Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: The third wave is accelerating

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The third wave is accelerating, and targeting younger populations, and the affected provinces are seeing record levels of hospital strain, and the number of positive cases has now topped one million since the beginning of the pandemic. School boards are starting to shut down in-person learning in several Ontario regions, and it’s getting really, really bad. But the province is keeping on with its current mockdown rather than imposing actual tough measures, and I’m sure we’ll hear another round of blame being laid at the federal government (never mind that the vaccine rollout is ahead of schedule, with another 2.2 million doses arriving this week).

One thing we are hearing a lot about is workplace spread, and most of it with “essential workers” (even though that definition is so broad these days). This is causing a number of infectious disease experts to call for the province to shift its vaccination plans from simply going by age to targeting areas where more of these essential workers live, or even vaccinating at workplaces. I’m not confident, however, that the affected provinces will do so, because a) they are being run by incompetent murderclowns who are incapable of pivoting to where there is greater need, b) they want to cater to boomers because that’s where the votes are, and c) they have an in-built ideological inability to doing the kinds of things that are needed to halt workplace spread, such as paid sick days or simply paying people to stay at home to avoid spread, and this is allowing things to get progressively worse.

To that end, here’s Robert Hiltz, who quite rightly points out that the current mockdowns will remain useless because the provincial governments have decided that these workers are expendable to keep the economy chugging along, while tut-tutting at the rest of us, and yes, that should make us all furious.

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Roundup: A refusal to admit failure in the face of the third wave

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Ontario is once again going back into a four-week mockdown because the province walked right into the third wave of the pandemic, despite being warned repeatedly that they were headed for disaster, but they barrelled ahead anyway. And because the murderclowns who run this province want to keep things as confusing as possible for everyone, decided to brand this one a “shutdown” instead of a “lockdown” or a “stay at home” order.

But what remains galling is the fact that nobody wants to take responsibility for the current state of affairs. Most concerning is that the province’s chief medical officer of health insists that it hasn’t been a failure, because hey, the modelling said we’d be at five or six thousand cases a day if they didn’t make any interventions, and we’re only at 2000, so mission accomplished. No, seriously – that’s his argument. It’s utterly bonkers, and they’re getting away with it because all of Doug Ford’s folksy sing-song pronouncements keep blinding people to what is going on, and the bulk of the media in Queen’s Park is not going hard enough on him for it.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1377376033729511425

Of course, this isn’t simply confined to Ontario either. Alberta is seeing some its highest case numbers, and the variants are in full-blown community spread, and what does Jason Kenney do? Refuse to impose tougher measures, trot out his failed “personal responsibility” schtick, and blame the federal government for not making enough vaccines appear from thin air by way of magic. No, seriously. How people stand for it, I just don’t understand.

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Roundup: Sending in the wrong minister

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The shenanigans at committees on all sides are severely testing my patience, as things continue to spiral toward a potential contempt of Parliament charge, never mind that what’s being demanded is exceeding what is generally acceptable parliamentary norms.

The demands that staffers appear at committee are clearly outrageous and in violation of the sacrosanct notion of ministerial responsibility, but the Liberals are nevertheless pushing the bounds of what is acceptable in and of itself. Instead of sending staffers, they were offered the chance to send the prime minister instead – a bit of a long shot, but sending the Government House Leader was clearly testing the committee’s bounds. For them to then send the Minister for Middle Class™ Prosperity® on a second appearance is definitely pushing buttons, and they should know better. If you’re going to invoke the principle of ministerial responsibility, then gods damned well respect it and put the actual minister forward, and for PMO staff, then the prime minister is the responsible minister. Sending Mona Fortier is a deliberate slap in the face.

At the same time, I am also particularly at the end of my rope with the constant demand for unredacted documents, and the insistence that the House of Commons’ Law Clerk be the one to do any redactions. His office is already buried under the literal millions of documents that the Health Committee demanded, and now the Foreign Affairs committee also wants a piece of him and his time to do even more redactions when the non-partisan civil service is normally the body that does this work. This is generally beyond the scope of what the Law Clerk should be doing, and he’s already stressed his resources and staff to do work they shouldn’t be doing, and yet more MPs keep making even more demands. That’s not how this works, and not how this should work, and yet they keep hand-waving about “cover-up!” as though that’s some kind of talisman. I’m not sure what the solution here is other than telling MPs from all sides to grow up, but that’s where we are.

