporation, its only reporting relationship to the Industry Minister is around the status of the initial endowment, and the Conservatives put them under the Access to Information and Privacy regime in 2007 because they put all kinds of organisation with a tangential relationship to government under the regime during their performative toughness. It doesn’t fall under the Financial Administration Act, so there is no basis for the AG to examine their books.

This news of course has the Bloc somewhat apoplectic, and they insist that if she doesn’t have the authority to look into their books, then Parliament should give her that authority. Which is, frankly, boneheaded. She already has more than enough work to do. The very last thing we need to do is turn her into some kind of roving commission of inquiry for MPs to sic her upon anyone who turns their ire (through a motion in the House of Commons that she would “consider”), especially because she’s already unaccountable for her parliamentary audits. Extending those into past Parliament or Crown corporations would be a disaster.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have bene trying to weaponise the Public Accounts Committee into looking into the Foundation, which again, is beyond their ambit. It’s especially beyond their ambit because the Auditor General hasn’t produced a report on them, and she won’t—because she has no authority to—so that particular committee has no authority to look into it. And yet, they voted on doing just so, but with the caveat of not calling any elected officials or members of the Trudeau family to testify. I can’t believe that the committee clerk didn’t warn the Chair this is out of bounds, but this is an opposition-chaired committee—in this case, Conservative John Williamson—and it sounds like he opted to ignore that warning and proceed anyway, which is incredibly poor form, especially since this whole exercise is about little more than letting Garnett Genuis perform for the cameras. And once again, we prove that ours is not a serious Parliament.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Estonia’s prime minister met with president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the northwestern city of Zhytomyr, and said that she supports Ukraine’s accession to NATO “as soon as conditions allow” (which means the war has to be over and Russian forces no longer occupying territory).

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Roundup: Few details on the Canadian coronation

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As the coronation fast approaches, we’re still waiting for details in Canada about what we’re doing here, or what the events happening in Ottawa will be, or who is part of the delegation going to London for the event itself. The level of secrecy is a bit weird, but I have my suspicions that this is trying to be downplayed from the top, meaning PMO.

As for King Charles III himself, the early signs are that he’s looking to be a bit more involved and less removed than his mother tended to be, in part because that was the generation she came from. And what does that mean for Canada? Well, that’s dependent entirely upon the prime minister, because the King can only act on the advice of the PM. And this PM, well, doesn’t like it when the spotlight is away from him. He likes the “ceremonial” aspects of the job, and a lot of that stuff is what the Crown and the Governor General does. So while we’ve just had some incredibly important events in our country as a constitutional monarchy—the loss of the Queen who had been our sovereign for seventy years, and now the installation of the new King—it’s being downplayed in ways that are not healthy for us as a country, but our civic literacy about this is at terrible lows, and there is an organised campaign of misinformation about the role and nature of the Crown in this country, and Trudeau could do something about that, but he won’t, and it erodes the nature of our democracy even more.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian Forces are yet again claiming to have achieved more of a foothold in Bakhmut, while Ukrainian forces continue to insist they’re holding the line. There are also a bunch of denials as to whether or not the Ukrainians have established a foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river in the south of the country. Russian forces are also claiming to have repelled a drone attack against their Black Sea fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1650111231196536832

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1650012022371753984

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Roundup: Angst over a poor metric

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A lot of ink (or, well, pixels, I supposed) has been spilled over the past week about those leaked documents where Justin Trudeau allegedly told NATO leadership privately that Canada will never reach the two percent of GDP defence spending target, which shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who has paid a modicum of attention. And while we get these kinds of analysis pieces that try to dig more into the two percent target and its significance, we have to remember that it’s a lousy metric. Greece has been above it for years because of a stagnant economy and including military pensions in their calculations—and you can easily get to 2 percent of GDP by tanking your economy, while growing your economy makes that spending target increase impossibly. The other thing that the two percent metric doesn’t capture is engagement—Canada routinely steps up to meet its NATO commitments even without reaching the spending target, while certain European countries may meet the spending target but don’t participate in these missions (again, looking at you, Greece, but not just Greece).

