Tag Archives: Broadcasting

Roundup: Arrests begun as overwrought debate underway

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Debate on the emergency orders began yesterday with all of the leaders staking out their positions. And I will note that there is a legitimate argument from the Conservatives that the Emergencies Act shouldn’t have been invoked—but then they take argument that Trudeau didn’t do enough beforehand to deal with the situation, never mind that the Ottawa Police are the police of jurisdiction, that Doug Ford did virtually nothing to help never mind that this was well within his jurisdictional purview, and of course, they argue that Trudeau caused this by being mean to the extremists who organised this whole thing, and that he hasn’t capitulated to their demands. And thus, a good point is lost in the fog of utterly dishonest partisan posturing. It should also be noted that civil liberties groups are going to court to oppose the Act’s imposition, but their otherwise valid points are divorced from the reality that this is not a peaceful or legal protest—it’s an event organized by anti-government extremists. This is not a good faith protest, it’s an illegal occupation, and that colours events.

With this in mind, the House of Commons will be sitting all weekend in order to debate the emergency order the fact that they will be sitting almost entirely around the clock over the long weekend means that they have speaking slots for virtually every single MP, which is egregious and overkill. If anything, it’s the height of parliamentary narcissism. Yes, this is an unprecedented action, but you do not need every single MP to stand up and read a prepared speech that parrots the talking points that their party leader has decided upon. That’s not debate, it’s not edifying, and it’s just an exercise in providing clips for MPs’ websites and social media channels. It defeats the purpose of what Parliament is about, and debases the point of debate (not to mention that everyone is already burned out from the past three weeks of insanity and this robs the employees, staffers and most especially the interpreters of the long weekend that they all needed). If they haven’t made up their minds on the imposition of the emergency orders by end of day tomorrow, then maybe public life isn’t for them.

Update: Sittings in both Chambers were cancelled due to the ongoing police action, so we’ll see when they resume. The point stands, however.

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Roundup: Complacency versus the hard work of democracy

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Things are fraught in Ottawa, tempers are short. A lot of stuff that has been barely under the surface is blowing up. David Reevely has some thoughts about where we find ourselves, and why, and he’s pretty dead-on about it.

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Roundup: Poilievre first out of the gate

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First out of the gate to declare his intention to run for the leadership of the Conservative Party was Pierre Poilievre, who opted not to run the last time citing family concerns. Of course, numerous Conservative MPs and partisans have immediately lined up to support Poilievre, while others over social media have been digging up his long history of petulance, racist comments, and outright fictions, not that this will dissuade those who think that he’s just the guy to “own the Libs,” and move the party even more in a populist direction. Brace yourselves for an onslaught of outright fiction, because that’s the kind of politician Poilievre is.

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Roundup: O’Toole out, Bergen in

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It wasn’t even a close vote—Erin O’Toole has been deposed as Conservative leader on a vote of 73 to 45, and he is done for. He says he’ll stay on as an MP, but we’ll see how long his appetite for that lasts now that is ambitions have been dashed. But rather than face the media, O’Toole put out a six-minute statement over social media that tried to claim the party was the founding party of Canada (nope—his party was created in 2003), and a bunch of other things to try and burnish his image on the way out the door. “This country needs a Conservative party that is both an intellectual force and a governing force. Ideology without power is vanity. Seeking power with ideology is hubris,” he recited. Erm, except the pandering to populism is not an intellectual or governing force, he couldn’t even identify an ideology given that he kept flopping all over the place, depending on who was in the room with him at the time. And he keeps floating this notion that Canada is “so divided!” but this has been his go-to talking point for a while, trying to intimate that there is a “national unity crisis” because Alberta didn’t get its own way and get a Conservative government (that would take them for granted and ignore their concerns), never mind that it’s not actually a national unity crisis, but mere sore loserism.

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Later in the evening, out of seven potential candidates, the party voted for Candice Bergen to be the interim leader, which is a curious choice given how much she swings to the angry populist side of the party, from her unapologetically sporting a MAGA hat, to her full-throated support for the grifter occupation outside of Parliament Hill currently. It makes one wonder about both the upcoming leadership and what that says about unifying the different factions of the party, or whether the party will splinter because these factions may prove irreconcilable. And perhaps it should be a lesson that hey, maybe you shouldn’t just lie to each faction saying you really belong to them, and hope the other side doesn’t find out.

