Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: Justice Abella’s farewell to the Court

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Yesterday was a bit of a sad day at the Supreme Court of Canada, as Justice Rosalie Ahella, the senior puisne justice on the court and the longest serving judge in Canada, heard her last case before her mandatory retirement date on July 1st. She will have another six months to finish writing up any judgments that she sat on before the retirement date.

As her final speech, she spoke of being born a refugee, her parents Holocaust survivors, and they moved to Canada, in order to give their children a better life. Abella went to law school, was the youngest judge appointed to the provincial bench at age 29, and went on to have a very influential career chairing commissions and a royal commission, before she was appointed to the Supreme Court – the first Jewish woman appointed, and the first refugee – where she has been for 17 years. And it was a lovely speech. (You can see the video here).

It’ll be interesting to see who the government chooses as her replacement. Because it’s an Ontario seat, there will be an increased focus on finding a more diverse candidate, given that we have yet to have a person of colour on the Supreme Court, and there is more likelihood to find one who can also meet the bilingualism requirement that this government has deemed so important.

Victoria Day

As a reminder, Victoria Day is the official birthday of the Queen of Canada, so be sure to raise a glass in her honour (gin and Dubonnet being Her Majesty’s favoured tipple).

https://twitter.com/Canadian_Crown/status/1395810388319539200

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Roundup: From ombudsman to officer?

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The current military ombudsman is trying to pitch the notion that the government doesn’t need to create a new independent body to investigate complaints about sexual misconduct – rather, he is pitching that his office can do it, if only parliament would loosen his shackles and let him report to them directly rather than to the reporting to the minister of defence. I am dubious, and a little alarmed.

For starters, I am not certain that he is actually the best-placed person to field those complaints, rather than a centre that specializes in it, that is properly trauma-informed and so on. There is a reason why the Deschamps Report called for an independent body to do this kind of work, and I’m not sure that the military ombudsman is independent enough (especially as many of those who fill the role have military backgrounds, and are just as likely to be inured to the highly sexualized culture in the Forces that is part of what needs to be changed). It also detracts from other work that the ombudsman should be doing around other aspects of military life than just this particular aspect of it.

The bigger part I am reticent about, however, is because the very last thing we need is yet another unaccountable Officer of Parliament, as we already have far too many, and some of them are problems. Look no further than the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is turning himself into a media darling and who is going far beyond his legislative mandate, but because he is accountable to no one – and because he is being encouraged to keep going beyond his mandate by the media – he is really pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. As for a military ombudsman, you don’t have to go too far in history to see others who held the role who were also becoming problematic – one of whom was also becoming a media darling, and who got increasingly erratic as time went on (especially once he was no longer in the job). It’s not the kind of person who should be in a role that has no accountability, and if it’s happened once, it’s likely to happen again, particularly in the current environment. I’m not unconvinced that the current reporting mechanism of the ombudsman’s office isn’t a problem, but there needs to be another solution than creating another Officer of Parliament.

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Roundup: Poilievre wants to lie to you about inflation

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StatsCan released the April inflation figures yesterday morning, and for the unprepared, they look bad – a 3.4 percent increase year-over-year, when the Bank of Canada’s inflation target is around two percent. This may look alarming, but there is a very simple explanation for why it looks high, and it’s something they call the base effect – meaning, when you compare it to last year’s figures, you need to put those figures in context. In this case, when you look at the April 2020 figures, we were actually suffering deflation in the early throes of the pandemic, when the first real lockdown started, and everyone was being sent home. We’ve had a fair degree of economic recovery since then, and inflation is really still running a little below target, but that gets obscured by the base effect, and that will likely carry on for another couple of months.

The problem, of course, is that you have media outlets that won’t properly contextualise this, looking at how much year-over-year prices like gasoline have spiked – which again, ignores that a year ago, gasoline prices dropped to an eleven-year low because demand cratered as a result of the pandemic. It’s a better headline to talk about “price surges” rather than explaining that base effect. And to be fair, some prices have gone up for a variety of factors, while others haven’t – it’s why the consumer price index looks at a basket of goods and provides an average, where some prices rise and some fall, and they provide additional measures that will strip out some of the volatile indicators to see how the more stable ones are faring. And more to the point, the Bank of Canada knows what they’re doing, and if they see runaway inflation starting, they will tamp it down with the tools available to them, such as interest rates.

