Tag Archives: Appointments

Roundup: Vandenbeld’s side—and a warning

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Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld penned an op-ed over on National Newswatch to explain her side of what happened at the Status of Women committee last week, which has led to her and her staff being targeted and harassed off-line (because this is one of the tactics that Conservatives also employ and pretend they don’t, even though they know full well that they send their flying monkeys at the people they single out over social media). It’s an illuminating read that has a lot more of the backstory about how this committee was operating under its previous chair, some of the procedural elements of what happened that got lost in the noise around the witnesses walking out (never mind that they were set up from the start), and some of the rationale behind why this is happening. Don’t get me wrong—I think she still made a mistake in trying to make the public pivot to the abortion study motion, but the rest of the piece is a good insight into the problems at hand.

“Following Trumps playbook, since becoming Conservative Party Leader, Pierre Poilievre has put out a narrative that Parliament is broken, and the institutions are rigged. The Status of Women committee was living proof that this narrative was not true. And so Poilievre had to destroy it.”

This is one of the most important points as to why things are happening the way they are, beyond the clip-harvesting exercises. It’s one of the primary reasons why the Conservatives have been going hard after Speaker Fergus, why they are abusing privilege in demanding reams of unredacted documents and demanding that the Law Clerk do necessary redactions and not trained civil servants, why they try to tie arm’s-length agencies to the government or prime minister personally. It’s all out of the same authoritarian populism playbook.

But while she pointed out, I feel the need to call out Power & Politics’ abysmal coverage of this issue yesterday, with the guest host (reading from a script on a teleprompter) saying that Vandenbeld’s “behaviour” led to her being harassed, and in the discussion with the Power Panel that followed, was dismissive of the “minutiae of parliamentary procedure” when that was one of the key cruxes of what happened. Procedure was quite deliberately abused, and it led to this confrontation. And the panellists themselves being dismissive of the overall problem, and giving the tired lines of “only five people in the country care about this,” or “I’m shocked that there’s politics in politics!” as though what has been happening is normal. It’s not. Institutions are being deliberately undermined and that is a very serious problem, and it would be great if the gods damned pundit class in this country could actually arse itself to care about that fact rather than just fixating on the horse race numbers for once.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine says that it downed two Russian missiles and four drones overnight, but that shelling killed four people in the Donetsk region, and that homes in the Kyiv region were damaged by a drone attack the night before. There are unconfirmed reports of a Ukrainian force in the Kursk region of Russia, but Ukraine won’t confirm or deny.

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Roundup: Emergency summer clip-harvesting

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In need of new video clips for their socials, the Conservatives have decided that they need to call an “emergency” committee meeting about the $9 million purchase of a new condo for the Canadian consul general in New York, because if anything is guaranteed gold for them on social media, it’s clips that will be edited in a way to drive anger and outrage, because that’s their whole game. And if you thought that either of the other two opposition parties were going to be grown-up enough to see through this ploy, well, you’d be wrong, because they also signed right up to put on this dog-and-pony show.

Because Parliament is no longer a place for serious discussions, the Bloc decided they needed to sign onto this farce because $9 million is more than some people earn in a lifetime, which I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the price of real estate in New York, but they apparently want to make a point. The NDP, quite predictably, wants to make this about affordability for all Canadians and not just some political appointees, which again, is irrelevant to the discussion because it’s an asset and not something that said consul general is keeping when his appointment comes to an end. Because nobody can grasp that this is both the going price of real estate in New York (which will increase in value), that the existing residence is being sold to cover these costs, that the new residence will be a net savings, but most importantly, that we need a place for the consul general to host politicians, diplomats, and business leaders, and that place needs to reflect well on Canada, which a bedsit in the outer Bronx is not going to do.