Meanwhile, Paul Wells enumerates O’Toole’s failures, and worries about the direction the party is headed now that it seems to be tearing down the few firewalls it had to keep the worst of Trumpism out of its playbook.

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Roundup: The extremists weigh in

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As the grifter convoy 2022 gets closer to Ottawa, it is attracting more online attention from some unsavoury circles. Some of them have been calling for this to be Canada’s January 6th insurrection, which one might think would give some Conservative MPs pause, but nope. No denunciations have yet been forthcoming. Another group associated with the convoy, calling itself “Canadian Unity,” seems to think they can force the government to sign some kind of quasi-legalistic “Memorandum of Understanding” that would essentially force the all governments, federal, provincial and municipal, to rescind all public health measures and dissolve the government so that said group can rule by fiat. Erm, yeah, that’s not going to happen.

One of the organizers (who has the GoFundMe in her name) says she won’t tolerate extremist rhetoric associated with said grifter convoy, but yeah, good luck with that. And if things do turn violent, well, that could trigger anti-terrorism financing laws to everyone who donated to those GoFundMe accounts.

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Oh, and the federal government isn’t budging on the vaccine mandate, and if they think a convoy like this will change the Americans’ minds for their own mandate, well, good luck with that delusion.

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Roundup: Holland breaks out the passive-aggressive open letter tactics

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The drama over the Winnipeg Lab documents took another turn yesterday as Government House Leader Mark Holland sent a four-page open letter to the Conservative House Leader, urging him to reconsider rejecting the government’s offer to create a new ad hoc panel to have the documents vetted behind closed doors with a panel of three former judges to adjudicate any disputes. In said letter, Holland name-checks nearly every national security and intelligence expert who has weighed in on the topic of the past few weeks, with a couple of exceptions.

While Holland didn’t name Philippe Lagassé’s piece, it’s fairly irrelevant to the concerns at hand. Whether NSICOP gets turned into a full-blown committee or not, it won’t make a material difference because the Conservatives’ objections are not based on any particular matter of principle or specific objection. As I point out in my column, they are merely acting in bad faith in order to be theatrical and try and score points by winking to conspiracy theories in order to paint the picture that the government is hiding something for the benefit of the Chinese, or some other such nonsense.

I don’t expect Holland’s letter to do anything other than look passive-aggressive and ham-fisted as the issue continues to fester—not that there is an order to produce documents any longer, and the committee that made said order no longer exists either (though O’Toole has been under pressure to restore it, as though it actually did anything meaningful other than be yet another dog and pony show). We’ll see if the other two opposition parties come to some kind of agreement, but so far this issue continues to just make everyone look like our Parliament is amateur hour. Which it kind of is.

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Roundup: Some more inflation fact-checking

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Because you know it’s going to come up yet again during Question Period today and through the rest of the week, here are a couple of reality checks around inflation, first from former Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz, who will give you all of the reasons why the pandemic spending and stimulus is not what is causing the current bout of transitory inflation.

Next, from economist Stephen Gordon:

So when Erin O’Toole and Pierre Poilievre start sounding off on inflation again, I know whose economic judgment I’ll be listening to (and it won’t be theirs).

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Roundup: Cherry-picking and one-upping policy

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There was a definite whiff of cynicism with the Liberals’ latest announcement, this time around housing, and it is starting to look like their election platform is to cherry-pick what the other two main parties have done and try to either one-up those policies, or extend the existing Budget 2021 framework with these rival policies in mind. So that’s going well.

On the other side, you have both Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh proclaiming that Trudeau had that six years could fix the housing affordability crisis, because apparently, it’s that easy to solve – and while Justin Trudeau did call them out in saying that anyone who thinks it can be solved in a snap doesn’t understand the depth of the crisis, and he’s right. He’s also right to point out that they had a big hill to climb when it comes to re-engaging the federal government on housing with agreements with the provinces, and they’ve been getting there, and accelerating a lot of that funding through the pandemic, but there has been little acknowledgement that the biggest bottlenecks to building more housing is coming from the municipal governments. It’s one of the reasons why the federal dollars for housing aren’t getting spent – projects can’t get approved at the municipal level. Now, the Liberals do have something to address this in their platform, which is a $4 billion fund that essentially seeks to bribe these councils into approving projects, but it is being argued that this won’t help those municipalities where this is a problem by very much, and it may be easier to go to the provinces to amend their own municipal parent legislation to remove some of these regulatory barriers from their end. Of course, that’s another case of “working with provinces,” though in this case, they may be more motivated than on other files.

