Tag Archives: Andrew Scheer

Roundup: Dishonest blame-laying

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As this so-called convoy of “yellow vest” protesters moves eastward toward Ottawa, many of them demanding magic wands to expedite pipeline approvals that won’t actually happen (seriously, trying to fast track and cut corners is what got approvals thrown out in the courts before), I find it exceedingly curious – and a bit alarming – that Jason Kenney refuses to denounce some of the elements that have attached themselves to these “yellow vests,” most especially white nationalists and racists who are trying to use these rallies to agitate against immigration and asylum seekers. Kenney simply waves them off as a “handful” of people with “kooky ideas,” while he takes the intellectually dishonest route of blaming Justin Trudeau and Rachel Notley for Alberta’s oil sector woes, never mind the global supply glut, the shale revolution, and market inertia, or the fact that capacity only became an issue in recent months when production increased – or the fact that when he was in federal cabinet, pipeline projects weren’t making any faster progress either.

Trudeau and Notley didn’t create the problems of consultations on Northern Gateway. They didn’t create the market condition problems for Energy East. They didn’t create the American regulatory issues around Keystone XL. Trudeau bears some responsibility for the consultation issues around the Trans Mountain expansion, but that also has to do with institutional inertia and how bureaucratic Ottawa and the NEB in Calgary thought of Section 35 consultations in spite of successive Supreme Court of Canada rulings. These are broad and, in some cases, intractable problems for which easy solutions don’t exist, no matter what Kenney or Andrew Scheer say. Putting the bulk of the blame on Trudeau and Notley is completely and utterly dishonest, and Kenney knows it. But why does truth matter when you’re trying to stoke anger to win points?

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Roundup: New year, same lies

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It’s the New Year, and it’s an election year, and that means we’re about to be subjected to all kinds of performative nonsense, and most especially about carbon taxes. Like how Doug Ford has all of the Ontario PC caucus tweeting about lowering gas prices, despite the fact that Ontario didn’t have a carbon tax (cap-and-trade did affect gasoline prices, however), and there also just happens to be a major tumble in the world price of oil because of a global supply glut. Andrew Scheer, meanwhile, is claiming that the government plans to hike carbon taxes to $300/tonne if they get re-elected – which is patent nonsense. He’s also unable to pick a lane in that the he claims the proposed $50/tonne carbon tax (in three years) is too low to do anything, and that it’s the “experts” and “departments” who are encouraging him to raise it to $100/tonne, if not the $300/tonne figure that he’s citing as a secret plan. (But seriously – they might have modelled it, but that’s not a plan). But hey, way to stoke the “elites” versus “folks” narrative that Scheer thinks is going to win him votes. To that end, he’s continuing to shitpost blatant lies about the carbon pricing system, despite the fact that this particular lie has been called out again and again. But since when does truth matter when you’re trying to make people angry?

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Roundup: A bad case for a dumb idea

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The flirtation with separatist sentiment in Alberta is bringing all the boys to the yard, and suddenly they’re all trying to make a cockamamie case for why this is a real threat. Yesterday it was respected tax economist Jack Mintz who decided to stray way outside of his lane, and insist that Alberta has a better case for this than Great Britain does with Bexit, which is patent nonsense both on its face, and in every single one of his nonsense arguments. And yet, in the rush to pander to the angry sentiment in Alberta and to offer up simplistic solutions and snake oil to what is a series of protracted (and in some cases intractable) problems that require time and patience to resolve. Mintz later went on the CBC to defend his column, and made a bunch of other nonsense arguments that presumes that the US would be a better customer for Alberta oil…despite that the actual pipeline capacity going from Alberta to the US is minimal and don’t think they could easily build more if they can’t even get Keystone XL over the finish line there.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1075414877890502656

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1075415929394102272

Meanwhile, Tyler Dawson makes the case that such a separatist movement not only lacks logic, it also lacks a real leader or the intellectual heft to actually make it something viable. Andrew Leach takes Mintz to task on his assumptions about demand for Alberta oil. Jen Gerson tells Alberta that while they have legitimate grievances, the insistence that Ottawa is simply out to get them risks becoming a pathology, while the separation talk is terrible, and simply burning the system down won’t help anyone. Can I get an amen up in here?

