Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: Chalk up another Conservative disinformation campaign

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We’re now on or about day fifty-one of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and has been confirmed that Russia’s Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, has sunk, which is a huge loss for Russia (particularly as Turkey is blockading the entrance to the Black Sea to military vessels, so there will be no replacement for it anytime soon), and it will no longer be able to support Russian ground forces, or to shell cities from afar. In the meantime, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues to show that he is a master communicator for his country and his cause.

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1514681561412780035

Closer to home, yet another pernicious bit of disinformation has started circulating, courtesy of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, who read the Emissions Reduction Plan (which was prepared by an arm’s-length advisory panel), found a reference to a proposal to add a surtax to certain kinds of gas-guzzling vehicles, and then wrote an op-ed in the Toronto Sun that declared this was the government’s plan. Jason Kenney picked up on this and decried it, as has the Conservative Party writ-large and several of its leadership contenders. Of course, there are no actual plans for such a tax, but why does the truth matter? This was the tactic they’ve been using on the supposed plans for a capital gains tax on primary residents, which doesn’t exist and never will exist (even if it’s actually decent public policy). This also compounds with the selective quotes they’ve been using from the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s recent report on carbon pricing, which has been torqued into more disinformation.

There’s so much disinformation and lies floating about, as though there weren’t enough actual things that you could absolutely excoriate this government for, and yet they resort to fiction. Utterly boggling.

Programming Note: I will be taking a long weekend off from the blog, because I am exhausted after the past few weeks. See you Tuesday!

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Roundup: Words with meanings and obligations

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We’re now around day fifty of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and four European presidents—Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—visited Kyiv to show their support yesterday. (Some photos of Ukraine here). Ukrainian forces also detained one of Putin’s oligarch allies, which has led to a new round of threats from Russia. The other thing that will make Russia angry? The fact that the Ukrainians sank Russia’s flagship for their Black Sea fleet—the same ship that fired upon the border guards at Snake Island. It’s almost poetic justice.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1514397710509559814

Meanwhile, we are getting into a frustrating debate about whether or not to call what’s happening in Ukraine a genocide, and what makes it frustrating is the fact that there are international obligations to do something about it if that’s indeed the case. There is no argument that there are crimes against humanity happening, and those are very, very serious. But “genocide” is a specific legal term with specific intent, and for President Biden to throw the word around and saying that lawyers can sort out the details later isn’t helping, when the term obligates the US to do something about it (which they have danced around in the past because they don’t want to be obligated). And then Justin Trudeau chines in and says it’s “absolutely right” to use the term, which would then obligate Canada to do something about it as well. But we need to stop using the most serious language for things for shock value, because words have meanings, and in this case, obligations as well.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1513890485970116614

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1513902439556169733

Closer to home, the Bank of Canada raised its key interest rates by fifty basis points, and has hinted that more rate hikes are on the way, as they have to not only combat inflation with the only tool they have, but they have to fight the perception that they aren’t doing enough to cool inflation (and that latter part is the bigger part of the problem). I’ll be writing more about what’s in the Monetary Policy Report in the coming days, but in the meantime, here are some smart economists giving some reaction.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1514249461857366021

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Roundup: Faux concern over a decades-old system

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We’re now on or about day forty-seven of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Ukrainian forces are digging in and preparing for a renewed Russian offensive on the eastern and south-eastern portions of the country. UK prime minister Boris Johnson visited with president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv over the weekend, to show his support and solidarity in person. Elsewhere over the weekend, Ukraine was trying to ensure humanitarian corridors out of the Donbas region for Ukrainians to evacuate in advance of the coming Russian onslaught in the region.

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1512858863728570369

https://twitter.com/NikaMelkozerova/status/1513190467743236103

Closer to home, we are being subjected to a bunch of nonsense around Canadian content regulations in the context of Bill C-11, which updates the Broadcasting Act to now include streaming platforms like Netflix or Disney+. The particular nonsense? The notion that the CRTC will define what qualifies as Canadian. Erm, except they have been doing this already. They’ve had a well-defined point system for what counts as CanCon since 1984. Nineteen gods-damned eighty-four. This is not new. Extending broadcast regulations to streaming platforms changes absolutely nothing about what counts as Canadian content, because the rules are platform neutral. For decades, production companies needed a 6/10 on the CanCon scale to qualify for tax credits. None of this is new.

