Tag Archives: Bank of Canada

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.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316702304867946497

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316703965585833984

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316854251826683904

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.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1316454539596234753

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1316465701100552192

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1316465838468198401

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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Roundup: An address to the nation following the Throne Speech

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It’s Speech from the Throne day, which is always exciting, though it’ll be a much sparser affair given the pandemic. What is stranger is the fact that prime minister Justin Trudeau plans to take to the airwaves in the evening, around 6:30 PM, apparently in a bid to talk about the urgency pandemic and the emerging second wave, because we’re back to exponential growth in new cases in four provinces. After all, last night in the UK, Boris Johnson gave a public address to announce a second lockdown was going to start, so 2020 is going really well.

Meanwhile, there still is no agreement among MPs on how voting will work once the new session begins, and it sounds like the test for the proposed remote system did not go very well. Currently the parties seem to have some kind of an accord on a rotation system, but Trudeau and the Liberals keep pushing for hybrid sittings and remote voting while the Conservatives (rightfully) remain skeptical. But nobody is talking about the most practical solution, which is sequestering MPs and creating a bubble around Parliament Hill for them. I mean, if the NHL can do it, why can’t MPs, given how much more important Parliament is than the hockey playoffs.

Speaking of the importance of Parliament, MPs from the Liberals and NDP are balking at the availability of priority testing for them and their families at that Gatineau clinic, insisting that they’ll take spots away from other people who need it in the long queues for tests. And then the Conservatives went ahead and used unapproved serological tests yesterday provided by a lobbyist who is trying to get Health Canada to approve them – never mind that these tests don’t determine current infections, but only the presence of antibodies from past infections. This while they howl for the government to approve more rapid tests, even though the truncated approval process in the US has meant that faulty tests got approved there, which Health Canada is trying to avoid.

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Roundup: Blaming the wrong government

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It appears that Conservative leader Erin O’Toole has decided to use his need for a COVID-test after one of his staffers tested positive in order to be performative about the whole affair. Despite there being a dedicated testing services available to MPs and their families (because yes, Parliament is an essential service), O’Toole and family apparently opted to attempt the public route, which in Ottawa has been backed up for days because of a lack of testing capacity. O’Toole then put out a press release to blame the federal government – not for inadequate capacity, which is the domain of the provinces, and O’Toole couldn’t possibly be seen to criticize Doug Ford and his lack of appreciable action on the pandemic – but because rapid testing hasn’t been approved by the regulators at Health Canada. Hours later, Michelle Rempel, the new Conservative health critic, doubled down and demanded that Cabinet force Health Canada to work faster (and misusing an analogy about the bourgeoisie and “let them eat cake” in the process).

There are a couple of problems with O’Toole’s demands, and one is that Cabinet should be interfering in the work of a regulator, which sets up all kinds of bad precedents – you know, like the one the Conservatives set when they fired the nuclear safety regulator because she refused to restart a nuclear reactor during a crisis of isotope production. The other is that Health Canada has good reason not to approve these tests as they are, because they produce false negatives more often than the regular tests, and that creates a false sense of security among people who may be spreading the virus. “Oh, but the FDA approved it!” people say, ignoring that it’s an emergency approval that relies on self-reported results and not independently verified ones, which again, should be concerning – not to mention that infections in the US are still spreading rapidly. The fact that Health Canada is doing the job that the FDA didn’t shouldn’t mean that we’re “falling behind” – we’re doing the due diligence that they’re not.

As well, I’m not exactly mollified by the notion that O’Toole attempting the public route when he had an option available already because it’s the kind of performative “We’re like real people” nonsense – especially if it took a spot away from another local family who doesn’t have access to the private test that O’Toole did. It’s not heroic or setting a good example – it’s political theatre that could hurt other people in the process.

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Roundup: It’s all coming back to me now

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As Jason Kenney continues his bellicose demands for a revival of the Energy East project, it seems that his arguments have a certain familiar ring to them. Wait for it…

Anyone who has paid any attention to the Energy East demands for the past few years will note that there is a definite NEP 2.0 sensibility to them – especially the notion that in the name of “energy security,” we should repurpose this pipeline/build a new segment to the port of Saint John, where there is a single refinery that can handle limited amounts of heavy crude, and that the Irvings should either be forced to accept said Alberta heavy crude at a cost of an additional $10/barrel than they can currently import cheaper, lighter crude from abroad that their current refinery can handle, and that consumers in Atlantic Canada should be made to pay more for their gasoline for the privilege of it coming from Alberta – because I’m not sure that Alberta is going to accept the $10/barrel discount on their crude when they already are suffering from low global oil prices that have made many new oilsands projects economically unviable. Never mind the similarities of this scheme to the original NEP, for which Alberta has created a grand myth about the Great Satan Trudeau (even though the resulting closures in the industry had more to do with the collapse in global oil prices and global recession that happened at the same time) – the cognitive dissonance will not hold.

