Tag Archives: Bank of Canada

Roundup: A warning of finite federal resources

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Apparently spooked by the new modelling numbers showing daily infection counts in the range of 6,500 by mid-December, and the fact that he got caught out ignoring public health advice in favour of uncontrolled spread, Doug Ford announced that they were re-jigging their advisory system to a much more reasonable number to trigger “code red” states. You’d think this was good news, but “code red” still means you can eat out at restaurants and go to bars, and aren’t really in any kind of serious lockdown state, so it looks like a lot of show, and more excuses to not inconvenience business owners while case counts grow exponentially and hospitalisations and deaths mount.

Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau is sounding a bit more impatient with premiers, reminding them that their resources aren’t infinite and that there is still a chance to save Christmas if we all act now (but probably not). And while certain voices sounded incredulous that a government that has shovelled money out the door at an unprecedented rate doesn’t have infinite resources, we’re not talking about money – we’re talking about personnel from the Red Cross and Canadian Forces if absolutely necessary to step into hospitals and long-term care facilities, and one imagines it also means physical resources like PPE. You can’t simply buy capacity or trained staff – it doesn’t come off the shelf, and people should realise this. And to that end, Trudeau also warned that if they reach the threshold beyond which they have capacity, then difficult choices are going to need to be made about the allocation of those resources.

And if the calls for the federal government to invoke the Emergencies Act wasn’t bad enough (it’s not going to happen), we’re not getting calls for Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health to resign because Ford won’t take advice and he won’t visibly push back against Ford’s blundering – even though his options as an advisor would be limited, and he may not feel he’s at the ethical line of requiring a public resignation just yet. And even further down that path was a piece in Maclean’s (which I’m not linking to) that called on these provincial health officers to assert authority and start making orders, which is a dangerous path to tread down. Why? Because this isn’t a technocracy. In a democracy, advisors advise, and elected politicians decide. Dr. Howard Njoo, the deputy federal chief public health officer, made this exact point yesterday – that they give their best advice to their political masters, and it’s up to those masters to make the final decision, which Ford, Kenney and company are certainly doing. We don’t want politicians to hide behind their advisors by blurring that line of accountability, and we don’t want unaccountable advisors to be making the decisions exactly because we can’t hold them to account at the ballot box. We also need to remember that “listen to the science” isn’t actually public policy. Science can provide guidance, but policy is about implementation, which the science cannot always dictate. Nevertheless, we need to stop blaming Ford’s public health officer and blame Ford himself (along with Kenney, Moe, Pallister, Legault, et al.) They are where the responsibility and the accountability lies, and where the pressure for them to actually take this pandemic seriously needs to be centred.

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1327380638106849283

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Roundup: A promise to fight back against federal action

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Another day, more record-breaking COVID cases in this country. In Ontario, new modelling suggests that if we don’t get this under control that we’ll be seeing 6,500 new cases a day by mid-December, which should terrify everyone. And Doug Ford? Well, he called the reports that he ignored public health advice “inaccurate,” and “one doctor’s opinion,” and insisted that he’s trying to find a “balance.” Because the needs of businesses outweigh human lives.

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In Alberta, where the pandemic is starting to overwhelm a couple of hospitals, Jason Kenney was back in isolation for the second time after another close-call with a positive COVID case (which he tested negative for) – because he’s totally taking it seriously. Kenney decided to “toughen” measures, which means that he…reduced hours in restaurants and bars, stopped indoor sports, and limited weddings and funerals. Because he still refuses to do a proper lockdown to get infections under control, and he refuses to do anything to inconvenience businesses. Hell, he’s still telling people to go out to restaurants and bars – just not as late, which also has the added effect of ensuring more people will be in these establishments during the compressed hours, which would seem to increase the chances of infection rather than decrease it. After all, Alberta’s public health insisted that people should socialize in a “structured setting” (i.e. restaurant or bar) instead of at home, so they’re really taking it seriously.