This being said, nothing any of the parties are going to do is likely to help affordability anytime soon – especially because the problems for increasing the housing supply are dependent on eliminating those bottlenecks, and ensuring there is sufficient labour to build the houses, and in the major markets where this housing is most needed, that may be a problem in and of itself (especially if you want to attract that labour from other provinces, but they can’t afford a place to live when they arrive). And especially because nobody wants to piss off existing homeowners, who want their current home equity to keep appreciating, never mind that it just continues to make the problem worse. But politics is about tough choices, so we’ll see who can make reasonable ones.

In the meantime, here’s Jennifer Robson in this long thread recounting the last time a federal government tried a home buyers’ savings account, and Mike Moffatt gives his take on these announcements.

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Roundup: The Ombudsman demands independence

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The military ombudsman put out a position paper yesterday that called for his office to be made fully independent, and he criticized the minister’s office and the Department of National Defence for trying to interfere in investigations and ignoring recommendations for change. In particular, he cited that turning a blind eye to his office’s recommendations advances political interest or has to do with self-preservation or career advancements within the defence community.

Readers may know that I have issues with the demands for yet more officers of parliament. The proliferation of these officers has become acute in the last decade, and while there is a need for an independent ombudsman for the military, I also have not been blind to some of the previous holders of that office, and some were very much unsuited for an office that has no accountability. I’m not sure what kind of a structure the ombudsman’s office should need to be, but again, making him unaccountable and completely insulated opens the role up to the kinds of abuses of authority we’re seeing with the last officer of parliament that was created (being the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who has become completely unmoored from his legislative mandate). Anyone who doesn’t share this concern obviously isn’t paying attention (and I can guarantee you that the media is not paying attention, because they like it when these unaccountable officers try to turn themselves into media darlings, as the PBO is doing right now).

When asked about this, Justin Trudeau said that he would put it to Justice Louise Arbour as part of her comprehensive review, so that the ombudsman’s office can be part of the solution to reforming the military, but I fear that she may recommend the officer of parliament route. Part of the problem right now is that the minister isn’t responsive, but I think the solution needs to be that the minister needs to go rather than the ombudsman needing additional powers. Would that we actually hold ministers accountable for their failures, but this government doesn’t seem to be too keen on that.

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Roundup: Being called to the bar of the Commons

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Following the motion in the House of Commons that the head of the Public Health Agency of Canada has been found in contempt of Parliament for refusing to turn over national security documents to a House of Commons committee, and is being summoned to the bar of the Chamber on Monday, said PHAC president is faced with a possibly impossible choice – if he turns over the documents, he is in breach of the Privacy Act and the Security of Information Act. If he doesn’t turn them over, he is in contempt of Parliament and its powers of production – and he has not been guaranteed immunity if he turns those documents over, not that the MPs who demand these documents care.

What is perhaps more worrying is the apparently cavalier way in which this is being dealt with, as there is very little security around this. The Canada-China committee, which wants these documents, has no security clearances, nor are their communications even secure – the “hybrid” sittings are done over Zoom, and while it’s a slightly more secure version than the commercial one, it’s still not actually secure. As well, I am not particularly moved by the fact that they say that any redactions will be done by the House of Commons’ law clerk, because I’m not sure that he has the necessary security clearance to view the documents unredacted, nor does he have the background and context to read those documents in and apply redactions properly. This is a pretty serious issue that these MPs are handwaving over, and frankly, the way that they have abused the Law Clerk and his office over the course of his parliament by demanding that he perform the redactions on millions of documents that could wind up leaking commercially sensitive information has been nothing short of shameful. It certainly hasn’t been filling me with any confidence that any of the information will be treated with proper seriousness considering that they aren’t promising actual safeguards – or immunity. It very much makes this look more like grandstanding over a proper exercise in accountability.

Meanwhile, here is a history of people who have been summoned to the bar in the Commons, the last time which was in 1913, where the person refused to testify, and spent four months in a local jail until the parliamentary session expired. It’s a power that has very much fallen into disuse, but interesting nevertheless.

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