Tag Archives: Andrew Scheer

Roundup: Teck withdraws

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As the countdown to potential police enforcement at the Tyendinaga blockade were taking place, a bombshell hit – Teck Resources were “temporarily” withdrawing their application for the proposed Frontier oilsands mine, sparing the Liberal Cabinet of what was essentially an impossible decision, but also spurring the disingenuous cries from Jason Kenney and the federal Conservatives as to what this move represents. A big part of the decision was of course the fact that the price of oil is far too low to make the project viable, and global investment markets are making it clear that they are looking to invest in more sustainable projects, but we know that isn’t going to be the narrative that is being used to howl about it.

There is going to be so much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the next few days that the Liberals “politicized” the approval (which is funny considering it was the Conservatives that wrote in said politicization into the legislation in 2012, which was the process by which this project was being assessed), and that this will somehow be a loss of $70 billion in revenues (never mind that said figure comes from estimates that oil was somewhere around $95/barrel, when it’s currently hovering around $50 and is likely to remain so in the near term). Remember that there are about 20 other approved oilsands projects in Alberta that aren’t getting built because oil prices are too low to make them viable, and Teck has been saying for weeks if not longer that this was going to be the case as well – and yet Kenney, Scheer, and company have been making this approval into some kind of symbol or totem about the supposed health of foreign investment in Canada. It was only ever bullshit designed to make people angry for their political gain, but that’s what political discourse has devolved into these days.

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Roundup: Urging calm, patience, and police action

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Yesterday was a long and very busy day, as everyone scrambled to get their say on the ongoing protest and blockade situation across the country, with a mounting economic cost to them. First thing in the morning, the AFN National Chief, Perry Bellegarde, and several First Nations leaders held a press conference to ask the Mohawk protesters to dismantle the barricades – not as surrender, but as compassion for those who would soon be affected by shortages – but one of those Mohawk leaders also noted that his band office has been locked out and protesters among his own people say they want him out. A short while later, Justin Trudeau gave a speech in the House of Commons to counsel patience and to reiterate that dialogue remained the best way to resolve the situation – something Andrew Scheer denounced as weak, and he continued to insist that the police end the protests, insisting that this was but a group of “professional protesters” and “radicals” and that the “real” position of the Wet’suwet’en people was for jobs and resource development (even though he later said he hadn’t actually spoken to any of them) – something that both Peter MacKay and Erin O’Toole also echoed, because police action has never gone badly before. Oh, wait. (Marilyn Gladu, for the record, wants the military to step in). Shortly after Trudeau’s speech, he had a meeting with Yves-François Blanchet, Jagmeet Singh, and Elizabeth May, and made a pointed remark that Scheer had not been invited because his remarks were “disqualifying” – which led to Scheer’s agitated breathy and high-pitched performance during QP. Oh, and while all of this was going on, some activists in Victoria tried to perform a “citizen’s arrest” on BC premier John Horgan (and they got arrested instead).

By the time the five o’clock politics shows rolled around, Carolyn Bennett had concluded a meeting with some of the hereditary chiefs – who stated on one of the shows that they wouldn’t actually negotiate until the RCMP were off of their territory – and Marc Miller refused to discuss whether that was on or off the table when asked, leading the pundits to make hay of that. (“He didn’t say no!” is the worst impulse in journalism, guys). Oh, and hilariously, Jody Wilson-Raybould offered her services as a mediator, as though anyone in the government would be willing to trust her. As the day wound down, Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe said he was holding a meeting of premiers today because Trudeau “refused to act” – though I’m not sure what exactly he proposes, unless it’s to try to direct provincial police forces to start cracking skulls, both violating the rule of law and making the situation worse. And that’s where we are.

Meanwhile, here is a good primer written by a lawyer and a law professor about what “rule of law” means and why it’s important – as Scheer and company keep misusing the term. Heather Scoffield sees the business impacts of the blockades and deduces that it will be impossible to resolve them both quickly and peacefully – it would have to be one or the other. Andrew Coyne counsels patience in threating the needle that the protests can both be illegal while still noting that using force will only create martyrs. Matt Gurney worries that if the blockades go on much longer, they could fuel populist anger and damage the cause of reconciliation. Paul Wells attempts to make sense of the day that was, and the Liberals’ high-wire act in the middle of it all.