The other really stupid aspect of this is that they plan to call the consult general, former television journalist Tom Clark, to testify at the committee, even though this is not his decision, but one of the department, because it’s their asset. This is not accidental or because they don’t understand—it’s deliberate, because the Conservatives want to harvest clips of them calling him a “Liberal insider,” or a “media buddy,” trying to humiliate him by telling him to his face that Pierre Poilievre has promised to fire him as soon as he forms government, and generally denigrating him and his position—which is a tactic straight out of the authoritarian playbook, for the record. Clark, being in New York, is immune from a summons and should ignore it, because the only person the committee should hear from is the deputy minister, and possibly the minister, as she is politically accountable. But summoning Clark is beyond the pale, and they know it, but that doesn’t stop them from planning a social media campaign around it, because that’s what the House of Commons and its committees has become.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian missiles struck the headquarters of a Swiss mine-clearing NGO in Kharkiv, killing six. Russian drones also hit the Danube port of Izmail, wounding there others. Here’s a look at the people in Mykolaiv in the south, who have been under constant Russian attack.

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Roundup: Giroux tries his hand at semantics

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Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux is at it again, deciding that he wants to play talking head pundit rather than sticking to the confines of his job. Case in point was his report on the proposed Digital Safety Office, and his calculations around staffing and the costs thereof (which the Conservatives have disingenuously suggested was reason to kill said office should they form government, when we know it has nothing to do with the costs). But Giroux has decided to make some utterly incomprehensible musings, talking about how “Canadians need to decide” if this is just “bureaucracy” or “enforcement” of the Act.

I’m not even sure where to start here. For one, of course it’s enforcement—that’s the whole gods damned point of the office. And there will be cost recovery in the way of fees and fines from the web giants, but Giroux didn’t bother to calculate what those could look like, because apparently, he can only pull certain methodologies out of his ass, but not others. But to try and play semantic games about whether or not this is “bureaucracy” is frankly baffling. What exactly is he trying to say? How is this at all related to his statutory responsibilities of providing economic and macro-economic analysis? It’s not, and Giroux should know that if he wants to be a pundit, he should resign and actually go do that.

But that’s not all. Giroux put out another report that is disputing Canada’s defence spending vis-à-vis GDP, so that he can weigh in on the Narrative about our commitments to NATO (without any actual context). Giroux claims that we’ll be below because the Canadian Forces has been lapsing certain levels of spending (which is true, and also a sign why we can’t just budget even more money that they can’t spend), but beyond this, he also decided he was going to use his own calculations for the GDP denominator instead of the OECD calculation that NATO uses, because he knows better, apparently. I mean, why have an apples-to-apples comparison that’s actually useful when you can pull a bespoke method from your ass in order to make a point, which again, is not within his remit to be doing. I’m going to be generous and say that there is a legitimate point about lapsing spending, but whatever he’s trying to do here is hardly within the confines of his job description, and more in line with his desire to be a media star.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched a daytime airstrike against Ukraine that hit a children’s hospital in Kyiv, and which killed at least 41 civilians in total. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Warsaw to meet with the president of Poland to discuss strengthening air defences, as well as signing a bilateral defence cooperation agreement. Zelenskyy vowed retaliation for the strike, and called on allies to stand with him. Russia is claiming that Ukraine launched tens of drones at them, and that two power substations and an oil depot caught fire as a result.

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Roundup: Impossible to extrapolate

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As with so many elections these days, it brings out the electoral reform fetishists, and they get self-righteous and say dumb things all over social media, and this week’s general election in the UK is no different. And lo, those fetishists are again making pronouncements about things like “voters’ wishes” because they’re trying to find a grand narrative that confirms their priors, and I fear I may lose my gods damned mind over this.

Once again, let us remember what this election is—650 separate and simultaneous elections, each one for a specific seat. So yes, the voters’ wishes are reflected because they chose who filled each seat. As well, I will once again remind you that the so-called “popular vote” is a logical fallacy because there is too much variation between each electoral contest to make any kind of grand aggregate that is meaningful—particularly in the UK, where the smaller countries have regional parties that England doesn’t, and yes, that does distort the “national picture” (as what happens in Canada with the Bloc). And no, every vote that is cast does not deserve their own seat. That’s not democracy, and it’s actually sore loserism if you believe that your vote doesn’t count if the person or party you prefer doesn’t win.

This is the other aspect of these fetishists spouting off and producing their own graphs of how they claim that Parliament “should” look if they had a PR system, erm, except they seem to always insist that it would be pure-PR (which is almost entirely unlikely), and it discounts that voting behaviour would change, but so would party formation under a system that no longer rewards big-tent brokerage in favour of post-election negotiation for coalitions. In no possible way can you extrapolate a vote like Thursday’s and come up with what a Parliament “should” look like, but that won’t stop the fetishists from trying.