As for those who still insist on calling on the federal government to enact emergency legislation, Ford stated yesterday in no uncertain terms that he would not stand for it, and warned that other premiers would also fight back because they want to guard their own jurisdiction. So yeah, unilateral federal action would not fly (not that it really could under the terms of the Emergencies Act anyway), and we’d simply wind up in court over it. In other words, stop waiting for Trudeau to act (because he can’t) and pressure the premiers instead to quit worrying about businesses – especially since they have the power to help them out – and worry instead about the hundreds of deaths that are happening every week.

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Roundup: A question of political accountability

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An issue that I am getting tired of writing commenting on over, and over again, is this story about the supposed political vetting of judicial candidates. The reporters on the story fail to mention the crucial constitutional details underpinning the story, Erin O’Toole lies about what the justice minister has said in response to the constant allegations, and now the president of the Canadian Bar Association is writing to the government to express his concerns that this whole thing threatens public faith in the judiciary. And here I go again.

For the eleventieth time, let me reiterate that the prime minister is politically accountable for judicial appointments under our system of Responsible Government. That means that if another bad one gets through the selection process, he has to wear it politically if things come to light – kind of like what happened around now-former Justice Robin Camp (who you may remembered wondered why a sexual assault complainant didn’t keep her knees together). This is one of the reasons why once the candidates have made it through the initial non-partisan vetting process, that they are subjected to a political screen – to ensure that nobody is aware of any particular skeletons in these potential judges’ pasts that could come around to bite them in the future. Some of the confusion here is because one of the ways in which the government has been doing this vetting has been through their voter identification database, which has been interpreted as seeing if they are donors or had lawn signs – which is a false reading of what these databases do, which is to build voter profiles, and they consume vast amounts of data to do so (which is also why there are concerns that they are not subject to federal privacy laws). But this is being deliberately framed as looking for partisan manipulation. (This is not to suggest the motives of these reporters is partisan – only that they are looking to embarrass the government, and it wouldn’t matter which party is in charge).

I am more concerned by the fact that someone is leaking to the press, and the French press especially seems to be targeted about revelations concerning a particular staffer, which suggests to me some internecine fighting within the Liberal ranks that they are willing to do damage to themselves in order to hurt this staffer in particular. But why worry about motive or the fact that you are being played when you have a potentially embarrassing headline?

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Roundup: The slow part of the economic recovery

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It was a big day for economic news – the Bank of Canada stating that they expect interest rates to continue to be at near-zero until 2023, as the economic recovery moves into a much slower phase as we wait for a vaccine for the pandemic. They also stated their plan to change how they buy bonds going forward. A few hours later, Chrystia Freeland gave a major speech wherein she stated that the government was going to keep spending until the pandemic was over, because they can at a time of such historically low interest rates, and because it provides businesses and households a necessary bridge through the economic turmoil until the pandemic is over. And for those of you in the back, it’s not 1995, and even with all of this added spending – which is time-limited – is not going to create a debt bomb. It’s just not.

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Of course, conservative pundits set about clutching their pearls that the government is taking on the debt instead of households, apparently not comprehending that they have more tools and levers at their disposal than households – but these are the same chuckleheads who equate government debt with credit card debt. The Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report noted that much of the recovery to date has been on the back of consumer spending, which is one more reason why allowing households to go insolvent and enforcing consumer austerity would only harm the economic recovery – we saw this in the Great Depression, where consumers who had money but didn’t spend it because of the social stigma prolonged the depression for years. And yet, we keep hearing “taxpayer dollars!” and “leaving debt to our children,” as though leaving them a weak economy is any better – particularly if that debt is affordable and is treated as an investment with programmes like childcare, that creates more economic returns. This should not be a difficult concept to grasp – and yet…

Meanwhile, here is Kevin Carmichael’s parsing of the Bank of Canada’s rate decision and Monetary Policy Report, while Heather Scoffield gives her own thoughts on Freeland’s speech.

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Roundup: A spineless premier in the centre of a dispute

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The suspicious fire of a lobster pound used by the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia is the latest escalation in the fisheries dispute in that province, which prompted a number of calls over the weekend for the federal government to do something. But when you ask for specifics, people tend to come up with a bunch of hand-waving and not a lot of answers. As a reminder, policing is a provincial responsibility, and in Nova Scotia, the RCMP are contracted to the province. This means that it’s the province’s responsibility to ensure that the RCMP are doing their jobs and protecting the Mi’kmaq people from the mobs of angry commercial fishers that are threatening them, and not just standing there and watching it happen like they did during the swarming of a lobster pound last week.

