Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: Chalk up a couple of own-goals

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Political own-goals can be painful but also hilarious, and we saw two of them happen yesterday. The first was courtesy of the federal Conservatives, whose intended shitpost went awry when they wound up praising the Liberal government. It was obviously deleted within an hour or so, but the damage was done, and the day was spent with Liberals tweeting that the Conservatives told the truth for once. Oops.

The other was in Alberta, where a committee was examining the Energy Department’s budget, and questions arose about the spending on the province’s “war room,” whose job is supposed to be pushing back against the supposed “falsehoods” about their energy sector. You may have heard that last week, said war room decided to do battle against an obscure Netflix film called Bigfoot Family that shows a battle against an oil magnate seeking to blow up an Alaskan wildlife preserve. As a result of the war room’s ham-fisted campaign, the movie made the top ten streamed films, and had pretty much the opposite effect of what was intended. Nevertheless, the province’s energy minister, Sonya Savage, defended the attack against the film, and some UCP MLAs were praising the war room’s ability to make a film reach the top ten to be “pretty awesome.” Erm, they achieved the opposite and had more people watch the film they wanted to censor, guys. It’s so mind-numbingly dumb, and I just cannot even.

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Roundup: Final debate on the amendments

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While the Commons is not sitting this week, the Senate is, with several bills now on their Order Paper for consideration, most especially the assisted dying bill, which is under a court-imposed deadline (that has already been extended thrice). At issue are the amendments that the government accepted, rejected, and otherwise modified from what the Senate sent back to the Commons a few weeks ago (where the Conservatives then held it up).

The Government Leader in the Senate, Senator Marc Gold, is taking the line that this is a “historic example” of collaboration between the two Chambers that has resulted in better legislation, but I’m not sure just how historic that is, and by “better legislation,” it’s a fairly marginal case because the government reduced the attempt to render this legislation fully compliant with the constitution with one of its famous half-measures that means that people’s suffering will be prolonged as a result, and yet more others will need to embark on yet more court challenges in order to fully access what should be guaranteed rights.

Ultimately it does look like this will pass without sending it back to the Commons again, as most senators are taking the line that the House has had their say, and because they’re democratically elected, it can go ahead now (though there have been instances where the Senate made a second insistence on certain bills in order to make a point – though I’m not sure that will be the case here), and that it could pass and get royal assent before the court deadline. Nevertheless, the amount of time this has taken for something that had court-imposed timelines is a sense of just how vulnerable the parliamentary calendar really is when you had determined opposition to bills, and it’s not over yet because the proposed changes in this legislation will impose a two-year timeline for more consultations on aspects of the law that currently remain prohibited (where that prohibition remains unconstitutional), but that the government is dragging its feet for the sake of politics. Ultimately, nobody comes out of this exercise looking particularly good.

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Roundup: Pointing to the civilian culture too

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The reckoning over the culture in the Canadian Forces that permits sexual misconduct continues to get an airing, and over the weekend, we saw another dimension to this reckoning be raised, which is that the culture of the civilian branch – the Department of National Defence – has many of these same cultural problems in part because a good portion of its staff are former military and came up in the same toxic culture in the Forces. One example of ways in which the Forces were trying to show women that they weren’t welcome was forcing them into co-ed showers in 1997, and how the people involved in those decisions are still in positions of authority today.

Also over the weekend, there was an interview with retired Lt-Gen. Christine Whitecross, who discussed her experiences with misconduct that she did not always pursue complaints about, but also her sense of optimism that more people reporting sexual misconduct in the ranks. Whitecross also let it be known that she did apply for the chief of defence staff position, but obviously did not get it (to the surprise of many). As well, the accused in one of the most high-profile cases of sexual assault in the military – the story of which wound up in Maclean’s and touched off the Deschamps report and Operation Honour – is going to plead guilty to the charges after all.

Amidst all of this, the current military ombudsman is now echoing previous calls to make his office fully independent and reporting to Parliament, rather than to the department and the minister, and I just can’t. The very last thing we need is one more unaccountable Independent Officer of Parliament, and yet they are proliferating like mad, and this is yet one more demand. Surely we can figure out some sort of mechanism to help them retain greater independence within the current structure, but we need to stop the proliferation of Officers of Parliament, before they completely overrun our system, reducing our MPs to battle droids who recite canned speeches and vote according to their whip’s instructions. And it’s not like we’re not seeing other Officers of Parliament going well beyond their job descriptions and turning themselves into media darlings, right? Oh, wait…

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Roundup: Announcing the process to find the next GG

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Yesterday afternoon, the government finally announced the process by which they will be selecting the next governor general, and it is the return of an advisory panel – but not really the old vice-regal appointment committee process that Stephen Harper initiated. For one, minister Dominic LeBlanc co-chairs the committee along with the interim Clerk of the Privy Council, which is a big change because LeBlanc’s inclusion means it is no longer arm’s length and won’t be able to claim that it can avoid the appearance of considerations being made through a political lens. As well, the Canadian Secretary to the Queen is nowhere to be seen in this process, whereas the previous CSQ chaired the previous committee process. (There has been some disagreement with this over Twitter, which is their prerogative but I would not consider the creation of a short list to be “political advice” any more than any other options presented to a government as compiled by the civil service).

