Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: Totally not buying votes

Posted on by

With those new child benefit cheques starting to flow, a couple of bits of analysis were done over the past few days. One was to use census data to look at the demographics of ridings where people stood to gain the most from the new cheques, and wouldn’t you know it, of the 338 ridings, most were either Conservative or had a good chance of leaning that way in the next election. The other piece did some detective work into Pierre Poilievre’s big hunt for families who had not signed up for the benefit, and how he was able to derive numbers of how many families in certain regions had not done so. Why target regions? Why, electioneering, of course. There were also some pretty artificial deadlines being floated for getting people to sign up to the programme, so that cheques would handily flow just as the election is kicking off. Because that’s not trying to buy votes with people’s own money either, apparently. Among the places Poilievre visited on his “ finding families” tour were, you guessed it, Conservative ridings, while First Nations communities, who were less likely to be signed up, didn’t merit visits at all as they were unlikely to vote Conservative. So in case you really did think that these child benefit cheques were really about helping families and not about trying to buy votes, well, the analysis doesn’t support that kind of altruistic viewpoint.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/622932565306003456

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/622933109340774400

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/622933409762045953

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/622933528775364608

Continue reading →

Roundup: Stacking the panel

Posted on by

The government has unveiled how they’re going to respond to the Supreme Court’s ruling on doctor-assisted dying, and it could not be any more spineless if they tried. Having first ignored the issue in Parliament for decades, they waited for the courts to tell them to do something, and by something, they decided to appoint a three-person panel to hold more consultations and come up with recommendations. In other words, outsourcing their response. But wait – it gets better. Two of the three members of this panel are opponents to doctor-assisted dying, and testified on the government’s behalf during the court cases. The third member, a former Quebec cabinet minister, is vested in the issue of provincial jurisdiction. In other words, the government has decided on the outcome they want, and stacked the panel in such a way as to deliver it. We shouldn’t be surprised by this response, considering how closely it mirrors what happened with the Bedford decision on prostitution. Rather than actually heed the decision and what it said about safety and security for sex workers, the government stacked their consultations in favour of opponents and religious institutions, dismissed as much expert testimony as they could in committee hearings, and drafted a bill that substantively does not change the situation for those sex workers when it comes to their safety, and will in fact just drive the industry further underground by criminalising buyers, and all the while touting that they were listening to the responses from their consultations. Watching them do the same with the assisted dying issue is proof positive that this is a government that refuses to make any hard decisions. (On a related note, here’s an interesting analysis of the Court’s decision in the case from Michael Plaxton and Carissima Mathen).

Continue reading →

Roundup: A mixed pipeline message

Posted on by

There was confusion in the ranks yesterday as to just what the NDP position on the Energy East pipeline is. Recently they said that it was the “cornerstone” of their energy policy, and then comes an interview in L’Actualité where Mulcair is quoted as saying that he’s against it. And then Twitter went bananas. The NDP comms staff started rushing out transcripts and partial audio files to counter it, before their youth wing sent out a tweet cheering the opposition to said pipeline – only to have to delete it a few minutes later “for clarification.” Suffice to say, it did look a bit sloppy, and like he’s trying to give two separate messages to two different parts of the country – something that the party has certainly done before.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/621781691946954752

https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/621790674044776452

https://twitter.com/bruceanderson/status/621797933323841540

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/621808388113100800

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/621808715474317312

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/621809490409734144

Continue reading →

Roundup: Spinning deficit financing

Posted on by

It should be no surprise that a government that likes to re-announce the same funds over and over again are now re-spinning old funds with a new purpose. As previously discussed, they’re going full-speed ahead on rebranding their childcare benefits as economic stimulus – because apparently only families with children should be stimulating the economy. (Singletons, we’re being shafted – again). As well, Scott Brison noted that these cheques are essentially being deficit financed, after the budget raided both the contingency reserve and the EI fund to pay for them while still claiming balance (not to mention their projections for oil prices). And hey, you know what would be a good thing during a recession? A full contingency reserve and an EI fund that’s ready to help any layoffs and job losses that result from said recession. But things were going to be rosy, and there was nothing to worry about – except now there is, but Harper insists it’s all external factors (never mind that he still takes credit when things go well even though it had nothing to do with his government). What great economic leadership…