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Roundup: Alberta’s big budget hole

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Alberta released a fiscal update yesterday, and it was pretty abysmal, projecting a record-breaking $24.2 billion deficit. The problem? Was that the province’s finance minister spent much of it lying to the legislature and Albertans about the state of their books going into the pandemic, not to mention not having a real plan for the recovery. But it to put some of the staggering numbers in context, the province is taking in more revenue from gambling, alcohol and cannabis than they are from oil revenues – you know, what they have based their economy on. Meanwhile, their non-existent recovery plan is bro-heavy, and they still insist that they have a spending problem on services rather than a revenue problem from having the lowest tax rate in the country and no sales tax – and you know that’s going to mean the province is looking to slash and burn services, and they’ve already started by picking fights with doctors in the middle of a global pandemic, and those doctors are already shutting down their clinics and moving away. So yeah, Alberta’s got problems.

Economists Andrew Leach and Lindsay Tedds have more, starting with this preview thread by Leach that set the stage for the speech of lies that was to come.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1299171987655327744

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1299173816577347584

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Roundup: The O’Toole victory post-mortems

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Now that Erin O’Toole has been “decisively” declared the winner of the Conservative leadership contest, all of the analysis has churned out. While O’Toole avoided the media (he’ll have a press conference today instead) and got to work with meetings to solidify his transition to leader, including changes to senior staff, but had a call with the PM, wherein O’Toole was sure to point out in his readout that he raised “western alienation” as a concern he wanted addressed in the Throne Speech – sending a signal to his base on day one.

Here is a reminder of the things that O’Toole promised during his leadership campaign – and caution, a lot of those promises are premised on some eye-popping economic illiteracy. Here are five ridings whose results help tell the story of O’Toole’s rise using the rules of the campaign (you can find the full riding-by-riding breakdown here). Here’s an analysis of who the power players are in O’Toole’s Conservative Party.  Here’s a look into Leslyn Lewis’ campaign and what it signals, but I would put a word of caution for those who insist that this is some kind of turning point for a party that tends to favour old straight white men at all levels – I did notice over the past few months that whenever certain Conservative voters would harass female academics on social media and were called out for it, they would insist they weren’t sexist because they were voting for “a black woman to become prime minister.” I have a sneaking suspicion that Lewis has given a certain amount of cover to these kinds of people, which isn’t really a sign of progress.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt lists the things O’Toole will need to address before the party will be ready for an election, which means biding their time. Heather Scoffield sees an opportunity for O’Toole to exploit when it comes to fiscal policy. Aaron Wherry wonders how O’Toole will differentiate himself as leader given the party’s approach to issues. Éric Grenier crunches the numbers to show how the social conservative vote benefitted O’Toole over Peter MacKay. And Paul Wells takes stock of O’Toole, finding him to be little more than a warmed-over Scheer in an era where the political centre in the country has shifted from where the Conservatives believe it to be, which will mean that O’Toole will need to think bigger than he currently seems to have an interest in.

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Roundup: A curious case for declaratory legislation

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A curious story showed up on the CBC website yesterday, wherein justice minister David Lametti stated that if it looked like pandemic delays were going to cause criminal trials to essentially “age out” of the court system as a result of the Jordan decision – meaning that once they reach a certain point, they are deemed to be stayed because they took too long and have become unconstitutional – that he would introduce legislation to “clarify” how the Supreme Court’s Jordan decision was to be clarified. It’s curious because it seems to be a bit of a made-up issue – the Jordan decision already stated that the 30-month timeline allowed for exceptional circumstances, and we can all agree that a global pandemic is by definition an exceptional circumstance. This isn’t to say that declaratory legislation isn’t a valid exercise, because it can be – but it just seems wholly unnecessary in this case, when there are other ways that the government could be better dealing with the criminal justice system and juries than worrying about the Jordan timelines.

In any event, here is defence lawyer Michael Spratt with some thoughts on the story:

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