Part of the problem is that while this is a conversation that requires some nuance, the two percent target is too easy for journalists to focus on, and that becomes the sole focus. It’s a problem because We The Media keep reducing this to a single binary “are we meeting/not meeting that two percent” rate, which doesn’t help advance the conversation in any way, but most of us refuse to learn because a simple binary is easier to understand/convey.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Fighting continues in the western part of Bakhmut, as Wagner Group mercenaries are worried about the coming Ukrainian counter-offensive. Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation says that new technologies are going to help them win the war, particularly as they enhance the accuracy of modern artillery.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1649397099300093954

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Roundup: Questions on regulatory efficacy

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The Environment Commissioner released a series of reports yesterday, and I have some questions about a couple of them. His first report looks into the plan to plant two billion trees and states that it won’t be achievable unless there are big changes, citing that last year’s targets weren’t met, and that the agreements with provinces and territories around this are still being worked out. While I did notice that his graph about the plans for planting these trees does backload much of it because it will take time to grow enough saplings to plant, I’m not sure that one year’s data is enough to declare imminent failure. Maybe I’m just being optimistic.

One of his reports also criticises that the government can’t track which regulations reduce how many emissions, which makes it hard to assess their efficacy. I’m just not sure how a government would go about doing so, because there are so many overlapping measures including the carbon price, and emissions have started to bend, so that we’re slowly dropping below pre-pandemic and 2005 levels, particularly as the economy is growing, which is a good sign that measures are working overall, but there is more to do. And while I appreciate what he’s trying to say, I’m just not sure how someone goes about calculating how much the inventory changed for each regulatory measure. He did also talk about how many missed targets there were, but didn’t differentiate between which stripe of government was in power, and how the previous government set targets that they deemed “aspirational,” meaning that they did nothing to attempt to meet them, while the current government’s targets are for 2030, and they could very well still meet them if they continue their current trajectory. I’m sure he doesn’t want to get into that difference as part of his role as non-partisan quasi-Officer of Parliament (he is not a standalone officer but is part of the Auditor General’s office), but it is relevant to the state of the discussion.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces had a misfire, and accidentally bombed their own city of Belgorod, near the Ukrainian border. Oops. Meanwhile, the head of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, visited president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and declared that Ukraine’s future is in NATO (but that can’t happen under NATO rules so long as they have Russians occupying their territory). Ukraine has trained eight storm brigades worth 40,000 troops for the upcoming counteroffensive. Treason charges are being laid against several Ukrainian servicemen for giving away information to Russian force during an unauthorised mission, and those Russians damaged a Ukrainian airfield as a result.

https://twitter.com/euromaidanpress/status/1649030309109813248

https://twitter.com/minpres/status/1649093237632647179

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Roundup: Impressing the Scots

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The Speaker of the Scottish Parliament paid a visit to Ottawa’s Parliament earlier in the week and was apparently so impressed with our Question Period that she plans to write a report to take suggestions from it. I’m frankly a little dumbfounded, because our QP is pretty gods damned terrible in pretty much every respect, but let me first take what her observations are.

One of them is that ours operates bilingually fairly seamlessly. Well, she didn’t see the seams, in any case. In Scotland, they have translation available for those who speak Gaelic, but it’s not automatically provided like English/French is here. But she didn’t seem to see the stress that the pandemic has caused our simultaneous interpretation abilities, from the injuries to interpreters, or the strains to resources that are now severely limiting the function of our Parliament because MPs didn’t care enough about those interpreters as they abused them over Zoom, and lo, we’re staring down a crisis.

She was impressed with the “brevity” of our QP, where it operates in thirty-five second questions and answers. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, frankly, because it has largely just created a demand for talking points, both in asking and answering questions, and so much of the exercise is useless—the questions must contain key phrases (and that’s getting worse), while the answers are frequently non-sequiturs or just bland pabulum that is disconnected from what has been asked. I’m not sure what she saw that was so impressive. The fact that it happened at a rapid pace and bilingually looks impressive from afar, but spend more than a day here, and the uglier underside quickly becomes apparent. Yes, ours can be more dynamic than Westminster’s because we don’t require questions be asked in advance in order for briefings to be prepared, so the PM must be nimble when answering, but again, most of those answers are going to be vague and superficial.

It’s kind of flattering that they’re seeing the good we have to offer, but these days, our rules and system has given rise to an increasingly unserious Chamber, and that’s not something we should be exporting to anyone.

Ukraine Dispatch:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the border with Poland and Belarus, citing a need to be ready in case Belarus became another invasion route for Russia.