Continue reading →

Roundup: Abusing the Senate for partisan ends

Posted on by

The parade of people looking aghast at that Senate committee interim report continued yesterday, much of it with the usual cartoonish depictions of the Senate as a whole, never mind that this was a small group of Conservatives that made the recommendations in an interim report, and the Liberals on the committee explicitly dissented from it. Yes, the proposal is problematic and no doubt there are many in the Muslim community who are sceptical because it’s not a monolithic religion. Even those who are supportive in theory, because of the problem of foreign-trained imams that are more likely to come from radicalised schools, are wary of the current government and its mechanisms for dealing with it, though it has also been noted that the government already issues work permits for these imams, so perhaps that is a tool they could better use now. The report did mention what happens in Europe, but the language is vague, and what does happen in many European countries is providing funding for imam-training schools, with the intention of helping them learn about the language and culture of the country they’re heading to. Could this be what they mean? Maybe, but it’s still an interim report, so we won’t know until maybe December, assuming that the next parliament is actually constituted by then. So what to make of it? John Ivison posits that the report reads like a Conservative election platform, and I don’t think he’s wrong. This government has not been above abusing the Senate for its own ends before, and it looks like they’re doing it again. And yes, you’re going to look aghast at the suggestion that the Senate is partisan, never mind that it is and always has been – it’s usually just less partisan because Senators don’t need to campaign for re-election. It’s also in a difficult period right now because the majority of the Conservatives in the Senate were appointed in a manner that stressed the Chamber’s ability to absorb them, and that in turn led the Conservative leadership therein to further abuse the chamber by going heavy on the whip. It is a problem that may not be solved until Harper is no longer the party leader and this group no longer feels beholden to him. Until then, we should be critical, but let’s keep said criticism in perspective. The institution itself is not to be faulted because it currently has some problematic appointments and a Prime Minister that is keen to abuse it.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Making the AFN pitch

Posted on by

The Assembly of First Nations has been holding their General Assembly in Montreal, and both of the two main opposition leaders addressed them yesterday. As First Nations leaders try to convince their people to start flexing their political muscles, with some 51 ridings they say that they can influence, both Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau made their pitches to the assembled chiefs. For Mulcair, it was largely a recapping of pledges he had made previously, while Trudeau unveiled a much more comprehensive policy plank for the party’s election platform. The fact that the parties are making this kind of a pitch – probably the most high-profile of such pitches in recent electoral memory – is a sign to the seriousness to which Canadians are taking these issues now, where they would have been considered far more niche in elections past.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Tweet storms over Greece

Posted on by

On an otherwise hot and sleepy Monday in the Nation’s Capital, an otherwise innocuous-sounding tweet turned into a bit of a flap, which of course feeds the broader narrative of the coming election.

Suffice to say, both positions were both pretty ridiculous. Ashton (who later made it clear this was a personal position and not a party one) being ridiculous of course in trying to infer that there is some kind of oppositional dynamic between democracy and austerity (would a “yes” vote have been anti-democratic? Really?), while Poilievre ridiculous in trying to make any kind of economic comparison between Canada and Greece, even if Canada were to have an NDP government. It would take decades of structural and even cultural factors for us to even approach a Greece-like situation, but that doesn’t fit well into a tweet. Poilievre kept on, tweaking the opposition parties about their previous support for joining a Greek bailout, which would mean that Canada would now be on the list of countries owed billions, had we opted to do so. And then both the NDP and the Liberals chipped back with both Harper’s mediocre economic record and the ridiculous comparisons to Greece. So, I guess it gave us all something to talk about, but it’s still kind of lame – and did I mention ridiculous?