The problem, however, is that in the debates over C-11 (and its predecessor in the previous parliament, Bill C-10) you had Conservative MPs trying to make this an issue (and Rachael Thomas, who was then Rachael Harder, was particularly vocal about this). She kept trying to propagate this insane notion that somehow these rules should be in the legislation, which is bonkers because that shouldn’t be the job of Parliament, nor is legislation responsive in the way that regulation is. We have arm’s-length regulators like the CRTC for a reason, which is to de-politicise these kinds of decisions. Sure, everyone comes up with supposedly scandalous examples of why certain things which may sound Canadian on the surface isn’t considered Canadian under the CanCon rules (such as The Handmaid’s Tale series), and it’s only until you look at the points system and think through the rules that you realise that these examples really aren’t that scandalous. The whole point is to ensure that our industry isn’t just a branch plant for American productions who can do it cheaper and get tax credits up here. It’s to ensure that there are incentives for things that are actually Canadian-led and produced, and under Canadian creative control, to get made. You can argue that the rules need to be updated, but let’s not pretend that there is anything new here (and really, The Canadian Press deserves a rap on the knuckles for this kind of framing of the issue).

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Roundup: Sour premiers wanted more money

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We’re not on or about day forty-five of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and yesterday’s particular war crime of note was an attack on a train station in Kamatorsk that killed fifty-two Ukrainians fleeing to safer parts of the country. More chilling was the fact that the remains of the rocket had “For the children” spray painted on its side. Meanwhile, an international organization formed in the 1990s to identify the dead and the missing in the Balkan conflicts is preparing to send a team of forensic experts to Ukraine to help identify their dead as a result of Russian atrocities.

https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1512493160013996042

Closer to home, there is more reaction to this week’s budget, and in particular, some of the sour notes coming from provinces. It’s not just the current bit of confusion around just what the dental care programme is going to entail, because we don’t have any implementation details yet, and it sounds like the federal government may try to leverage existing provincial programmes for low-income earners. But more to the point, it’s about health transfers, and the fact that premiers aren’t getting their way with their demands for increased unconditional transfers, ostensibly to ensure that the federal government pays 35 percent of the share of health costs—a figure which is distortionary because since the 1970s, provinces were given tax points instead of direct transfers, so the true cost to the federal government would be far, far higher than the 35 percent figure they like to float. Not to mention, we saw that when federal transfers were higher for a decade, provinces used much of that money on other things, as certain provinces also did during the pandemic. So frankly, I wouldn’t expect the federal government to just hand over more unconditional money in the budget, particularly as they are negotiating with provinces for specific outcomes around mental health and long-term care.

Those demands for higher transfers are also raised in this op-ed by economist Trevor Tombe and professor Daniel Béland, which accuses the federal government of being uninterested in reforming those health care arrangements. I would dispute that because they have made it clear, during the election and since, that they are very interested in reforming those arrangements, and that those reforms mean strings attached to federal dollars, and those negotiations are ongoing. I’m also troubled by the notion that the federal government should be doing something about provincial debt, which is far more unsustainable than the federal government’s. Is the suggestion that the federal government upload more costs or programme responsibilities? Because I don’t see premiers clamouring for that (though they do want more money). Is the suggestion that the federal government simply pay for everything? Because that’s absolutely not sustainable either. It also ignores that most provinces have the ability to raise revenues the old-fashioned way—raising their own taxes. (Some provinces are admittedly screwed demographically, but again, what levers are we proposing the federal government employ?) Tombe and Béland want an open and collaborative process to rethink the fiscal relationships between levels of government, but we’ve all seen this movie before, and it always winds up with the provinces demanding the federal government give them more money. I’m not sure how that helps.

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Roundup: Pronouncements that should be disqualifying

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We are now on or about day forty-one of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the word of the day is “war crimes.” In particular, American president Joe Biden declared that Putin needs to be tried for war crimes…which is odd, because the Americans don’t believe in the International Criminal Court and haven’t signed onto its treaties for fear that they will be hauled before it at some point. So, I’m not sure who Biden thinks will be trying Putin for said war crimes, unless he plans to bring American into the ICC system at long last (though I am dubious that will ever happen). In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Bucha and witnessed the atrocities there for himself, calling Russia’s actions a “genocide” (though there is some debate about the applicability of the term given that it is a crime of specific intent).

Closer to home, there has been some attention being paid to the fact that Pierre Poilievre is trying to promote crypto and Bitcoin, and it’s just so ridiculous how this isn’t automatically being seen as disqualifying. (And it’s not just Poilievre—Michelle Rempel Garner has a private members’ bill in the queue about promoting crypto and blockchain in Canada). Never mind that everything Poilievre is saying is bunk, and his pronouncements about the Central Bank are utterly bonkers. The truth of the matter is that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is that they are nothing more than elaborate Ponzi schemes, and if he can’t see that, then we have a serious problem on our hands.