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1075469089450078208

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Roundup: $1.6 Billion instead of a magic wand

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Yesterday, the federal government announced $1.6 billion in help for the Alberta energy sector – but insisted it’s not a subsidy. $1 billion of it was in loans for exporters to invest in technologies and address working capital needs or exploring new markets; $500 million from to help smaller oil and gas businesses weather the uncertainty, $50 million from the Clean Growth Program, and $100 million in economic diversification projects. It wasn’t something like federal funding for companies to remediate orphan wells, for example. And predictably, Rachel Notley and various other Conservatives immediately dismissed this as not asking for money but wanting “the handcuffs removed,” which seems to me to be code for waving a magic wand to get pipelines built immediately, despite the fact that unless they plan to bulldoze through the Indigenous consultation process, is something the government can’t do. And Andrew Scheer? He went full drama queen with a petulant press release that accused Trudeau of trying to destroy Alberta, sounding very much like a jealous suitor wailing “He can’t love you like I will!”

More to the point, the federal government can’t just ram through the approvals for Trans Mountain, given that the last time they tried to cut corners, the Federal Court of Appeal objected and rescinded their approvals and would do so again, hence why they’re going the route of doing what the court laid out, and that takes time. There is no magic wand. Killing Bill C-69 won’t solve anything because the current system isn’t working, and while the bill is flawed and open to amendment at the Senate, Conservative senators have not consented to any committee hearings before the Senate’s slated (late) return in February (and I have heard various reasons for this, both in opposition to the bill, and because they are pushing back against the committee chair, who they accuse of doing the bidding of Senator Peter Harder). The tanker ban on BC’s north coast? That’s demanded by many of the coastal First Nations. Scrapping the carbon tax? Won’t change anything because it has nothing to do with the oil price differential and oil companies have been asking for a carbon price so that they can have predictability when it comes to climate demands. And then there’s the bogeyman about foreign funded “paid protesters” that the Conservatives blame for everything, despite the fact that they don’t control the courts or the economics of projects. That won’t stop Scheer or Jason Kenney from offering the people of Alberta another vial of snake oil, promising quick approval on pipelines that they can’t actually deliver on.

Meanwhile, amidst more lies and grievance narratives around the federal equalisation programme, Trevor Tombe drops a reality bomb about how the system works and why. Because amidst the demands for magic wands and offering snake oil, the Jason Kenneys of this country will continue to lie about how equalisation works to keep people angry in the hopes of getting electoral advantage for it. We need more people to tell the truth about the system if we’re to keep a lid on the anger and try to do something meaningful to address it rather than simply bow to grievance culture and fabrications.

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Roundup: Salaries are not cement

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As the debate over the proposed changes to the Parliament of Canada Act continues to roll along, some of us are struck by the fact that the whole framing of the debate continues to be utterly wrong – that the wrong headline on the Canadian Press piece about prime minister Justin Trudeau looking to “cement” the changes in order to make it harder for a future prime minister to roll them back is completely wrong, given that the PCA has nothing to do with the appointment process. And yet, here we are, once again debating the independent appointments commission, when the actual changes to the Act involve salaries for caucus leaders and some organisational issues. Virtually all of these have been extended to the Independent Senators Group, from committee chairs and assignments, to a role on the Internal Economy Committee, budget allocations for their leadership’s office (aka the “secretariat”), and so on. The only thing they can’t get currently, which they need changes to the PCA for is a higher salary for their leadership team. Fair enough, one might say, but considering that they eschew the label of a caucus, and the roles of both government and opposition, preferring to be neither fish nor fowl, it does make it a bit harder to justify that they should be on equal footing to them. In practice, they are very much a caucus, but this is what the changes they are asking for boil down to – it has nothing to do with “cementing” the changes to the institution, and it would be great if the pundits and journalists talking about this issue could grasp that basic fact.

