Tag Archives: Bank of Canada

Roundup: A carbon reality check

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A couple of weeks ago, Paul Wells did one of his CPAC interviews with Elizabeth May, the transcript of which is now available, and she talked a lot about how she thinks Canada can transition to a cleaner economy, and said a bunch of things about the oil and gas industry as part of that. The problem, of course, was that she was wrong about pretty much all of it, as energy economist Andrew Leach demonstrates.

Leach, meanwhile, also takes Jason Kenney’s rhetoric about carbon pricing to task in this Policy Options piece, and lays out the danger of that rhetoric, which has a high probability of blowing up in Kenney’s face. And as a bonus, he proposed a tool for conservatives to check their policy instincts against.

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Roundup: Weasel words on conversion therapy

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In the wake of the Liberals announcing that they were looking at what measures they could take at a federal level to ban “conversion therapy,” the question was put to Andrew Scheer if he opposed it. Scheer responded that while he opposes “forced” conversion therapy, he will wait to see what the government proposes around banning it before if he’ll support it. The Conservatives quickly cried foul that the Global news headline was that “Andrew Scheer will ‘wait and see’ before taking a stance on conversion therapy ban” was just clickbait that didn’t reflect his actual quotes (and Global did update their headline), but not one of them pointed out the fact that Scheer’s own words were, to be frank, weaselly.

Scheer said that he opposed “forced” conversion therapy, and that he’s opposed to “any type of practice that would forcibly attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation against their will or things like that.” And you note the weasel words in there – about only being opposed to “forced” therapy, or to change it “against their will.” The giant implication that not one conservative rushing to defend Scheer is that there are types of “voluntary” conversion therapy that he is okay with, and that is alarming because any kind of so-called “conversion therapy” is torture, whether entered into voluntarily or not – and it ignores that when people enter into it voluntarily, it’s because they have such a degree of self-loathing that they have deluded themselves into believing that they can change their sexual orientation in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and a lot of that self-loathing comes from the sorts of violence, whether physical, mental or spiritual, that has been inflicted upon them. And it does look entirely like Scheer is being too cute by leaving a giant loophole in the window for his religious, social conservative flank to not feel threatened by his position, because it lets them carry on with the mythology that there is such a thing as “voluntary” conversion therapy, and that this is all about their “love the sinner, hate the sin” bullshit that asserts that homosexuality is just a learned behaviour and not an intrinsic characteristic. So no, I don’t think Scheer has been at all unequivocal.

Meanwhile, Scheer’s apologists will demand to know why the government refused to act on a “conversion therapy” ban when presented with a petition about it in March, but again, this is an issue where there is a great deal of nuance that should be applied. The government response was that these practices tend to fall under healthcare or be practiced by health professionals, which makes it provincial jurisdiction, and that while there can be some applications of the Criminal Code with some practices, it required coordination with the provinces to address, which they have been doing. What the Liberals announced this week was that they were seeing if there were any other measures they could take federally, which might involve the Criminal Code. Again, it’s an issue where it’s hard for them to take a particular line, so they’re trying to see what it is possible to do – that’s not a refusal, it’s an acknowledgement that it’s a complicated issue.

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Roundup: Federal Government 2, Provinces 0

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It was not a surprise that the Ontario Court of Appeal told Doug Ford to go pound sand with regard to its objections to the federal carbon price, which is exactly what they did in a 4-1 decision, affirming the Saskatchewan decision that the price is not a tax but a regulatory charge, and that it’s not unconstitutional. Ford, predictably, vowed to take this to the Supreme Court of Canada, and given that they agreed to hear the Saskatchewan case, it’s likely these two will be heard together, where you can pretty much bet that the majority of the judges there will tell Moe, Ford, and the likes, to similarly go pound sand. As for the dissenting judge on the Ontario panel, well, he has a pretty interesting history of his legal philosophy, and was unusually appointed directly to the Court of Appeal from his being a law professor.

Meanwhile, here’s some analysis, with threads by Andrew Leach, plus Lindsay Tedds on the whole tax/regulatory charge difference.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1144686800348340226

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Meanwhile, the BC government’s lawyers were in Alberta court on Friday to argue for an injunction against the province’s blatantly unconstitutional “turn off the taps” legislation now that it’s been proclaimed, likening it to a loaded gun that they don’t want to go off accidentally. The hitch, of course, is the question of whether BC has standing to go to Alberta court over the case, so we’ll see what the judge decides there.