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Roundup: An emergency clip-gathering

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Sympathetic protests continue across the country as Justin Trudeau and several Cabinet ministers convened the Incidence Response Group yesterday, but had little to say as they emerged, other than dialogue remains the best option to resolve the situation as opposed to sending in the police to crack heads. Some new protests included demonstrations that closed Bloor Street in Toronto, and another blockade on the Thousand Islands international bridge (which was short-lived). Carolyn Bennett is still waiting on more meetings, apparently, while the CBC got a leaked recording from Marc Miller’s meeting with the Mohawks in Ontario on Sunday, so there’s that. And amidst this, police associations are grousing that they’re caught in the middle of all of this, criticized for both being too aggressige and not doing enough at the same time.

And with Parliament back again today, the request has been made for an emergency debate on the situation – but I can tell you right now that it’s going to be nothing shy of a five-alarm clown show. If the Speaker decides to grant it, it’ll happen after the close of regular business, so somewhere between 6 and 7 PM, and designated to run until midnight, unless debate collapses sooner. But you can bet that the most that can come of it – and the parties bloody well know it – is that they’ll simply be gathering clips for their social media of their righteous indignation for their side of the debate, whether it’s that the economy is being affected, that police are supposedly not enforcing the rule of law (hint – that’s not what “rule of law” means), or that this government has failed in its goals of reconciliation (as though that could happen in the space of four years). And if it’s outraged clips they want, well, isn’t that what Question Period has devolved into? In other words, I see zero actual utility in the exercise, but then again, I’m cynical (or realistic) like that.

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Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt tries to evaluate this government’s communications around the current situation after they handled the previous two (Flight PS752 and COVID-19) fairly well, and outlines the difference between complex and complicated problems. But being unable to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag is this government’s usual schtick, so that should be no surprise.

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Roundup: Checking Scheer’s privilege

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The solidarity protests with the Coastal GasLink protesters continue across the country, and police continue to hold off on enforcement while dialogue continues – Carolyn Bennett is slated to meet with chiefs in BC, while Marc Miller will be meeting with the Mohawk protesters in Ontario today using the protocols of the covenant chain. And amidst this, Andrew Scheer decided he needed to get involved. It didn’t go well.

Scheer’s tone deafness over the “privilege” remarks likely stem from the belief that the Conservatives have convinced themselves of, that it’s just rich, foreign-funded radicals who are protesting while the First Nations want the projects to proceed because jobs – which some do, but it delegitimizes the legitimate grievances and differences of opinion within Indigenous communities (even if all of the protesters aren’t themselves Indigenous). Add to that, Scheer’s insistence that ministers should be directing the operations of the police is wrong-headed (and dangerous – this is how police states happen), which forgets that even if Bill Blair could get on the phone and direct RCMP to enforce injunctions, the ones in Ontario that have shut down the rail network are squarely within the jurisdiction of the OPP. Oops. There may be some debate over how much authority that governments have to direct enforcement in cases like these, but Scheer (and Scott Moe, who has also been echoing his comments) should know better. That they don’t is a bad sign for the governance of this country.

Meanwhile, Chris Selley decries the ongoing blockades but makes some interesting points about the way in which the male hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs displaced the female hereditary chiefs who were in support of the project. Colby Cosh is bemused at how threatening commuters in Central Canada is the kind of leverage that Alberta could only dream of having. Matt Gurney recalls Christie Blatchford’s book on the Caledonia crisis, and how the Ontario Progressive Conservatives apparently didn’t learn anything from what happened then, given their absolute silence over what is happening under their jurisdiction.

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Roundup: Coronavirus case in Canada

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We can expect a bunch of questions around the first two suspected cases of coronavirus being treated in Toronto when the Commons returns for Question Period tomorrow, and it’s a question of how much we’ll see any kind of politicking being played around it. The line is that we’re not expecting an outbreak in the country – but we’re already at a situation where the suspected case was symptomatic on a flight so that means tracking down the other passengers.

Over the past week, we’ve seen a lot of interviews with former officials, political or bureaucratic, who dealt with SARS and MERS, and they insist that lessons have been learned in Canada, even though we don’t know how this coronavirus will compare. That said, the Ontario government already slashed Toronto Public Health’s funding, so that just may come around to bite them in the ass.