Meanwhile, here’s the former Governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, eviscerating Poilievre and his nonsense thinking:

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Roundup: Not the first real test

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We’re around day forty of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Ukrainian forces have retaken more territory, but that has come with some awful discoveries. In Bucha, outside of Kyiv, they have found mass graves and the bodies of civilians who were simply executed by Russian soldiers. At least 410 bodies have been found, traumatising witnesses, as they must now work with investigators who will put together the case for war crimes tribunals. In the meantime, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian obsession with capturing Mariupol has given them needed time in other parts of the country, where forces have had time to build up defences, and now reclaim areas where Russians have been though. Nevertheless, the human toll is staggering, and the atrocities are only now being uncovered, which may further spur more aid from Western countries given how graphic the scale of these atrocities are.

Closer to home, it’s budget week, so expect a veritable slough of thinkpieces about how this week is the “first big test” of the NDP-Liberal supply and confidence agreement, and its sub-variations of environmental policy, or defence spending. But that’s actually a little absurd, because this budget was always going to pass (it’s been too close to an election, and nobody is in shape to let the government fall), and frankly, the budget was already baked in and probably on its way to the printers when the confidence agreement was signed, so it’s not like Chrystia Freeland was going back to the drawing board to redraft the whole thing in light of the agreement. That was never a serious question (and frankly, most of the agreement is just about doing things the Liberals had already promised anyway).

The real test will be next year’s budget, when everyone has had a year to simmer, the Conservatives will have a new leader, and the NDP will have received the pushback from their own base. We’ll be out of the too-close-to-the-last-election safe zone, and the NDP will have a decision to make whether they think this still serves their purposes (because this agreement is only good as long as the either the NDP or the Liberals think they can still get something out of it). This budget was always a gimme—it’s the next one that things will start to get interesting.

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Roundup: A Ukrainian delegation in Ottawa

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We are now on or about day thirty-eight of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russia has accused Ukraine of crossing the border with two helicopter gunships to attack a fuel depot in Belgorod—something that the Ukrainians deny, which raises the notion that this may be some kind of false-flag operation by Russia to justify further action against Ukraine. After all, CSE has outlined some of the disinformation storylines that Russia has been pushing around their invasion of Ukraine, including the fabrication that Ukrainians are harvesting organs from soldiers, which is blatantly untrue—but Russia has been bad enough at their information operations that it may not be too surprising if they staged this explosion in Belgorod. Also pressing is the statement from president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Russian forces have been leaving mines in the area outside of Kyiv, including around homes and corpses.

https://twitter.com/ArmUkraineNow/status/1510096650823421958

Elsewhere, Ukraine has paused its efforts to recruit fighters internationally, given that there are some problems with the legal status of some of them with their home countries, but also the fact that it actually doesn’t make sense to put these people on the front lines with little-to-no training. That said, they stated that they still need help with non-combat roles, such as transporting food, ammunition, fuel, and moving wounded soldiers from the battlefields, so we’ll see if there is still the same enthusiasm for those roles. As for refugees coming to Canada, there are concerns that there are now months-long waits for biometrics appointments at embassies and consulates in surrounding countries, but the government has been putting more resources in those offices, and have stated that it would actually take longer to make the IT changes necessary for visa-free travel than this system which adapts existing travel streams to the country. I guess we’ll see which winds up being correct.

Meanwhile, five Ukrainian parliamentarians have been in Ottawa for the past two days, meeting with Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland, Anita Anand, and other parliamentarians. Part of what they have asked for the government are a specific shopping list of weapons and lethal aid, as well as financial aid. It sounds like there haven’t been any announcements out of these meetings, other than an assurance to watch next week’s budget, so that’s one more thing to stay tuned for on Thursday.

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Roundup: No more human resources to spare

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I believe we are now in day thirty-seven of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian forces are believed to be leaving the area of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after their soldiers soaked up “significant doses” of radiation while digging trenches in the area. (You think?) There were also plans for another humanitarian corridor to evacuate people from Mariupol, but it doesn’t appear to have been honoured.

Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that he had sacked two high-ranking members of the security services, citing that they were traitors. As for the Russians, the head of CGHQ in the UK says that they have intelligence showing that some Russian soldiers in Ukraine have refused to carry out orders, sabotaged their equipment, and in one case, accidentally shot down one of their own aircraft. There are also reports that Russian troops have resorted to eating abandoned pet dogs because they have run out of rations in Ukraine, which is pretty awful all around.