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Roundup: An unusually partisan report

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The saga of Bill C-48 continues its strange trek through the Senate with the release of the report from the transport committee that recommended that the bill not proceed. Or at least that’s what it should have stated – that based on the tie vote, that the committee could not recommend the bill proceed. What they got instead was a lengthy screed about how allegedly terrible and the bill was for national unity, and it cherry picked comments from witnesses to “prove” that case, and strangely omitted any witnesses that stated – with facts – that the bill would have almost no impact on the energy industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In fact, the report was so partisan that it raised eyebrows among my sources in the Senate, who could not recall the last time that they had seen such a blatantly political document.

Naturally, not everyone on the committee was in favour of this report, and there are accusations back-and-forth about conversations regarding whether those who disagreed could write a dissenting report, and the eventual reluctance to bother because it would likely have tied things up in committee for even longer, as the clock ticks down. (Things are so bad on the Senate’s Order Paper that the need to sit well into July is now pretty much guaranteed). Of course, delaying this bill to death is part of the Conservative game plan, and everyone knows it – in fact, they pretty much have set up a situation where the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, will have to invoke time allocation to get it passed.

The shenanigans with this bill aren’t done yet. There will be a great deal of debate when this report gets debated in the whole Senate, where it is doubtlessly going to be rejected, but not without a great deal of noise and accusations that the Independents are just Liberal stooges, and so on. And it’s going to be so annoying when it’s all over.

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Roundup: The report and its “legal imperatives”

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As expected, the MMIW Inquiry report was delivered in a ceremony yesterday morning, and the prime minister accepted the report at the ceremony and promised that a national action plan would be developed in concert with Indigenous people – but the fact that he didn’t echo the use of the word “Canadian genocide” from the report had everyone trying to make an Issue out of it (though he made a qualified use of the term at a speech later in the day in Vancouver). The overall theme of the report is that there needs to be a “decolonization” in order for things to get better – which is easier said than done. The report’s 231 recommendations are phrased as “legal imperatives,” but some of them are tremendously problematic or impractical. Some of it is useful – suggestions around policing (which the RCMP promises to review carefully), some specific recommendations about the “man camps” that accompany resource development projects in Indigenous territory, more Indigenous prosecutors and judges (but less helpful is the suggestion that they may require a separate judicial system). But far less practical “imperatives” included things like demanding that the government create jobs in Indigenous communities (because we have a command-and-control economy?), or the creation of a basic income for all Canadians (erm, you know how much that would actually cost, right? Right?). How those kinds of recommendations can be phrased as “legal imperatives” is in and of itself a problem.

And then we’re back to the “genocide” issue, which has sucked up a lot of the oxygen. The Commissioners asserted that it’s a different kind of genocide than the Holocaust or what happened in Rwanda (which had Roméo Dallaire objecting), but wanted to remove the qualification of “cultural” genocide that was previously used in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, and which was accepted by pretty much all facets of Canadian society. Expect this particular polarizing language to continue to dominate the discussion in the weeks ahead.

In hot takes, Chantal Hébert worries that the report’s fairly hardline, all-or-nothing approach will be an excuse for people to tune out rather than engage with its findings (much like the apocalyptic language around climate change has not had the desired effect of spurring action). Chris Selley, meanwhile, points out some of the glaring omissions in the report, the lack of some context when it comes to rates of murders of Indigenous men, for example, and some of the contradictory recommendations such as being against mandatory minimum sentences because they disproportionately affect Indigenous people – while calling for mandatory minimums that are punitive if victims are Indigenous women, never mind that most of the perpetrators will be Indigenous men.

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Roundup: Problematic leaked recommendations

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On Monday, the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women will give its final report, and judging from the leaked copy, there will be some consternation with the conclusions, particularly that it considers the deaths as the victims of a “Canadian genocide.” While previous inquiries and even statements by the former Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin, have used the term cultural genocide, this report allegedly drops the qualifier. That will likely be a hurdle because there would seem to be an implication that a genocide implies an organised effort – which there was on the cultural side (because it was inconceivable to think that they shouldn’t be converted to Christianity and “civilised” because that was the dominant cultural framework), but I think it will be hard to stretch that to deaths that are more attributable to poverty and intergenerational violence – we can’t forget that the vast majority of perpetrators of these deaths were Indigenous men (and that there are even larger numbers of Indigenous men who have are missing and murdered).