Of course, the premier keeps trying to insist that he can’t solve the problem and demands that the federal government define what a “moderate livelihood” for the Mi’kmaq people is under their treaty rights (which, to be clear, the government has been at the negotiation table about for weeks now), which is a cynical exercise in buck-passing from a premier who make a big song and dance about admitting that the province was mired in systemic racism. Funny that when it’s in his face, he doesn’t want to do anything about it. On Saturday, the province’s attorney general finally requested additional support for the RCMP from the federal government, which Bill Blair immediately granted, days after he publicly stated that there were resources waiting to be deployed to the province upon request, which they had not done up until that point. A bunch of people (including Jagmeet Singh) also started chirping over Twitter that this attack was “terrorism,” except that it’s not – the Criminal Code has a very specific definition, and a mob is not it. One of the Indigenous chiefs at the centre of the dispute also mused over social media that the military should be called in, but again, this can’t be done without the request of the provincial government, and I cannot stress this enough, but you do not want the military to conduct law enforcement. It’s a VERY, VERY BAD THING.

Meanwhile, both the fisheries minister and the NDP are now calling for an emergency debate in Parliament over this, which seems to me to be the most useless thing imaginable, but what can you do? Erin O’Toole is also trying to pin the blame on the federal government, insisting that they should have had the negotiations over by now (how? By imposing a solution?) and blaming the federal government for not properly resourcing the RCMP in the province (who are under provincial contract and jurisdiction), but then again, truth hasn’t exactly been his strong suit of late. But this shouldn’t be an issue about the treaty – the government has signalled that they will protect those rights, and are just figuring out the details. Protection of the Mi’kmaq fishers and their property should be a police matter, which is provincial jurisdiction, but so long as the premier is too afraid of the white voters, I don’t see him exactly taking a strong stand on this issue anytime soon, and while all eyes turn back to Justin Trudeau to do something, anything, he doesn’t exactly have the levers at his disposal.

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Roundup: Special committee games

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The competing offers for special committees got even more crowded yesterday as the Liberals suggested their own possible special committee to examine pandemic spending, in a bid to jam both the Conservatives and NDP as they make their own offers. The Conservatives, you may recall, are employing a stunt to call for a special “anti-corruption committee,” as though the penny-ante bullshit that happens here were actual corruption that happens in other countries, and called explicitly for the purpose of decrying any lack of support for this committee idea as being in support of corruption. The NDP have their own proposal for a pandemic spending committee, but it was intended as a kind of super-committee to draw in not only the WE Imbroglio, but to revisit other non-scandals such as the Rob Silver affair (which the Ethics Commissioner declined to investigate), or the fact that one of the many pandemic procurement contracts went to a company whose owner is a former Liberal MP (whose departure was a bit huffy and drawn out at the time, one may recall).

The Liberal plan is to offer a “serious committee” to do “serious work,” which is a political gambit in and of itself – citing that if the other parties don’t agree to this particular committee (whose terms of reference one expects will be fairly narrowly circumscribed), then it proves that they are simply motivated by partisan gamesmanship rather than helping Canadians. And they’re not wrong – that’s exactly what both the Conservatives and NDP are looking for, at a point where they can only expect diminishing returns the longer that they drag on the WE Imbroglio (though, caveat, they do have a legitimate point in the Finance committee about producing the unredacted documents because that was the committee order that the government didn’t obey, and risks finding themselves in contempt of parliament over; the Ethics Committee demands are going outside of that committee’s mandate).

To add to the possible drama, the Liberals are also contemplating making the Conservatives’ upcoming Supply Day motion on their committee demand a confidence vote, which will wind up forcing the hands of one of the opposition parties into voting against it because nobody wants an election (and that could mean a number of Conservative MPs suddenly having “connectivity issues” and being unable to vote on the motion to ensure its demise). Of course, there is always the possibility of an accident – that seat counts weren’t done properly and the government could defeat itself, though that’s highly unlikely in the current circumstances. Nevertheless, this game-playing is where we’re at, seven months into the pandemic.