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1648688637670830083

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Roundup: The optics ouroboros

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So, that big CBC/Radio-Canada “scoop” that dominated the news yesterday about Justin Trudeau’s Christmas vacation. Because this is sometimes a media criticism blog, I figured I would make a few remarks, because there were some very obvious things about it that were just being shrugged off, or actively ignored by some of my fellow journalists. To begin with, there is not a lot of substance to the story. It’s some typical cheap outrage—how dare the prime minister go on a luxury vacation on taxpayer dollars when there are people struggling in Canada—mixed with a specious connection that doesn’t mean anything in substance, but which looks bad when you make it sound sinister in order to fit it in with the current nonsense around the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. Fit those two in a particular frame that makes it sound salacious, and you have the makings of a story that dominates Question Period. Congratulations! You’ve set the agenda for the day, you can pat yourselves on the back to your heart’s content.

But the whole connection to the Foundation is a construction that implies a relationship that doesn’t exist. Yes, the Trudeau and Green families have been friends for 50 years, but the donation to the Foundation was a bequest after the death of one of the Green family members, and it was done two years ago, which was eight years after Trudeau stepped away from any involvement in the Foundation. Implying that there was something untoward about the donation and then vacationing with Trudeau—who has been family friends his entire life—is simply scandal-mongering. And this gets justified with the pearl-clutching about “optics!” But you’re the one creating the optics with the distorted framing of the situation, so you’re literally inventing a mess that doesn’t actually exist, so that you can report on the invented mess, and then report on the follow-up reactions from other political leaders who will tut about “optics.” Which you created in the first place with your framing, like some kind of ouroboros. Very convenient, that.

None of this is to say that Trudeau shouldn’t know better than to take these kinds of trips, because he knows full well that there is an intrinsic culture of petty and mean cheapness in Canadian media, and that his opponents will take full advantage of it. And lo, the story also quotes unnamed Liberal Sources™ who are once again shocked and dismayed that the prime minister once again did something with poor optics, because that’s who he is. And Trudeau then made it worse, as pointed out in my QP recap, by not answering about the gift of the accommodations, which just perpetuates the story rather than cutting it off at the start. “Yes, I accepted the gift of the accommodations. Yes, the Ethics Commissioner cleared it. Yes, I paid the equivalent commercial rate for the flight.” And it stops their ability to try and stretch this into a scandal. But Trudeau and the people who advise his communications are so tone-deaf that they keep doing this. They keep stepping on every rake in their path, every single gods damned time.

Ukraine Dispatch:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited troops in the eastern city of Avdiivka, which is facing an advance like Bakhmut, which itself is facing an increase in Russian shelling and air strikes. Ukraine has reached a deal with Poland about grain and other food products transiting that country, but the future of the Black Sea deal remains in doubt.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1648431809200553985

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Roundup: Troll-bait taken

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Well, Pierre Poilievre’s troll-bait worked, and everyone was frothing at the mouth over the application of “government-funded media” to CBC’s main Twitter account (but not its news accounts, or any of their French accounts). And the Conservatives lapped it up; Andrew Scheer, pleased as punch and in full smirking doofus mode, even gave a trollish member’s statement ahead of Question Period which was quickly clipped for use as a shitpost. In protest, CBC declared they would “pause” their use of Twitter, which just cedes the field the flood of bullshit. And then later in the day, Elon Musk decided to adjust his tag to say “70% government-funded,” as if it makes a difference to the insinuation Poilievre was trying to impart, only for a short while later, change that to “69% government-funded,” because this is Musk and Poilievre we’re talking about, and they have the mentality of twelve-year-olds in their quest to become shitposting edgelords.

 

Justin Trudeau, somewhat cleverly, noted that Poilievre ran to the arms of American web-giant billionaires to support his attack on Canadians, which bolsters the Liberals’ narrative about their legislation to curb the power of web giants and forcing them to pay into the Canadian content ecosystem (which the Conservatives have been falsely decrying as government censorship). The NDP and the Bloc went with the tactic of calling this an attack on Quebec culture, which may do more damage to the Conservatives in the province where they are hoping to make inroads.

But this is all culture war bullshit, and yet, people fell for the troll bait. The Liberals immediately tried to fundraise off of this, and played right into the Conservatives’ hands.

I did note that three former CBC bureau chiefs did impart their experiences about editorial independence, and governments going after them for their reporting, which is not exactly the narrative that Poilievre has been trying to prompt.

Ukraine Dispatch:

The Ukrainian grain deal is threatened as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia have all banned Ukrainian grain as part of protectionist measures, and the EU is likely to mount some kind of response. The prisoner exchange on Sunday saw 130 Ukrainians returned, but it’s not clear how many Russians were turned over. A top Ukrainian official said that they will launch their counteroffensive when they’re good and ready, and not before.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1648018653885898756

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1647891561915596800

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