As for recommendations, the headline one also appears to be problematic – that instances of domestic violence against Indigenous women that result in death be regarded as first-degree murder – and that the use of “Gladue principles” be reviewed with cases of deaths of Indigenous women. That again will be problematic because the Supreme Court ruled on those principles as a way of addressing intergenerational violence that leads to higher rates of incarceration for Indigenous people, and again, if the majority of perpetrators of violence against Indigenous women are Indigenous men, does this recommendation then not demand that more Indigenous men be incarcerated? While the recommendation is rooted in the principles of denunciation and deterrence, I’m not sure that’s sufficient given the broader implications. As well, some of the recommendations like making Indigenous languages official and on par with English and French don’t seem to grasp the practical considerations of ensuring that there be federal services provided in 60 different Indigenous languages.

It also sounds like the government isn’t going to readily accept all of these recommendations Carolyn Bennett has been pre-consulting on what she’s been hearing out of the Inquiry, and she’s not in favour of harsher sentences because it goes against evidenced-based policy as to what is effective. She also noted that their bill on changing child welfare systems for Indigenous communities will do more to prevent the intergenerational violence that the current broken system does. We’ll see what the formal report and its apparent 230 recommendations entail, and what the government’s response will be, but this leak and Bennett’s response sounds like they won’t be endorsing the whole thing.

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Roundup: Incoming amendments

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There are a tonne of amendments coming out in committees in the Senate, and there are likely going to be some fairly major developments and debates on these in the coming days – particularly once the House of Commons starts debating (and ultimately rejecting) a number of them. One of the more unexpected ones for me were the fairly major amendments to the solitary confinement bill. I was fully expecting the committee to recommend the bill not proceed because the courts had already found the bill unconstitutional and the committee was on the road to deeming it unsalvageable. Apparently, they’re going to make amendments instead, so we’ll see where this goes, because they have at least two court decisions on their side already.

The legal and constitutional affairs committee has also amended the Criminal Code revamp bill to ensure that there are tougher sentences for those who perpetrate domestic violence against Indigenous women. The problem? Well, most of those perpetrators are Indigenous men, and there is already a problem with over-incarceration, so this is going to be a tough needle to thread (but we’ll see how they attempt to do so.

Meanwhile, it looks like that major revamp of C-69 – the environmental assessment bill – was left intact at report stage on a vote on division, which means that they didn’t hold a standing vote, but were simply acknowledging that the vote was not unanimous. It’s a bit…suspect that they chose to go this route, considering how many of these amendments essentially gut the bill (and were indeed written by oil and gas company lobbyists, which totally isn’t problematic at all). But what is ultimately happening here is that these senators – and Senator Peter Harder in particular – are going to send this to the House of Commons so that they can reject them, and then send it back to the Senate where they will ultimately pass it after some minor theatrics, because of the will of the elected house, and so on. It’s not exactly the bravest route, and for the opposition in the Senate, it forces Trudeau to wear the decision more directly. There may yet be senators who will try to move amendments or delete some at third reading, but given Harder’s stance, I think the strong impetus will be for them to get the Commons to make the defeats so as to protect their own backsides from the wrath of Jason Kenney and others.

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Roundup: From a bad bill to a useless one

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Rona Ambrose’s judicial training bill looks like it may have some life left in it, as Independent Senator Pierre Dalphond himself a former judge, has started making deals and compromises to see the bill go ahead in an amended form. Working both with the bill’s Senate sponsor and one of its critics, Dalphond has come up with an amended version of the bill which should address most of its critics, and apparently got a procedural deal passed in the Senate as a whole, which gave instruction for the legal and constitutional affairs committee to hold a special session next week to deal with the bill, outside of the normal process where it would be dealing with government business (which is the whole reason the bill hasn’t gone anywhere – the committee is loaded with government bills, which Senate rules state needs to take precedence).