Oh, and if one of these fetishists also tries to bring up lines about how the current single-member plurality system is “bad for democracy,” I’m not sure that PR is having a great run right now, as it legitimizes far-right and extremist parties that is almost impossible under SMP, and that legitimacy afforded to them is allowing them to grow across Europe. The situation in the Netherlands is also cause for concern, given that the far-right parties there have taken months to try to cobble together some sort of working coalition and may prove completely unworkable or ungovernable, and that’s not good for anyone.

Ukraine Dispatch

The Russian advance toward Toretsk in the Donetsk region means that time is running out for any Ukrainian citizens that want to flee. While Ukraine managed to destroy all 32 Russian drones launched Friday night, early Saturday morning was another story—drones hit an energy facility in Sumy, and hits on Selydove and Komar killed eight combined. Meanwhile, the head of Ukraine’s navy says that Russia has  nearly re-based all of its combat-read warships from occupied Crimea, because of the number of successful Ukrainian strikes on the region.

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Roundup: A choice to be dickish about pensions

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Over the past few days, the NDP have put on a big song and dance about the bill to update the Elections Act, which they had a hand in drafting with the government as a part of the Supply and Confidence Agreement. They now claim that they were blindsided by the provision to move the “fixed” election date by one week so that it doesn’t clash with Dwivali, because the knock-on effect is that it will qualify a number of MPs for their pensions in that extra week because they’ll have had their six years of service then. So they are now moving an amendment to the bill to return the election date to its original schedule, because who cares about Dwivali, right?

This is actually a new low for the NDP, who are trying to play populist politics but are doing it very, very badly. And if the intention is for this to come off as mean-spirited at the expense of Hindus, Jains and Sikhs who are celebrating and can’t vote of campaign on that day, well, who cares? As I believe Emilie Nicholas pointed out on Power & Politics, if the bill is to eliminate barriers to voting, why would the NDP then put up a new barrier for Hindus, Jains and Sikhs, so that they can try and outdo the astroturf charlatans in the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation? Because that’s the only group not actually is going to derive any joy from this. And media framing this as tAxPaYeR dOlLaRs is complicit in this kind of base thinking.

Frankly, we shouldn’t begrudge MPs their pensions because they put their lives on hold for years to serve the public in this way. (Whether they serve effectively is another story). We underpay them for the work they are doing (well, the work they are supposed to be doing—the current crop is not exactly doing themselves any favours), and to make these MPs lose out on the pensions they’ve earned because they are a few days shy of the cutoff is actually kind of cruel, and is the sort of thing that makes people rethink ever wanting to run for office, and to come out of it at the end with nothing for the time they put into public service when they could have made much more money and gotten a pension in the private sector. Instead of being gracious enough, every opposition party now wants to be dickish about it, which is pretty much fitting for the moment we’re in.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Russian missile attack overnight destroyed a power facility in Kyiv and damaged the electricity grid. Ukraine struck an oil terminal in Kavkaz in Russia thanks to missiles fired from their navy. Both Germany and the US have now said that Ukraine can use their weapons to strike inside of Russian territory, so long as it’s for the defence of Kharkiv. A prisoner swap with Russia took place on Friday, exchanging 75 people on each side. Ukraine has had four thousand prisoners apply to join the army in exchange for parole. And the factory in Ukraine that makes Oreo cookies is back online after two years of rebuilding after being damaged by the Russians.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1796518606832017524

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1796445849683419207

 

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Roundup: Huffing those culture war fumes

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My absolute exasperation with the need to constantly import American culture war bullshit into Canadian politics continues to grow, as we see yet another example playing out in the House of Commons. This time, it’s opposition whip Kerry-Lynne Findlay using the far-right gotcha of “What is the definition of a woman,” in the hopes that the response is some kind of confused mess in order to include trans women in the definition of women.