With that in mind, Colby Cosh penned a fairly (deservedly) harsh piece about the changes to the Upper Chamber, and the fact that Trudeau is creating a Frankenstein’s monster that has more to do with his trying to absolve himself of his responsibility for the Chamber than anything. And Cosh is absolutely right – this has been about Trudeau washing his hands of any whiff of scandal in the Upper Chamber since he became leader, consequences be damned. And there have been real consequences – Trudeau centralised power within his caucus because he got rid of the voices with the most experience who could push back against him without consequences (it’s not like he can threaten not to sign their nomination papers), and got rid of the bulk of his party’s institutional memory in one fell swoop. He’s also losing his ability to get his legislation through the Chamber because he named someone inept as his “representative” (who should be a full-fledged Cabinet minister in order to ensure proper lines of accountability) who refuses to negotiate timelines on bills in the manner in which the Senate operates.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1074845188210622465

This having been said, I will again reiterate that what we should strive for is for the ISG to become like the crossbenchers in the Lords, but that depends on a strong enough Liberal and Conservative contingent to provide balance, and this prime minister has no interest in that, preferring to continue with this experiment in Frankenstein’s Monster until he gets burned by it. And while I’m sure that there will come a reckoning, that the ISG will fracture, and eventually some of its members will drift to an established caucus, it may be some time before that happens and sanity starts to prevail in the Chamber. I just wouldn’t count on this prime minister to provide any of it.

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QP: All about Scheer

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For what might be the final QP of the year, the galleries were full — press gallery included — and the benches were full. Andrew Scheer led off, repeating yesterday’s lead around the PBO’s contention that the deficit could be higher than reported. Trudeau got up and recited by rote his well-worn talking points about investing in Canadians and making life better for the Middle Class™. Scheer switched to English to ask again, and Trudeau hit back about “phoney budget balance” the Conservatives delivered that hurt veterans and families. Scheer accused him of offering falsehoods about the Conservative record (which is rich coming from Scheer, whose capacity for mistruth is quickly becoming legendary) before demanding a balanced budget. Trudeau castigated the Conservative record on growth while his government oversaw growth. Scheer insisted that Trudeau inherited a good economy (not true), to which Trudeau found it curious that Scheer wanted to double down on a plan that Canadians rejected in 2015. Scheer retorted that it was Trudeau who was doubling down on a failed plan before calling him a trust fund baby, and Trudeau replied that you can’t grow the economy with cuts to services, and listed the investments they made that led to record-low unemployment. Guy Caron was up next for for the NDP, and he worried that the CRA has not recouped anything from the Panama Papers. Trudeau picked up a script to read about the investments made in CRA to combat tax evasion, and that CRA has risk-assessed over 80 percent of the 3000 identified files and that criminal investigations were ongoing. Caron switched to French to reiterate the question, and Trudeau read the French version of the same script. François Choquette worried about Canada’s climate performance, to which Trudeau, sans script, talked about putting a price on pollution and helping families adapt. Linda Duncan repeated the question in English, and Trudeau grabbed a script to list measures they have made and investments made.

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Roundup: Unfulfilled drama

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After days of building expectation that there was going to be drama at the First Ministers’ meeting, virtually none was had. Doug Ford was going to storm out, and then he didn’t, and his people started recanting the threats. And, well, other stories started emerging as well. And some other premiers claimed progress on their files, like François Legault saying he got closer to his demands for $300 million in repayment for irregular border crossers and dairy compensation; Rachel Notley could claim some progress on getting Ottawa to consider helping pay for her plan to buy more rail cars. That sort of thing. 

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1071165518462271489

Where there was some minor drama was Doug Ford and Scott Moe coming out at the end, complaining that the federal government was trying to “move the goal posts” on them when it comes to their climate action – which was immediately denounced by other premiers’ officials, and which also demonstrates that they don’t actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to the federal climate framework – in particular that Ford was walking back on some of the province’s earlier commitments to the tune of a 30-megatonne reduction in GHGs, which was not going to fly with anyone else. (Oh, and the federal government says that Ontario won’t get the $420 million promised as part of the Low Carbon Economy Fund after they pulled out of cap-and-trade).