Continue reading →

Roundup: The R-word

Posted on by

With all of this bad economic news coming out lately, the R-word has been bandied about – recession, or technical recession, in the event that we get two quarters of negative growth. After all, we had negative growth in the first quarter, and we’ve already had one US bank say that we’re headed for recession and a 77-cent dollar (note: This was misreported as a 70-cent dollar the day before yesterday). Oh, but don’t worry, Joe Oliver says – we won’t go into recession. His forecasters still show growth, and Harper insists that the oil patch is going to bounce back, while they send out MPs saying that certain sectors of the economy are going to do better with a lower dollar – except no, the manufacturing sector isn’t ramping up on a lower dollar this time because that burned them before, and they had already retooled a lot of their operations to service oil and gas demand rather than export demand. So there’s that. One also can’t help but be reminded of the 2008 election, when Harper insisted that if a recession was going to happen, it would have happened already, and hey, look at all of these great buying opportunities. And then the “Great Recession” happened (a ridiculous name considering that the recession in the early 80s was actually worse), and the government drove us into deficit with a badly planned stimulus programme. Now that the campaign has begun, all of the leaders are plugging their messages – Harper insisting that things are going to bounce back and hey, look over there – terrorists!; Mulcair talking about manufacturing jobs without saying how he’ll encourage them (that miniscule innovation tax credit isn’t going to cut it) while also falsely decrying that “all of our eggs” were in the resource basket (not even remotely true); while Trudeau is making points about the current way the government is treating the economy and environment in an oppositional framework when it needn’t be, and talking about ramping up infrastructure spending but also trying to be clever about how to do it without more deficit spending. We’ll know by September 1st if we’re really in a recession or not, but it could make for a long two months of campaigning on the economy in the meantime.

Continue reading →

Roundup: And now the environmental policy

Posted on by

Justin Trudeau was out in Vancouver yesterday to unveil the next plank in his party’s platform, filling out his previous environmental proposal to sit down with the provinces to allow them to collectively come up with a climate plan in the short time between the election and the Paris climate conference in December. Trudeau’s new announcements included phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, putting more money into clean tech jobs, restoring the environmental assessment process and adding more teeth to the National Energy Board and its review processes, increasing the amount of protected coastal areas, and cancelling fees at national parks in 2017 to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary. Overall, his message was that there will be a price on carbon if the Liberals form government. Predictably, the Conservatives came out with cries of “carbon tax!” while the NDP rolled their eyes and muttered about vague targets with no actual named carbon price. Paul Wells notes that one really can’t criticise Trudeau for being devoid of policy any longer, and that it may force voters to give him and his party a second look.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Preparing to change gears

Posted on by

Today may be the final day the Senate sits – we’ll see if the Liberals are able to tie-up the “union-busting” bill C-377 in procedure for longer than it has been illegitimately time-allocated for today. From that point on, with business out of the way, it looks like senators can spend the summer focusing on some of the more managerial aspects of what has been going on with them of late, being the Auditor General’s report and his recommendations, particularly with regards to the independent oversight committee. It’ll be a tricky thing to get right because the AG did not contemplate the issue of parliamentary supremacy, but you can be sure that there are a number of senators who won’t be silent about that particular issue. It will also be a summer of fending off smears and attacks from MPs trying to use the Senate as a punching bag in their bid to get re-elected – never mind that a few incidents of alleged misspending have nothing to do with the powers or legislative business of the Senate, or the fact that MPs are far more opaque about their own spending practices. To that end, Senate Speaker Housakos told Bob Fife over the weekend that he’s not going to take any lessons on accountability from MPs, and most especially Mulcair with his party’s $2.7 million satellite office issue. And that’s exactly it – MPs aren’t saints by virtue of having been elected, and it doesn’t mean that they are really held to account for those issues because they are rarely brought to light. Witness last week, when the Ottawa Citizen asked MPs about their residential claims, and only 20 out of some 300 actually bothered to respond. Oh, but it’s the Senate that has the problem and with the “entitlement” issue.

Continue reading →