This being said, I’m not surprised that it was Findlay, because she has a growing record of doing things like this, most especially when she was tweeting her concern about how Chrystia Freeland once interviewed George Soros when she was a journalist. Findlay was greatly alarmed by what she saw, and in case you’ve been living under a rock, the attacks on Soros are largely rooted in antisemitic tropes that date back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Findlay has repeatedly shown that she hasn’t learned her lesson from that incident, and this latest one is more proof of that.

The panic over trans people continues to infiltrate the discourse in Canada. The Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a thinktank that initially billed itself as a centrist endeavour in the mode of the two pivotal prime ministers who helped build and shape the country as we know it, has increasingly been pulling further and further to the right, and adopting anti-trans rhetoric as part of their offerings, which is a little alarming (and people who are associated with the Institute should start distancing themselves the more this kind of bullshit takes hold). This is also in the context that CSIS is seeing threats coming from the “anti-gender” movement, and for a group like MLI to pander to those sentiments is irresponsible, and dangerous.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia launched one of its biggest air strikes against Ukrainian thermal power generation stations in weeks, causing blackouts throughout the country. A separate air attack hit a school stadium in Kharkiv. It was Victory Day in Russia, celebrating their victory in WWII, and it should be noted that they did not take Chasiv Yar like they were hoping to beforehand.

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Roundup: More misleading over opioids

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The weekend discourse appears to have been much of what last week’s was, which was the Conservatives lying about the state of the opioid crisis in BC, lying about Justin Trudeau’s culpability, and lying about…well, pretty much everything. I feel like I need to keep saying this, but the decriminalisation project in BC is not what caused people to start using drugs openly in public places. That is happening everywhere. It is happening right now on the streets in Ottawa, where there is no decriminalisation, because there is currently a prevailing ethos that if you use in public places and overdose, you have a better chance that someone will come across you and get a Naloxone kit to save your life. It’s not about decriminalisation. That also didn’t cause users to leave needles in parks—that’s been happening for decades in some urban centres. We’re now fully into moral panic territory.

Meanwhile, Toronto Public Health’s hopes for a similar decriminalisation programme don’t seem to be going anywhere, and Justin Trudeau stated last week, in QP that they only work with provinces and not individual cities on these kinds of projects, which is why they didn’t accept Vancouver’s proposal earlier, and why they’re not contemplating Toronto or Montreal now. And frankly, that shouldn’t be unexpected because public health is a provincial responsibility, so it would make more sense for the federal government to work with a province rather than an individual municipality that may be at odds with the province in question. Federalism matters, guys.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces shot down 23 of 24 drones overnight on Sunday, with more airstrikes on Kharkiv during the day on Sunday. There was also a drone attack on power supply in the Sumy region early Monday morning. Drone footage shows how the village of Ocheretyne is being pummelled by Russians, as residents are scrambling to flee the area, as Russia claims they have captured it. Problem gambling has become an issue for a lot of Ukrainian soldiers dealing with the stress of combat.

https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1787172469100478665

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Roundup: Reasons to oppose a bad judgment

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After the federal government filed their appeal of that Federal Court decision that…strongly suggested to them to appoint more judges (because it certainly wasn’t an order), the lawyer behind that suit has filed a cross-appeal because he wants tougher language and more teeth to it, but it’s not something that the courts can really force a government to do because it’s a Crown prerogative. They have no enforcement mechanism, so I’m not sure what the lawyer here is hoping to accomplish other than to keep getting his name in the papers.

Speaking of papers, I do find it to be a problem that in both the National Post and Toronto Star stories about this cross appeal that neither of them referenced the fact that the primary reason the federal government is appealing the decision is not because it’s useless, but because it’s a complete dog’s breakfast that makes up a constitutional convention from whole cloth and then runs with it. There is plenty of commentary from constitutional scholars out there, Emmett Macfarlane’s being one of the most accessible, but this is a real issue, and no government that is the slightest bit responsible wants bad precedents sitting on the books. It’s one of the reasons why they fought the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision on compensation for Indigenous families—they were willing to pay the compensation, but the Tribunal exceeded its authority and they didn’t want that to stand lest it create a precedent (and why that was one of the points of negotiation in the settlement).