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne questions the point of these meetings, even from the standpoint of political theatre, while Chantal Hébert calls out Doug Ford’s marked inexperience and partisan petulance, and that he made threats with no reason to back them up. Paul Wells takes the opportunity to explore what these kinds of meetings mean for Trudeau’s style and his vision of federalism – before throwing some well-deserved shade at the final communiqué.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1071184799073796098
https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1071185862032048128
https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1071186561323200512
https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1071187024449863681

Good reads:

  • In case you missed it, Statistics Canada reported record job numbers and the lowest unemployment rate since the current tracking began in 1976.
  • Here’s a look into the arrest of Huawei’s CFO, and the extradition process that she will now be subject to. She didn’t get bail; our ambassador in China is on the case.
  • The Canadian Institute of Health Research is doing away with virtual meetings citing lack of preparedness and distraction, but the trade-offs are travel costs.
  • Some BC First Nations are looking to renegotiate their benefit agreements with Trans Mountain on the pipeline expansion.
  • Crown attorneys will stop prosecuting some HIV non-disclosure cases as new prosecutorial guidelines come into effect.
  • Here’s a good look at how Doug Ford and Jason Kenney are sowing distrust with the media for their own ends.
  • Murray Brewster delves into the Crown’s filings on Mark Norman as part of their court case alleging he leaked shipyard information.
  • Kevin Carmichael looks into the darker undersides of the good job numbers that came out yesterday.
  • My weekend column calls out Andrew Scheer’s use of conspiracy theories as part of his war on truth that he hopes will give him an edge, but only feeds Russian trolls.

Odds and ends:

It looks like we’re seeing a renewed bout of really dumb takes on “Alberta separatism,” which seems to forget some pretty basic facts about their exports.

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Roundup: The inaugural NSICOP report

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The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians tabled their redacted report on the prime minister’s India trip yesterday, and, well, there were a number of redactions. But what wasn’t redacted did paint a picture of an RCMP that bungled security arrangements, and that didn’t have good lines of communication with the prime minister’s security detail, and where they left a voicemail for someone who was on vacation, while someone else in Ottawa decided to not bother trying to reach out until the following day because it was the end of their shift. So yeah, there were a “few issues” that the RCMP fell down on. And because of the redactions (done by security agencies and not PMO, for reasons related to national security or because revelations could be injurious to our international relations), we don’t have any idea if the former national security advisor’s warnings about “rogue elements” of the Indian government were involved was true or not.

https://twitter.com/SkinnerLyle/status/1069736311785951234

The CBC, meanwhile, got documents under Access to Information to show what kind of gong show was touched off with the communications side of things as the government tried to manage the fallout of the revelations of Atwal’s appearance on the trip (and in many senses, it wasn’t until the prime minister gave a very self-deprecating speech on the trip at the Press Gallery Dinner that the narratives started to die down). Because remember, this is a government that can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag.

In order to get some national security expert reaction, here’s Stephanie Carvin and Craig Forcese:

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1069747574435995648

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1069718997937995776

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1069708639479451649

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1069708795134308362

It should also be pointed out that the opposition parties are trying to make some hay over the redactions, and are intimating that they’re the product of PMO for partisan reasons. It’s not supposed to work that way, but hey, why deal in facts when you can proffer conspiracy theories, or in Andrew Scheer’s case, shitposts on Twitter?

https://twitter.com/RobynUrback/status/1069786954756173825

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Roundup: Grewal gives some answers

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Just when the drip-drip-drip of new information and the grasping of straws around the Raj Grewal drama was reaching its expiration date, it all blew up anew last night on two fronts. One was the report that the RCMP had been asked to investigate a Brampton infrastructure project where questions are being raised about a land deal and that information had been passed along to both Grewal and Navdeep Bains (and in QP yesterday, Bardish Chagger called the reports false and warned that if allegations were repeated out of the House, they would be met by Bains’ lawyer); the other was that Grewal released an eleven-minute video, releasing it both to the Globe and Mail and to his Facebook page.