But more than just media outlets, we have the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre in particular who are determined to light their hair on fire and lie about the inflation figure in order to denounce the government (blaming it on deficit spending) or by saying that the Bank of Canada is in cahoots with them (when they are independent of government and kept at arm’s length). And lo, Poilievre even produced a video that railed about the price of lumber to make his point – err, except the price of lumber isn’t increasing because of the monetary supply or deficit spending. It’s rising because there is a housing boom, particularly south of the border, and lumber exports can’t keep up with demand, hence the price increases. That’s basic economics, which you think that the party that bills itself as “good economic managers” and the “party of the free market” would understand, but apparently not. And more to the point, we can be assured that Poilievre will neither a) read a gods damned report from Statistics Canada beyond the headline to understand what’s going on; or b) tell the truth when he can whip up hysteria for the sake of scoring points. And because they will quote statistics in a way that strips it of its context, they will lie to the public, and the media will do very little about it – at most, both-sidesing the comment rather than calling out the simple falsehoods.

Meanwhile, Poilievre’s antics were perfect to turn themselves into memes. It’s probably just as well.

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1395103214681300992

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Roundup: Not taking constitutional amendments seriously

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During his press conference yesterday, prime minister Justin Trudeau said that according to his legal advice, Quebec can unilaterally modify part of the federal Constitution that applies specifically to them – which is either untrue, or appeasement to the Legault government, because every party is trying to suck up to Legault and his overwhelming popularity.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1394692157001412612

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1394692818644393991

A plain reading of Section 43 of the Constitution states that where language rights are involved, the federal Parliament needs to have a say in the constitutional amendment, and it’s very much invoked in these proposals from Quebec. That Trudeau – or apparently the lawyers in the Justice Department – can’t see this is a problem, and raises some real questions as to the quality of advice the government is receiving from the department. (Hell, even other Liberal MPs are questioning it).

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1394762687410753539

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1394763319932764166

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1394800378013790211

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1394801217029746688

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1394693812568694787

But what were people riled up over instead of an egregious violation of our constitutional norms? A photo of Trudeau at a laptop which was clearly an HP machine, with the logo covered over with an Apple sticker. The scandal!

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Roundup: Quitting over a municipal issue

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News came down yesterday that Liberal MP Bob Bratina announced, in a bit of a huff, that he wasn’t going to run again in the next election because the government decided to fund an LRT project in Hamilton – where his riding is, and where he used to be mayor – because he’s personally opposed to the project. A certain Postmedia columnist picked up on this and insisted this was dire news for the Liberals, because they’re not even listening to their own MPs. There are counterpoints to this argument.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1394439822748659719

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1394441891937140741

This having been said, yes, we know that sometimes Trudeau and Cabinet can be deaf to caucus concerns, but in this case, Bratina is throwing a tantrum, insisting that they didn’t consult “the Hamilton guy” when the Labour minister’s riding is also in Hamilton, and the infrastructure minister, Catherine McKenna, grew up there. In other words, the voices at the Cabinet table are just as qualified to talk about Hamilton issues than the “Hamilton guy,” especially because he’s personally opposed to a project that is basically what his own party is standing up for right now – mass transit options as part of the oncoming rapid decarbonization we need to engage in if we’re going to get our GHG emissions below catastrophic levels. He should be well aware of this given it’s the party he ran for two elections in a row. If he wants to run for mayor again to oppose the project, he’s within his rights to do so.

As for said the aforementioned columnist’s coded language around “common sense” and “silent majorities,” it’s hard to square that with the current incarnation of the Liberals. In other words, it’s probably pretty safe to consider his dire warning about this as an example of concern trolling, for what it’s worth.

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Roundup: On not electing first ministers

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There was something going around the Twitter Machine yesterday regarding past prime ministers, and Kim Campbell in particular, and it appealed to my sense of pedantry/exactness in our civic discourse – no, Kim Campbell was not “elected” as prime minister, but no prime minister is actually elected in the Westminster System.

She was not the first prime minister not to have been appointed to the position without leading their party to victory in a general election. We had two early prime ministers who were sitting senators and not MPs. John Turner didn’t have a seat in either Chamber when he was sworn in as prime minister. At least Campbell had a seat and had led several high-profile Cabinet portfolios (first female justice minister and defence minister), and she made significant reforms to the structure of Cabinet upon her appointment as PM, many of which have been lasting. She did not have to face Parliament as prime minister, but neither did Sir Charles Tupper, not John Turner. Trying to somehow insist that because her appointment did not follow a general election victory as somehow denigrating or making her lesser-than as a prime minister is ahistorical and ignorant of how Westminster parliaments work.