Bad precedents, if left unchallenged, create bad case law, and that creates all kinds of problems in the future. Nobody is arguing that this government doesn’t need to make faster appointments, because they absolutely do, and even they recognise that. But this was a bad decision that shouldn’t be allowed to stand.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia subjected Kyiv to intense bombardment for the third time in five days, and once again, damage and injuries were mostly from debris from intercepted missiles and drones. Russia also attacked an underground gas storage facility, at a time where there are already rolling blackouts because of attacks on power supplies, as engineers work to restore power, in particular at Kharkiv and Odesa. Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to make drone attacks on Russian refineries.

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QP: Is the PBO right or out of date?

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In spite of the fact that they are both in town, neither the prime minister nor his deputy were present for QP today, and most of the other leaders were absent as well. Andrew Scheer led off, and after rattling off slogans, he raised the story on the cost of the prime minister’s vacation, and got increasingly breathy as he demanded an election. François-Philippe Champagne said that Scheer had become the CIO of Canada—the Chief Inaction Officer, and that he was advocating inaction on climate change and clean growth. This earned him a warning from the Speaker. Scheer then railed about people not being able to afford food and blamed the carbon levy, and again demanded an election. Gudie Hutchings got up to recount the story of a senior in her riding who tracks his expenses, and what happy that he comes out ahead with the rebates. Scheer insisted this was just false, and claimed the PBO stated otherwise, and once again demanded an election. Hutchings recounted more stories from seniors in her riding. Luc Berthold took over in French, took some swipes at the Bloc, and demanded to know what the government promised them for support. Champagne said that it was clear that the Conservatives didn’t believe in climate change while the government takes action and grows the economy. Berthold tried to call out the Bloc on the upcoming vote, and and Steven Guilbeault reminded him that they ran on climate change in the last election, and that just behind him sits a former Quebec minister who brought in Quebec’s system. 

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and decried how much the government says no to Quebec, Pablo Rodriguez listed things they said yes to, and that the Bloc only wants to start fights. Therrien listed more things the government said no to, including the abolition of the monarchy, and Rodriguez gave much the same reply.

Peter Julian rose for the NDP, and in French, decried rent increases in Montreal—which is provincial jurisdiction—and wanted something for renters in the budget, Soraya Martinez Ferrada noted the investments in different types of housing, and their agreement with Quebec. Jenny Kwan appeared by video to give the same question with a BC lens, and Martinez Ferrada gave the English version of the same talking points.

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QP: Spike the Hike vs Scrap the Crap

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Kicking off the sole sitting week of the month, the prime minister was not present for QP, though he did show up immediately after, for the speeches paying tribute to Brian Mulroney. Trudeau’s deputy was present, however, as were most of the other leaders. Pierre Poilievre led off in French, and after rattling off his slogans, he railed about the increasing carbon price, and pivoted to a decree about supposedly closing the forestry sector in Quebec. Chrystia Freeland responded that Quebec has their own system for carbon pricing, which…was not the question. Poilievre noted that wasn’t what he asked, and then asked something around police needing to control crowds for food basket deliveries. Freeland noted that the Conservatives only want to cut supports for those less fortunate. Poilievre switched to English to again rattle off his slogans, and noted military families going to food banks and demanded the levy increase be curtailed. Freeland repeated that the Conservatives only want to cut programmes people rely on. Poilievre declared this to be “fear and falsehoods” and repeated some slogans about the carbon prices. Freeland retorted that Poilievre traffics in fear and falsehoods, and repeated that he wants to cut the carbon rebates. Poilievre read an out of context figure about how much the increase will cost—citing a different figure than what applies to households—and Freeland gave a somewhat confused group of carbon rebate points that didn’t really flow.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and raised the PM’s meeting with François Legault last weekend, and lamented all the things that Trudeau rejected that Legault warned. Marc Miller noted they already have an agreement with the province, but they won’t turn over all powers. Therrien took a swipe at Trudeau’s radio interview on Friday, and Miller repeated that they have constructive dialogue with the province.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP to exhort the government to vote for their Supply Day motion on Palestinian statehood. Mélanie Joly said they agree with the aims of peace, but didn’t say if they would or would not support it. Singh repeated the demand in French, and Joly noted that she was in the region last week, and spoken about a two-state solution but again didn’t give a clear answer.

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