The amendments would ensure that a judicial appointee must commit to sexual assault law training as designed by the Canadian Judicial Council, and administered by the National Judicial Institute – moves that address many of the concerns around judicial independence (which likely would have rendered the bill unconstitutional), and would have created conflicts of interest where the bill as it stands would demand that future judges need to be trained by sexual assault survivors groups – the same groups that would normally be called upon to be expert witnesses in trials. This help to address other concerns about the bill, such as access for lawyers who aren’t in urban centres, or that requiring training before application would tip off coworkers to those lawyers that they were applying for a position on the bench. I remain curious what other objections the Canadian Judicial Council still has about the bill, but I guess we’ll find out next week when they will likely appear at the committee.

This all having been said, we need to remember that the Canadian Judicial Council has been seized with this issue for a few years now and has been ensuring that there is better training for judges, which is as it should be – the system is already working. That means that Ambrose’s bill is really, if amended, just another bit of feel-good legislation that MPs keep burdening the Order Paper with. (Note that as it stands, the bill is likely unconstitutional and actually a very bad bill despite its good intentions). And as with so many feel-good bills, it takes up all of the space in the media for little actual benefit, but that’s politics these days, unfortunately.

https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1132389428910088192

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Roundup: Alberta sends the wrong (price) signals

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It was Throne Speech day in Alberta, and sure enough, it contained an ambitious laundry list of upcoming legislation designed to undo much of what the NDP had put into place as a means of “restoring” the mythical Alberta Advantage. (Full speech here). Shortly thereafter, the promised Bill 1 to repeal the province’s carbon levy was introduced – pretty much guaranteeing that the federal carbon price will be imposed once the bill is enacted. It doesn’t repeal all of the carbon prices in the province, however – it merely shifts them to the largest polluters, which does nothing about the demand side of carbon consumption, and won’t shift consumer behaviours, nor will it do enough for those large emitters, because for all of Kenney’s talk about looking to protect the energy sector, he just shifted the bulk of the burden onto them. (It also won’t really help consumers because poorer households will be worse off now).

Meanwhile, here’s Andrew Leach to explain why Kenney’s repeal of the carbon price is handing a rhetorical victory to Ontario, and why the reliance on magical technology from the future to reduce emissions won’t happen if there aren’t proper price signals to spur its development.

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Roundup: An economic vision without an economic case

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Andrew Scheer gave the second of his policy keynote speeches yesterday, this one on his economic vision, and as could be expected, it was full of hyperbolic declarations about the size of the deficit (it’s tiny in comparison to our GDP), and the state of Canadian household finances (which have been growing). He promised that any new spending programmes would have to be paid for out of government “savings,” and in his pledge to balance the budget in two years, that would mean cuts. Of course, Conservative mouthpieces say this is easily enough achieved because they did it before (forgetting of course that the previous government had a habit of booking savings that were never going to be achieved for the sake of getting to a paper balance, like Shared Services Canada, or the Phoenix Pay System). The Liberals, incidentally, were quick to put out Bill Morneau to put a price tag on those cuts and warn that they would come out of families, and with the spectre of seeing what Doug Ford is doing to those families in Ontario, well, it’ll make things harder for Scheer.

The part that everyone talked about, however, was his grand vision of an “energy corridor” across the country where pipeline projects would magically cross the country with buy-in from Indigenous communities and everyone would be happy and prosperous, and we would have energy security and would never had to import oil from Saudi Arabia ever again. The problem with this fantasy picture, however, is largely economics. Even if Energy East were to get built, by some miracle, it would not have an economic case given that it wouldn’t be used for domestic oil in the eastern provinces as it would be far more expensive than the oil they’re importing. In fact, Energy East did not make it off the drawing board because there was no economic case – it wasn’t because there was opposition in Quebec (which has already achieved some kind of mythical status), but because there was no economic rationale for the company given that Keystone XL was back on the table. Scheer’s promise (other than the fantasy of it even happening) is that Alberta will either have to take a huge discount per barrel of oil, or oil prices in the eastern provinces start taking a major jump because they’re paying a lot more for it, and upgrade it from heavy petroleum and refine it (in refineries that would have to have been refitted, likely with yet more taxpayer subsidies). But since when should logic or basic economics be part of an “economic vision”? That would be silly.

Chris Selley offers a critique of Scheer’s rhetoric, but finds it more astonishing that it’s the Liberals’ own self-inflicted damage that is putting Scheer in a position where he has a reasonable shot of winning.

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