Amidst this, Matt Gurney is decidedly more pessimistic about the preparations and says that the facts we know around this suspected case mean that the system didn’t work, and that’s going to be a problem going forward. He has a point, but we’ll have to see how the response changes in the days ahead.

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Roundup: Convention confusion

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The Conservatives announced over the weekend that their policy had convention had been postponed to November in order to give more time to their leadership contest – but then had to spend the rest of the day explaining that no, this didn’t mean that the leadership was going to be held in November, and no, they hadn’t made any final decisions on the leadership, and so on. Because it would have been great if they’d actually said that in their press release.

With this in mind, I figured I would do my best to clarify what part of the problem is here, which is that they don’t actually have leadership conventions anymore, but “leadership events” where all of the mailed in ranked ballots get counted up in a dramatic way to try and replicate the fun and excitement of a delegated convention. One might assume that they might try to kill two birds with one stone and have both events at the same time, but we’ll see if that is actually the case.

This having been said, we also need to remember that so long as we have a system where there is direct election of party leaders by their membership, and that those leadership candidates are running on policy slates as though this were an American presidential primary, it starts making party policy conventions into a bit of a farce. Why? Because so long as leaders feel empowered to move ahead with the policies that they have a “democratic legitimacy” to enact, then what does the grassroots policy preferences matters? We’ve seen this erosion across parties for years, and it will continue apace under this Conservative system just as it has with everyone else so long as we keep up this bastardized system of membership votes for leaders.

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Roundup: Lethal overwatch?

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There’s been some chatter about a story in the Guardian that purports to show BC RCMP communications that would have allowed for “snipers” and “sterilizing” of Indigenous protests in the province over LNG pipelines – which the minister of Indigenous services wants some answers to, and which the RCMP denies is actually legitimate, citing that the terminology used isn’t consistent with their own, or that some of it is being misinterpreted (in particular “lethal overwatch). To that end, here’s Justin Ling with a bit of context and nuance to consider before you get agitated at what’s being reported, as it may not necessarily be correct.

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Roundup: SNC-Lavalin gets a plea bargain

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In an unexpected development yesterday, we learned that SNC-Lavalin took a plea deal from the courts – that one of their divisions would plead guilty for fraud over $5000 in connection to their dubious activities in Libya, pay a fairly hefty $280 million fine over five years, and all of the rest of the charges they were facing were withdrawn, and they wouldn’t face debarment from future contract work for governments. In other words, they largely got what they wanted with the Deferred Prosecution Agreement/Remediation Agreement that they had been agitating and lobbying for, and which spun off the whole Double-Hyphen Affair in the first place.

Could of things – first of all, DPAs are not “get out of jail free” cards like they have often been described as. Had SNC-Lavalin been granted the DPA, they would have had to agreed that they committed wrongdoing, paid a fine which would have included remediation for the wronged parties, and would have a structured monitoring regime put into place to ensure better governance going forward, and it wouldn’t have protected any of their executives from future prosecution. One particular law professor, Jennifer Quaid, noted that even though they weren’t a good candidate for a DPA, it would have actually been more transparent than the plea bargain that they wound up with, there is no guarantee of remediation to wronged parties, and it’s unlikely there will be the same structure imposed, so maybe, just maybe, the DPA was the better plan in the first place.

Jody Wilson-Raybould tweeted out in response that the system worked, while Justin Trudeau said in an interview that he may have acted differently had he known this would have been the outcome, but he was trying to do the best he could at the time. And there are certain people screaming about prosecutorial independence, but I keep going back to the conversation that Wilson-Raybould taped with Michael Wernick, and so much of it was them talking past one another – him looking for an explanation and her not providing one until the end of the conversation when she said that she gave a report to PMO months prior, to which Wernick said “That’s news to me.” This key exchange was completely glossed over in most of the reporting because they fell instead for the juicy quotes that Wilson-Raybould had set up in conducting the conversation the way she did. So much of the communications and relationship breakdown is on full display in that call. (That being said, I remain deeply troubled with how much SNC-Lavalin was stage-managing the legislative process around the DPAs, even if lawyers in the field had been demanding that legislation for a decade because we were behind our comparable Western allies in making these kinds of arrangements available).