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Roundup: Poilievre attacks the central bank

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I am generally tolerant of MPs taking on ministerial or critic portfolios without first requiring a background knowledge in the subject matter, because for ministers, what matters is your ability to manage the department and act on advice that you’re given (as well as being accountable for those actions), while critics are playing an accountability role, and don’t exactly need subject matter expertise in order to do that. This having been said, sometimes ignorance is damaging, and we saw a very real example of that yesterday, where the Conservative finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, started taking shots at the Bank of Canada, saying that their quantitative easing programme is a “pyramid scheme” that is enabling the Liberals’ deficit spending (because we’re in a global pandemic!), and in doing so, is threatening the independence of the central bank. Poilievre also raised the spectre of runaway inflation if the Bank keeps printing money, err, except that we are currently facing deflationary pressure – not inflationary.

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There are plenty of economists who can explain these concepts to Poilievre, except we know that he’s not interested. He was given the portfolio in order to be a shit-disturber, to knock Bill Morneau off his game (and Morneau was fairly easily rattled by this kind of partisan buffoonery), and presumably kept in the role because Erin O’Toole thought he was doing a good job of it. Mind you, Chrystia Freeland is not Bill Morneau, and she’s not affected by Poilievre’s antics, and frequently puts him in his place in QP. But the fact that this is the state of the discourse on the economic recovery is both disappointing and dispiriting. We should be having reasonably conversations about what is happening with the economic recovery, not this kind of performative baboon jeering and hooting that we’re getting from a party that claims to be the better economic managers.

Good reads:

  • The Chinese ambassador has implicitly threatened Canadians in Hong Kong if Canada grants asylum to Hong Kong protesters. So that’s going well.
  • The new commercial rent subsidy will be retroactive to October 1st, but will require legislation to pass before those funds can roll out.
  • Indigenous Services minister Marc Miller says the raid on the Nova Scotia lobster pound on Tuesday was an attack on all Mi’kmaw people.
  • The Mi’kmaq chief involved in the fishery dispute says that the RCMP inaction on the scene as their property was destroyed in the raid is systemic racism in action.
  • The federal government is investing $20 million in helping bring small modular reactors to market as part of the goal of reaching net zero emissions.
  • The RCMP’s union is back in talks around salary increases, after they were delayed for the pandemic.
  • The government’s COVID Alert app has a bit of a glitch on Apple phones running older iOS, where it’s telling them they have potential conflicts when the app doesn’t.
  • The Bank of Canada is preparing to have a digital currency at the ready in the event it’s needed should Facebook’s planned Libra get blocked by regulators.
  • Pharmaceutical companies are threatening not to launch new medicines in Canada if new regulations come to force that would lower some prices.
  • Liberals on the finance and ethics committees are continuing their filibusters to avoid resuming the investigations into the WE Imbroglio.
  • Economists Andrew Leach and Blake Shaffer consider Alberta’s shift away from coal-fired electricity to be a success story for tools like carbon pricing.
  • Susan Delacourt recounts a political scientist’s attempts to interview women MPs about their experiences, and how that translates into changing the political culture.

Odds and ends:

Colin Horgan gives a wake-up call that the end of 2020 won’t bring relief, but will probably make things worse because we’ve exposed the problems in society.

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Roundup: O’Toole’s “cancel culture” performance

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Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is making obligatory right-flavoured populist noises, decrying “cancel culture” because Queen’s University’s board voted to consider changing the name of their John A. Macdonald building, as is much the flavour of the day. It’s this juvenile, performative noise, but this is the kind of thing that O’Toole built his leadership around, without any critical thinking whatsoever, so here’s @moebius_strip to point out the sheer absurdity of it all.

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Meanwhile, there is consternation because the Library and Archives websites haven’t yet updated their biographies of prime ministers like Macdonald and Laurier to adequately convey that they had racist policies, and lo, cookie-cutter journalism gets the same four voices to decry this that appear in every other story. Never mind that Library and Archives says that they are doing consultations in order to do the work of reconciliation, and that there will be updated versions coming – it’s not good enough because this all needed to be done yesterday.