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Roundup: Confusion over AstraZeneca

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The third wave of the pandemic is now out of control in Ontario while the murderclowns in our provincial government continue to stand idly by, as BC goes into a “circuit breaker” lockdown to try and get a hold of their own skyrocketing numbers – because apparently fourteen months into this pandemic, nobody can grasp that exponential growth means that cases grow exponentially. Funny how that happens.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1376630821717569538

Meanwhile, there was confusion over new advice on the AstraZeneca vaccine as the National Advisory Committee on Immunisation informed provinces on Sunday that they were advising on pausing doses for those under 55, but didn’t make a broader announcement about that until late in the afternoon Monday, leaving a mess of confusion for much of the day. It seems that the blood clotting issue, while still extremely rare, is of a type that can have a forty percent fatality rate, and it’s been seen more prevalently in women under 55 (though it is suspected that it may simply because more women have been vaccinated in the healthcare fields and hence it is showing up more often there). That being said, they have decided to hold off on that age group until they can get more data, which could come in the next few weeks – especially as there have been no reported case of clotting in Canada thus far. It should also be noted that there would be very few AstraZeneca doses given to those under 55, because most provinces are not there yet in terms of their vaccine roll-outs, so those under 55 who have received it are likely some essential workers. (More from Dr. David Fisman in this thread).

While this was going on, there was a little too much made of the (temporary) disunity between Health Canada and NACI, in spite of the fact that they are separate, that NACI is arm’s-length from government, and that they each have different roles to play. Too many people – especially in the media – were just throwing their hands up and proclaiming their confusion, which allowed certain actors like the Conservatives’ health critic to take advantage of the situation and insisting that the minister wasn’t “controlling her bureaucrats” (NACI are not “her bureaucrats), and trying to paint a situation like the government is out of control. Yes, it’s a fluid situation, and there should have been earlier guidance released after the provinces were notified and started pausing their own appointments, but I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to consider the situation as being out of control, or so confusing that nobody knows what was going on. I think there were a lot of dramatics (or possibly histrionics) from people who should know better, but perhaps I’m being too generous.

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Roundup: Not a tax but a regulatory charge

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The big news yesterday was that the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 6-3 that the federal government’s carbon price backstop was indeed constitutional, and included in that ruling was that the price was not a tax, but a constitutionally valid regulatory charge. This is important for a couple of reasons – taxes go to general revenue, whereas regulatory charges must be cycled for specific purposes, and in this case, they are rebated to the provinces in which they are collected, and under the federal backstop, if a province doesn’t have a revenue recycling mechanism, these carbon charges are rebated at a rate whereby most households will get more back than they paid into it owing to the fact that institutions who pay the prices don’t get those same rebates.

Of course, you wouldn’t know it based on a bulk of the coverage in this country, for whom the common headline was “Supreme Court declares carbon tax constitutional.” CBC, iPolitics, The Globe and Mail, Global TV, the Postmedia chain – all of them using “carbon tax” throughout to describe the very ruling that says it’s not a tax. This matters for a couple of reasons – one of them is that calling it a tax is actively misleading as this charge does not go into general revenue. Why is that important? Recall that in the lead-up to the last election, then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer kept declaring that the federal “carbon tax” would keep increasing because the government needed the revenues to pay for their deficits – a lie because it’s not a tax, and those revenues got rebated to household. But he almost never got corrected on that, because people kept using “tax.” Erin O’Toole keeps offering the lie that this “tax” is punishing low-income households, again misleading because of the rebates, which again, few people correct him on.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1375152876641746947

The other reason it matters is because using “tax” fits it into a particular ideological framing device for which “taxes” are a bad thing. “Taxation is theft,” and all of that particular bullshit, but this is a particular frame that serves those narratives. Journalists should be under no obligation to carry water for those interests, and if anyone says “calling it a tax is just easier,” then you are party to misinformation. And I am starting to wonder how many of my journalist colleagues either didn’t pay attention or skipped the class in journalism school where we discussed framing devices and how they influence coverage. A few outlets were able to get the nomenclature correct – that others couldn’t is a problem.

Meanwhile, Jason Markusoff makes note of what certain premiers did and did not say about the result, given that this is now a reality that they will be forced to contend with. Heather Scoffield considers the decision the stake to the heart of governments’ ability to drag their feet on tackling climate change. Colby Cosh takes a deep dive into the ruling’s exploration of the Peace, Order and Good Government provisions of the constitution.