Closer to home, the Senate was debating their orders to extend hybrid sittings yesterday, as the sixth wave has been picking up steam, and one point of contention are the resources available to senators to hold sittings and committee meetings. In particular, they have a Memorandum of Understanding with the House of Commons about sharing common resources, and that MOU gives the Commons priority when it comes to resources available. This has hobbled the Senate, but even if they did try to come up with some way to add resources, the biggest and most constrained resource of them all is the finite number of simultaneous interpreters available, and we are already in a problem where as a nation, we’re not graduating enough of them to replace the attrition of those retiring, or choosing not to renew their contracts because of the worries that those same hybrid sittings are giving them permanent hearing loss because of the problems associated with the platform and the inconsistent audio equipment used by the Commons. These hybrid sittings exacerbated an already brewing problem of not enough new interpreters coming into the field, and Parliament is going to have a very big problem if they can’t find a way to incentivise more people to go into the field. We rely on simultaneous interpretation to make the place function, and if the number of interpreters falls precipitously low—because MPs and senators insisted on carrying on hybrid sittings in spite of their human cost—then we’re going to be in very big trouble indeed.

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Roundup: Insufficient consequences for an abuse of power

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We are now on or about day thirty-six of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the promise that they were pulling back from Kyiv and other places to give peace talks room to breathe were, well, not true. But nobody actually believed Russia in the first place, so nobody is exactly shocked here. Maclean’s features photos from Ukraine from Canadian photographer Philip Cheung on the ground there.

Closer to home, former Chief of Defence Staff Jonathan Vance pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice charges, and admitted to all the various things that he flatly denied previously. But the galling part in all of this is that got off on a conditional sentence that included community service, rather than face a criminal record. And even more appalling was the fact that his lawyer was trying to argue that Vance was going to suffer enough because his reputation had been stained enough that he wasn’t going to be able to cash in on the promises of future defence spending, whether that’s with some kind of government relations gig, or consultancy.

The bigger picture in all of this is not just that there is a highly sexualized culture in the military that this is a mere hint of, it’s that there is an abuse of power crisis within the military that the lack of meaningful consequences here simply emboldens. This obstruction of justice charge, and the admission of it all, is a demonstration of the abuse of power that Vance was trying to wield, and got caught doing. That he gets to avoid the serious consequences of this abuse, and that the notion that he can’t cash in is punishment enough, is a sign that this is a rot that runs deep and we need to be serious about this problem and acknowledging that it exists before we can get to work on tackling it as part of the culture change that the Canadian Forces desperately needs to undergo.

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Roundup: A strange definition of dictatorship

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We’re now on or about day thirty-five of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian forces appeared to be pulling back from Kyiv, allegedly to give more space to peace talks, not that anyone believes Russia (nor should they). It could mark a more concentrated effort by Russian forces to “liberate Donbas,” which some say could be a face-saving measure for Putin. As part of the peace talks, Ukraine floated the idea of making Canada a security guarantor to the proposal of neutrality, and not hosting any military troops or bases from other alliances such as NATO, so that’s something. In the meantime, here is a look at why Russia is taking such heavy casualties (and why that is unlikely to deter them).

Closer to home, we have a major problem with disinformation that is being pushed by MPs, particularly Conservative ones. This week, MPs Brad Redekopp and Rachael Thomas declared that Justin Trudeau is a “dictator,” and that they were being absolutely serious about it. This, like Andrew Scheer declaring that Trudeau is the world’s greatest threat to liberty, is absolutely gobsmacking, but part of an increasing pattern of rhetoric that is dangerous to our democracy because it is so corrosive to both accepting election results, and faith in government writ-large, regardless of party.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1508917840333709317

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1508917842607054853

This metastasises into the full-blown endorsement of conspiracy theories, and it’s a problem that is currently plaguing MPs, as that (fairly shite) Senate bill on developing a framework for a guaranteed basic liveable income has senators’ mailboxes and social media being flooded with both conspiracy theories and disinformation about this bill, but also panicked seniors who are being told that they will be denied their pensions and benefits if they are insufficiently vaccinated or the likes. It’s a real problem, and too many MPs (and a handful of senators) have been feeding into this disinformation environment for the sake of scoring a few points, and they really need to stop. No good comes of this, and they’re causing longer-term damage that will be incredibly hard to overcome.

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