Part of the problem here, however, is that it will take time to get a properly nuanced version of history that both acknowledges their contributions to building the country while also acknowledging the racism of the era – particularly because it’s not simply black-and-white, and anyone who has read Macdonald’s biography will find it hard to simply pigeon-hole him as some kind of cartoon racist, which is certainly what some of the online dialogue would have us do. Yes, he’s a complex and problematic figure, but he was also a moderating influence, and his racist policies were actually the less-bad ones that were being demanded by a lot of voices of the era, which I doubt is going to be acknowledged to the satisfaction of his modern-day critics. It’s not a simple conversation, but that seems to be what is being demanded.

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Roundup: Absent other measures

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Yesterday, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report that unsurprisingly states that the federal carbon price will need to increase significantly, absent other measures. This is not news. We all know this is the case. We also know that the government is finalising all kinds of other non-price measures as part of their plans to exceed our 2030 Paris targets, including the Clean Fuel Standard, and we have Jonathan Wilkinson on the record stating that they are nearly ready and should be out before the end of the calendar year. Why the PBO and others feel the need to keep repeating that absent other measures the carbon price would need to increase significantly to meet those targets, I’m not sure, because all it does is start a new round of media nonsense about how awful the current prices are (they’re not), and that this is all one big socialist plot, or whatever. And there are more measures on the way, so the question becomes fairly moot.

Speaking of the Clean Fuel Standard, there was a bunch of clutched pearls and swooning on fainting couches over the past couple of weeks when a former MP and current gasoline price analyst indicated that said Standard would be like a super-charged carbon price, and a bunch of Conservatives and their favoured pundits all had a three minutes hate about it. What I find amusing is that these are the same people who a) claim to believe in the free market, b) oppose the carbon price which is a free market mechanism to reducing carbon emissions, and c) are calling for more regulation, which the Clean Fuel Standard is, even though regulations are opaquer as to the cost increases that will result. There is an argument to be had that the government should focus on increasing the carbon price over other regulatory measures (though I would disagree with the ones that say all of said measures should be abandoned in favour of the price), but getting exercised because the very regulatory measures you are looking for cost more money means that you’re not really serious about it in the first place.

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Roundup: Taking credit for changing nothing

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It’s becoming a tale as old as time, where NDP leader Jagmeet Singh calls a late-afternoon press conference to declare that he has achieved a great victory of pushing on an open door and getting nothing new that the Liberals weren’t already going to do, to be followed by his supporters taking to social media to crow about it. And thus, late Friday afternoon, Singh held a press conference to say that he had struck a deal with the Liberals about paid sick leave, and that this, along with their previous decision to keep EI and the recovery benefit at CERB levels, meant that he was likely to vote confidence in the government, thus avoiding the election that was never going to happen anyway.

But let’s review – you can be assured that the Liberals didn’t decide to boost the EI and recovery benefit levels from $400 to $500/week because of Singh’s pressure, but rather because they can see the COVID case counts climbing like the rest of us, and with the second wave here earlier than anticipated. That’s likely going to mean more shutdowns, even if they’re not as bad as the initial one in March, and their commitment to having Canadians’ backs means that it was easier to keep the benefit levels the same. On top of that, they had already committed to paying for the sick leave benefit that the provinces would implement, based on negotiations that happened at the behest of BC premier John Horgan (as Trudeau assiduously assigned him the credit and not Singh). When Trudeau got this assurance from the premiers, Singh declared victory and his supporters crowed that it was all him that did this when it clearly wasn’t. And now, Singh is again taking credit for this benefit, even though nothing has actually changed.

And then we get supposed dunks like this one. Nothing changed. Nothing the federal government does will unilaterally change provincial labour laws that will actually implement this sick benefit, especially on the permanent basis that Singh wants it to be. Sure, the federal government says they’ll pay for those two weeks of sick leave, but does that mean that the person’s job is going to be protected? Nope. There are provinces, like Nova Scotia, who were reluctant about it because they felt it was up to collective bargaining between employers and labour to come to an agreement on this leave. Does this agreement that Singh got change that? Nope. Nothing has changed, and yet he’s suddenly the new Tommy Douglas. Girl, please.

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