Part of this, however, is tied up with narratives that our pundit class keeps importing from the US, and which our media stokes out a sense of general ignorance of civics. We recently saw in places like Nova Scotia, where they just appointed a new premier, that the media are jumping up and down for him to get “his own mandate” – meaning going to a general election – which goes against how our system works. In Newfoundland and Labrador, their premier was appointed without a seat, which he promptly won in a by-election, and then called an election “to get a mandate” and lo, it turned into a gong show because they had a sudden outbreak of COVID. But this false notion about “mandates” keep cropping up, because media and pundits keep feeding it. It’s not how our system works, and it places false expectations on new first ministers, and creates unreal expectations for those, like Campbell, who did everything according to our system’s actual tenets. It would be great if we had a better sense of civics in this country to counter this ongoing nonsense.

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Roundup: Blanchet thinks he knows when an election will be called

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The constant assertion that we are just around the corner from another election is tiresome, and yet it keeps rearing its head, sometimes in very novel ways. Yesterday, it was Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet telling a virtual meeting of Quebec municipalities that he believes an election is going to be called on August 16th, in order to avoid a federal election interfering with municipal elections in Quebec this fall – assuming, of course, that the pandemic is largely under control by then.

No, seriously.

The logic of this assertion, however, does not hold. First of all, there would be no reason for the prime minister to go to the Governor General (assuming we have a new one installed by that point – otherwise, it would be to the Chief Justice in his role as Administrator, for which the optics are very bad), and request dissolution in the middle of August. Remember that we still have fixed election date legislation, and while it’s largely useless, it does create a situation of poor optics for prime ministers or premiers who pull the trigger early. Yes, we are in a hung parliament, so a confidence vote could be lost at any point, but the Commons won’t be sitting in August. In fact, it is not scheduled to be back until September 20th, and I doubt we’re going to be having the same kinds of summer sittings like we did last year, where there was a sense of urgency, particularly around rapidly passing new pandemic spending measures. That is unlikely to be the case this summer given the place that we’re in with the pandemic. This means the government couldn’t even engineer its own defeat over the summer without a hell of a lot of effort, which seems tremendously unlikely given the circumstances. Given the poor optics of just requesting dissolution, this seems highly unlikely.

To add to this, Bill C-19 – which would allow Elections Canada to hold a safer election in the pandemic setting – only just got sent to committee this week in the Commons. Next week is a constituency week, so even if it did pass both committee and third reading the following week (unlikely), and passed the Senate the week after that (a better possibility given the speed at which they seem to be operating these days – not that it’s necessarily a good thing) then it still has a 90-day implementation period for those changes to take effect, so it wouldn’t reach that threshold until mid-September at the earliest. Again, this makes a call for an August 16th dissolution unlikely, because Elections Canada couldn’t be prepared, and even if most of the country gets their second dose by the end of September, that both cuts it uncomfortably close for when an election would be held following an August 16thdissolution, if at all given the need for more advanced voting days and so on.

Simply put, C-19 should have passed months ago in order to ensure there were proper safeguards in case something happens in this hung parliament, and a confidence vote didn’t go quite the right way. But nobody is suicidal enough to want an election right now, and that will continue to be case for much of the fall, until we can be sure that we’re out of the grip of the pandemic. Blanchet is spouting nonsense and should be called out as such.

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Roundup: Refusing to enforce quarantine orders

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There were a couple of notes around the border and quarantines yesterday that I thought bear some additional note, particularly in light of the rhetoric we’re hearing. The first is that it looks like as many of a third of air travellers are able to avoid hotel quarantine and the Public Health Agency of Canada won’t provide a breakdown of figures as to why. There is a fairly obvious answer to this, which is that as part of the hotel quarantine programme, the government also allowed for a metre-long list of exemptions that are applicable to these travellers, because remember that there is ostensibly very little non-essential travel happening right now – I heard a figure that travel volumes are about five percent of what they were pre-COVID. Given how many of these hotel quarantine exemptions have to do with certain essential travel reasons, it should not be a surprise that as many as a third of these travellers are able to bypass that system. The fact that there are as many exemptions as there are should be up for debate, however, because it does undermine the whole point of quarantine, but it’s hard to have that discussion when every time you turn around, someone else is demanding another exemption – and it really doesn’t help when the party in the Commons howling that the border is too lax is at the very same time trying to get an exemption for returning snowbirds.