Meanwhile, certain journalists want to insist that this doesn’t mean that the story is over because parliamentary committees. Erm, except they would need the support of the Bloc to push forward with them, and they have explicitly stated that they have no interest in doing so. (Also, I am a bit concerned that Elizabeth May was conspiracy theorizing over Twitter regarding who this plea deal is “protecting.”)

On a related note, Wilson-Raybould was chosen by The Canadian Press as their Newsmaker of the Year, and make news she certainly did (and still does).

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Roundup: Mandate letters and the minister for everything

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Yesterday was the day that Justin Trudeau released the mandate letters for his ministers, giving us a glimpse as to what their marching orders will be (which is still a fairly novel transparency and accountability measure in this country, it needs to be said). The National Post counted up some 288 projects listed in those mandates, some of them holdovers from the previous parliament (which isn’t surprising considering that  many of them were fairly ambitious and transformational and were not achievable within four years). But there were also a number of things missing from several of those letters that should have been dealt with – particularly on the justice file.

As with the previous parliament, each of the letters has an identical preamble, advising the ministers to “govern in a positive, open and collaborative way,” because it’s a hung parliament and all of that. In terms of specific points in the letters, there are issues like discussions with province over pharmacare, shortening wait times for airport screenings, tax cuts for green tech companies, reforming the medical assistance in dying laws, advancing international efforts to ban “killer robots,” procuring new fighter jets and modernizing NORAD. One of the more alarming mentions was in Bill Morneau’s letter, advising him to review and possibly modify the financial stress test applied to mortgages, which is a Very Bad Thing, and means that the real estate lobby is winning its air war over the good common sense of the Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. (Seriously – there is no excuse for encouraging bad debt).

And then there is Chrystia Freeland’s letter, which is expansive and makes her in essence a “minister of everything” who is assigned to basically work with a number of other ministers to advance their priorities, whether it’s carbon pricing, getting resources to market, breaking down internal trade barriers, facilitating pharmacare talks, working on pan-Canadian childcare, gun control, regional economic development agencies, and advancing reconciliation. This leaves questions as to what exactly Trudeau will be doing while Freeland does all the work – leaving her to either take the fall while Trudeau gets to take the credit. This having been said, it’s just as likely that she wanted a full plate of projects rather than simply spending her weeks heading to provincial capitals to meet with premiers once the New NAFTA is ratified, but she certainly has her work cut out for her, ensuring that enough of these promises are fulfilled before the inevitable early election call that comes in a hung parliament.

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Roundup: Exit Scheer

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The news that blew up all of our days was that of Andrew Scheer’s sudden resignation as leader, despite having stated for nearly two months that he planned to stay on and fight the next election. As this news broke, so did the news that party funds were being used to finance his children’s private school education, and throughout the day there was a lot of back-and-forth as to just who in the party knew about it, and it sounds increasingly like Stephen Harper, the Conservative Fund’s chair, was mighty upset when he learned about it. Oops. Nevertheless, Scheer went before the House of Commons and talked about how this was all about needing to spend more time with his family, and he spun a tale about how he realized he barely knew his teenaged son, and Justin Trudeau and others were very gracious and classy, and offered more humanity to Scheer than he managed to in his time as leader. The caucus also voted to let Scheer stay on as interim leader until his replacement is chosen, but considering how well that went for the NDP, with the embittered Thomas Mulcair poisoning the well, well, you’d think they would know better.

While the group calling itself Conservative Victory that were organizing to pressure Scheer to resign has declared victory, we now begin with all of the breathless speculation as to who will run to replace Scheer, and you can bet that most of the usual names – Raitt, Ambrose, Kenney – won’t. The Star runs through the probable names and their chances of actually running.

And, of course, come all of the hot takes. Justin Ling declares this the end of Scheer’s reign of incompetence. Andrew Coyne notes that Scheer’s departure won’t solve the party’s bigger problems. Matt Gurney makes the point that the party really can’t choose a new leader until they learn the lessons from the last election. Susan Delacourt explores the parallels between Scheer’s departure and that of Joe Clark after his election loss in 1979. Paul Wells gives a fair accounting of Scheer’s self-inflicted wounds, and the huge challenge the party faces in trying to find a leader that will unify the party’s various factions. Robert Hiltz gives his not-so-fond farewell to Scheer with his trademarked acerbic style. My own column on Scheer’s demise looks at how he turned politics into a house of lies, and why his successor will need to rectify that mistake.

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