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QP: Those aren’t the transfers we’re looking for

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On a slightly muggy Thursday in Ottawa, in the House of Commons, the Liberal benches were back down to three MPs, including two ministers, because we can’t have nice things. Erin O’Toole led off, script on his mini-lectern, and he decried delays in vaccines that have not materialised — mere rumours thereof — and he demanded a plan to end lockdowns. Rachel Bendayan reminded him that we are actually ahead of schedule on vaccine deliveries, and we had assurances from the European Commission. O’Toole raised the dosing directives — which is not a federal responsibility — for which Patty Hajdu launched into a spiel about science and evidence and how those evolve. O’Toole switched to French to repeat his first question, and Bendayan repeated her answer in French. O’Toole then returned to English to cite the Auditor General saying that this government shut GPHIN down, for which Hajdu countered with the expert panel report that said that problems with GPHIN did not affect when were alerted to the possible pandemic. O’Toole then repeated the question in French, and Hajdu spoke about the expansion of the Public Health Agency, and exhorted him to pass Bill C-14, which has more public health supports in it.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and he declared that the announced one-time transfer to the provinces was not good enough, and he repeated their original demand of $28 billion without strings. Patty Hajdu reminded him of the other transfers and federal supports already given. Therrien was not mollified and demanded more, and got much the same response.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and in French, raised the loss of seven women in Quebec over the past seven weeks to domestic violence, and demanded an end to this femicide. Maryam Monsef assured him that the government takes this seriously and listed some actions taken. Singh switched to English to decry that the government was not doing enough for climate change, for which Jonathan Wilkinson raised this morning’s Supreme Court of Canada ruling, and stated that the plans laid out are some of the most comprehensive in the world.

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Roundup: CBC’s baffling mandate talk

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There are some pretty questionable narratives that circulate in Canadian media for a lot of very dubious reasons, and we had another winner yesterday, when Justin Trudeau was on Peter Mansbridge’s podcast. Bafflingly, he was asked if he needed to go through an election to get a “mandate” to implement his upcoming budget, and I cannot even.

I. Cannot. Even.

Trudeau – semi-correctly – noted that he does not because he already one.

This notion that we somehow have “mandates” in our system is completely divorced from reality. We don’t have mandates – governments operate on the basis of confidence. They are appointed by the Governor General based on their ability to maintain the confidence of the Chamber – they are not popularly elected. They do not need to solely operate on what was in the election, because a) events, dear boy, events, and b) they operate on the basis of confidence. If the legislature has a problem with the government’s agenda, they will let them know. It’s also incredibly difficult to claim a “mandate” in our electoral system given that we operate by plurality, and even more especially when we have a hung parliament. (More on this from Philippe Lagassé here).

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1374805012120014862

Even more to the point, why the gods damned CBC would write up 800 words on this interaction for a dynamic that does not exist in a Westminster parliamentary system like ours is boggling.

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Roundup: A level of cynicism you need to reach for

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The Conservatives spent their allotted Supply Day yesterday debating a non-binding motion that would demand the government produce a “data-driven” plan to end all lockdowns permanently – something that should more generously be referred to as shenanigans, but is perhaps better described as an act of deep cynicism that is designed to create false expectations, and make it look like the government is guilty of inaction when the demands being placed on them are largely outside of their jurisdiction.

https://twitter.com/kateheartfield/status/1374374821463687186

https://twitter.com/kateheartfield/status/1374375879959187459

Part of this cynicism is trying to blame the federal government for the lockdowns – or perhaps more appropriately mockdowns – that have occurred over the past year, when those are provincial decisions. Every few days in QP, we get a question prefaced with “lockdowns were supposed to be a temporary measure,” which then blames the federal government for something or other when it was the provinces who a) did not lock down properly, b) opened too early, and c) tried to play Goldilocks by thinking they could have a little bit of COVID in the community and everything would be fine, forgetting that it grows exponentially, and by not taking proper measures, things spiralled out of control. And it keeps happening – we never properly exited the second wave and we are already into the third because these premiers did not learn their lessons and were too concerned about letting people eat in restaurants and failing the marshmallow test rather than actually crushing the spread and allowing a more normal pace of business operations – much as Atlantic Canada managed to do.