In the video, Grewal methodically went through not only his gambling habits, but also the loans (all of which were done by “transparently” cheque and since repaid), and then went through all of the allegations around property ownership, loans, his wife’s finances, the aforementioned Brampton infrastructure project, and even the questions he was asking in the finance committee study on money laundering and terrorist financing. A lot of the information puts to rest speculation and shows how grasping at disparate information and forming a sinister narrative can be when there are fairly simple explanations – explanations that Grewal probably should have been making over the past week as this was coming out, and answering media questions when they called (though one probably has a bit of sympathy for the feeling overwhelmed by it all). What is news out of this, however, is that Grewal said that while he’s leaving the Liberal caucus and taking a leave of absence for his treatment, his announced intention to resign may have been premature, and he’s going to be considering it over the next few weeks – but would have a definitive answer before the House resumes in January. (So maybe Jagmeet Singh made the right call after all in not immediately jumping back to Brampton in anticipation of that seat opening up). I’m not sure this will stop the hyterial questions – particularly the risible notion that he was some kind of national security threat – but it does seem like a lot more questions are now answered than not.

Meanwhile, further to yesterday’s discussion about why MPs shouldn’t be subject to the same kinds of background checks as ministers, here is some more discussion about why it’s a Very Bad Idea.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068485192149389312

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068486410464686080

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068489389062254592

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068491118122160128

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1068480047793618944

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1068481863348449283

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1068483537110614016

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Roundup: Ginning up the Grewal resignation

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As the stories on Raj Grewal’s gambling debts and intended resignation continue to trickle through, a number of them have taken on a vaguely conspiratorial tone. A lot of facts that shouldn’t be out of the ordinary are treated as suspicious for absolutely no reason at all. For example, people keep wondering why he was reassigned from the finance committee in September “with no warning.” Gee, what else happened in September that would have affected committee memberships? Could it have been the fact that the parliamentary secretaries all got shuffled, so committee assignments need to be rejigged? Maybe? And whoa, he asked questions on catching money launderers to law officials and FINTRAC agents during a study on – wait for it – “Confronting Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing: Moving Canada Forward.” Such an amazing coincidence that is totally suspicious. And the latest “revelation” is that Senator Jean-Guy Dagenais says that a retired Mountie told him a year ago that he heard Raj Grewal was under investigation, and he therefore thinks PMO should have known then. Erm, except that neither the OPP nor the RCMP tell the PMO what they’re investigating because they operate at arm’s length, and more to the fact, Grewal was a backbench MP, which I cannot stress enough.

To that end, Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column looks at the issue of parties policing MPs’ off-hours, considering the Clement and Grewal situations, while Susan Delacourt cites those same two cases, and wonders if we need to do a better job of screening backbenchers. And I’m pretty dubious because backbenchers are not ministers. They don’t have access to secret materials (Clement, I remind you, is a former minister and thus a member of the Privy Council, and his activities on NSICOP are outside of the usual activities of a backbencher), nor are they public office holders. Their job is to hold government to account – they are not part of the government, and it doesn’t matter what committees they’re on. Treating them as the same thing is not only a gross overreach, but frankly it will give MPs a wrongheaded sense of their place in the system, which is already suffering because of civic illiteracy.

Are Grewal’s debts concerning? Yup. Is it a crisis that he was mentioned in passing as part of an investigation into other suspicious characters? Maybe, but we don’t know enough to say whether it is or not, and the baseless speculation and ginned up allegations aren’t helping. Should Trudeau and the PMO have been more candid from the start about the reasons Grewal was resigning? Probably, and given this government’s inability to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, their approach once again blew up in their faces. But treating this affair with clickbait headlines and spinning random facts out of context in order to make them seem sinister is bad reporting.

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