And then there is the question of enforcing the Quarantine Act, and we find that Alberta hasn’t signed onto the Contraventions Act, which makes it easy for their police to do the enforcement, and to issue fines for those who break it. (Saskatchewan also hasn’t signed onto the Act, but there are no airports currently open to international travel in that province). And this is completely baffling, because you would think that the provincial government would want to empower their peace officers to do the enforcement work if they are so concerned about variants coming in over the borders that they would want to ensure that they are actually enforcing quarantine orders in the province, but apparently not. This makes it all the more difficult to swallow Jason Kenney’s insistence that the federal government hasn’t done enough about the border – they have clamped down as much as they are really able to under the constitution, and they have empowered the provinces to enforce quarantines, but oh, Alberta refuses to take responsibility for doing so, while they complain.

I will also note that the fact that Ontario has signed onto the Contraventions Act means that their own complaints about quarantines and lax borders are all the more hollow. They have all the tools they need to enforce the orders, and they are also largely refusing and blaming the federal government. And worse, nobody is holding them to account for their failures to exercise their own powers in their own areas of jurisdiction to do so – especially not the media. This is a problem, but hey, keep writing stories about “finger-pointing.” That’ll help.

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QP: Inventing an “Internet Czar” out of whole cloth

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For Wednesday, proto-PMQ day, Justin Trudeau was present, as was the usual Liberal placeholder, Mark Gerretsen. Erin O’Toole led off, script on mini-lectern, and he led off by accusing the government of moving the goalposts on vaccines, blamed him for not getting any last winter (when no one else in the world did), and Trudeau reminded him that they had stated the goals of three million doses by the end of March and they got well more than anticipated. O’Toole raised the CanSino conspiracy theory and accused Trudeau of wanting lockdowns until Thanksgiving, and Trudeau stated that by accelerating first doses means people can do more with one another in the summer, in advance of getting their second doses in the fall. O’Toole then accused the government of “stealing doses from COVAX” and of being late by trying to partner with CanSino, and Trudeau reminded him they have seven signed contracts and none were with a Chinese firm. O’Toole declared that we were in a third wave because of the CanSino non-deal, and Trudeau called out the misinformation and disinformation coming from the opposition. O’Toole then switched to French to repeat his first question, and got the same answer about first doses meaning a better summer.

Yves-François Blanchet led off for the Bloc, and he accused the government of wanting an election and invited all leaders to have a private meeting to come to a consensus, but Trudeau denied wanting an election while they were delivering for Canadians, and the Bloc are the ones who want an election by voting against a confidence motion. Blanchet repeated his invitation for a meeting to come to a consensus — which seems to be the opposite of an open legislative process — and Trudeau reminded him that all parties can reflect on the bill at committee, and repeated that he didn’t want an election.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and in English, demanded “concrete action” on long-term care, for which Trudeau reminded him that there were $3 billion in the budget, and the government has been investing to create standards and to make permanent changes, but they need to work with provinces. Singh demanded more of the same, and Trudeau declared that the situation is deplorable, but they have stepped up as a federal government to assist the provinces, whose jurisdiction this is.

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Roundup: Inflating the Line 5 drama

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There was a lot of performative nonsense around Enbridge Line 5 yesterday, considering that today is the deadline by which Michigan’s governor gave to Enbridge to shut it down. And plenty of media outlets were playing up the drama around this, despite having been told repeatedly that it’s pretty certain that nothing is going to happen because that pipeline is under federal jurisdiction in the US, and the governor has no authority or power to shut it down. She has since shifted her rhetoric, saying she’ll go after Enbridge’s profits if they don’t follow her requests, but all of this is now in the courts.

Which brings me to my particular complaint, which is how things were characterised. The federal government filed an amicus brief in the case yesterday, which is basically just presenting its reasons for why they support the continued operation in the ongoing court case, and yet, both Erin O’Toole and most major media outlets treated this as though the federal government had applied for an injunction. An amicus brief is not an injunction – far from it. But this was the how the narrative was applied, as though that’s the only thing that happens in courts. It’s not particularly helpful for media outlets to treat it as such, but hey, it’s not like I have any say in this.

Regardless, it’s almost certain that Line 5 won’t be shut down because it’s frankly too important to both sides of the border, and this is largely a stunt on the governor’s part. It’s a stunt that the Biden Administration is handling with kid gloves, mind you, but I’m sure she’d love nothing more than the prime minister of Canada throwing a public tantrum over this, as the Conservatives are demanding, as it would be a propaganda victory for her, which we probably don’t want to give her. Let’s all keep a level head over this.

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