Of course, it’s the Conservatives’ ideological brethren who are responsible for most of the disasters at the provincial level, meaning that they don’t want to criticize them. Rather, they are more invested in creating some kind of alternate reality where the federal government is making the calls (they’re not), and are dressing up their disregard for lives under the crocodile tears of “mental health,” when their loaded questions about re-opening the economy betray their true concerns. The realities of a pandemic, where people need to be paid to stay home in order to limit spread, have proven to be beyond their capacity to process, and they cannot deal with this reality – so they instead create an alternate one. Having the federal government produce a plan for re-opening at this point not only sets up false hope and unrealistic expectations, but it would simply allow people to feel like they have permission to start “cheating” on the rules the closer they get to any of the dates outlined in these plans, and it would set back progress even more than it’s been set back now by certain incompetent and immoral murderclowns who are running many of the provinces. With the new variants circulating in community spread, demanding a map for re-opening when we still don’t know what the landscape will look like is premature and frankly, foolhardy. But they don’t care – they’re just looking to score points by crying “The US and the UK have reopening plans but we don’t!” It makes it hard to treat them as a government-in-waiting if this is the casual disregard they have for human lives.

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Roundup: The leader and the grassroots disagree on climate change

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After Erin O’Toole’s big speech at the Conservative Party’s “virtual” convention, where he said that the party needed to change if they hoped to win enough seats to form government in the future, the party apparently felt otherwise on a number of policy resolutions. The big one that will be cited for weeks to come is the fact that on a resolution to declare that climate change is real that the party needs to act on it, the grassroots voted this down – predominantly with votes from Alberta and Saskatchewan, but also from the social conservatives. It seems that Campaign Life Coalition distributed a guide to delegates, wherein they equated “climate alarmism” as a tool to justify population control and abortion, so good luck having that rational debate.

But it almost doesn’t matter because O’Toole says climate change is real, and he’s going to do something about it. What exactly is unspecified, and he also intimated that the economy comes first, so that could mean doing as little as possible using the economic recovery as cover – but it won’t be a carbon price (which is ridiculous for a supposed fiscal conservative given that it’s a transparent market-based system that allows consumers to make better choices). But this has become what happens with our political parties now that we have made them solely leader-centric thanks to our presidential primary-style leadership contests. What the leader says goes in terms of policy and election platforms, so these grassroots policy conventions have largely become theatre with little resonance to how said leader operates because his or her word is what goes. The system shouldn’t work like this, but all parties now operate in this mode, but nobody wants to address the cause of it.

To that end, Chantal Hébert weaves together O’Toole’s weakness on promising a climate plan without a carbon price, and the upcoming Supreme Court decision on it, and how those two dynamics play together. Susan Delacourt takes the “virtual” convention to heart and posits that the Conservatives have created a virtual reality for themselves if they believe that denying climate change is what will set the tone for a campaign while their leader tries to shake them out of their complacency.

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Roundup: Agitating for a political document

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Unable to score points on the vaccine procurement in a meaningful way, now that sufficient quantities have arrived, Erin O’Toole has recently tried pivoting to the federal budget, or the fact that there hasn’t been one in some 700 days. Given that the party is losing its lustre in public opinion polls as being “good fiscal managers” – a bit of branding that rarely, if ever, actually proved itself to be true, O’Toole is trying to bolster their street cred. The problem, of course, is that many of his arguments are, well, not actually sound ones.

For starters, no federal budget is like a household – not even close. It’s a bogus populist argument that just refuses to die, but everyone keeps repeating it and buying into it. More to the point, O’Toole is trying to claim that nobody knows how government money is being spent, which is a falsehood. Any money that the government spends has to come through the Estimates process, which gets voted on in Parliament after going through committee study. Afterward, how that those appropriations wound up being allocated get reported in the Public Accounts, which are released every year. All of this spending is being accounted for.

What O’Toole is looking for is a political document that lays out spending plans in broad strokes. It does not on its own showcase how that money gets allocated and spent. In fact, there has been a disconnect between the budget and the Estimates going back a few decades now, because governments and civil servants preferred it that way, and when the Liberals tried to better re-align those processes in the last parliament, it did not go very well thanks in part to institutional inertia pushing back. Suffice to say, it is not true that money is being spent blindly. MPs have ostensibly been in control of the process the whole time – but whether they have paid attention to what they were voting on is another matter entirely.

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