What concerns me is the timeline of this process, which the government claims to want to be “expeditious” because they don’t want to keep the Chief Justice in the Administrator position for long, particularly if we are in a hung parliament that could theoretically fall at any time (if you discount that the only people who actually want an election right now are bored pundits). Nevertheless, it took them a month-and-a-half after Payette’s resignation to just announce the committee. The old committee process took an average of six months to conduct a search and compile a short-list for a vice-regal position, which is really not tenable in the current situation.

If anyone wants to read more about the old process and the role of the Canadian Secretary of the Queen in it, it was part of the focus of my chapter in Royal Progress: Canada’s Monarchy in the Age of Disruption, which was the product of presentations made at the last conference by the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada.

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Roundup: Closure, and false hope

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The government followed through on their plans to invoke closure on the assisted dying bill yesterday, and with the support of the Bloc, they had final debate and a vote, which passed, sending the amended bill back to the Senate. (The NDP, incidentally, voted against it simply because they refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the Senate). Because the government only accepted a couple of the Senate amendments, and modified others, it will require another vote in the Other Place, but it is most likely that they will allow the bill to pass in time for the court-imposed deadline.

There have been a lot of disingenuous comments about this bill. Certain disability advocates have insisted that this makes it easy to kill them, which it doesn’t, and these advocates ignore that other people with disabilities have requested assisted dying and won in the courts – which is why this bill exists. Many of those advocates are trying to re-litigate the case they lost at the Supreme Court that allowed for the assisted dying regime to be created in the first place, which isn’t going to happen – that decision was unanimous and the Court is not going to revisit it. As well, one of these amendments puts a two-year time limit on the mental health exclusion so that more guidelines can be developed. That exclusion is almost certainly unconstitutional, and the government knows it – but again, there is a cadre of disingenuous commentary, including from some MPs, that this would allow anyone with depression access to assisted dying, which is unlikely in the extreme, and more to the point, it conflates other mental illnesses with depression, and it stigmatises mental illness by excluding it, effectively undoing years of trying to treat mental illness like any other illness.

When I tweeted about this last night, I got a lot of pushback from a certain segment that coalesced around the narrative that the government would not provide supports for people with mental illness but would let them kill themselves; and furthermore, they tried to further say that the government that voted against pharamcare was doing this. There is a lot to unpack in those statements, but there are a few things to remember. One of them is that most disability supports, as well as treatment for mental health, are both in provincial jurisdiction, so the federal government can’t offer more supports for them. Hell, they can’t even simply send $2000 per month to people with disabilities – as the NDP are demanding – because they don’t exactly have a national database of people with disabilities (and they had a hard-enough time kludging together a special pandemic payment through use of the flawed disability tax credit). They do have jurisdiction over the Criminal Code, which is what this legislation covers.

As for the pharmacare bill, we’ve already covered repeatedly that it was unconstitutional and unworkable, and would not have created pharmacare, as the NDP claimed (while the government is already at work implementing the Hoskins Report). But as we’ve seen here, they sold a bill of goods to these people, and gave them false hope as to what they were doing. They lied to vulnerable Canadians to score cheap political points. The sheer immorality of that choice is utterly shameful, but this appears to be what the party has reduced itself to. I sometimes wonder how their brain trust sleeps at night.

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QP: Curious expectations of the ombudsman

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For the one-year anniversary of the declaration of the pandemic, there were more MPs in the Chamber than we’ve seen in weeks — there was more than bare quorum for a change, and not only was the prime minister present, but so was Catherine McKenna and three other Liberals — it’s almost a miracle. Before things got underway, a moment of silence was called for the victims of the pandemic. Erin O’Toole led off, script on mini-lectern, and he said that PCO told the PMO that the military ombudsman was not in a position to investigate sexual misconduct — which isn’t what anyone was asking, but may instead have been based on a poor interpretation of something the minister had said — and accused the government of a follow-up. Justin Trudeau reminded him that they take allegations seriously, and that politicians cannot do the investing, but appropriate independent authorities must do it. O’Toole tried again twice more with increasing sanctimony, and Trudeau repeated his same answer. O’Toole then pivoted to the 40-day delay between vaccine doses and if the off-label use would have an impact on the contract with Pfizer, and Trudeau reminded him that politicians don’t give guidance around vaccines, but experts to. O’Toole repeated the question in French, and got the same response. 

Yves-François Blanchet rose for the Bloc, and in light of the day, wanted them to put partisanship aside…and accede to the provinces’ demand for $28 billion without strings. Trudeau reminded him of the increased transfers they already gave for during the pandemic and an assurance that they would negotiate increases after it was over. Blanchet tried to then affect some gravitas in demanding that all seniors be given additional supports and not just those over 75. Trudeau explained that older seniors have greater needs than younger ones, which is why the government was giving them additional supports.

Alexandre Boulerice led for the NDP by video, and he returned to the allegations around General Vance, for which Trudeau gave a paean about working harder to giving support to victims and in transforming in institutions like the armed forces and the RCMP. Lindsay Mathyssen repeated the question in English, with an added demand for an apology, and Trudeau repeated his same paean, but he disputed the assertion that the government did nothing, and he listed some of those actions.

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QP: The 2015 or the 2021 Justin Trudeau?

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For Wednesday, proto-PMQ day, the prime minister was finally present for the first time in the week, and he was accompanied by three other Liberal MPs, all of them men. Erin O’Toole led off, script on mini-lectern, and he quoted Justin Trudeau in 2015 calling for then-chief of defence staff General Tom Lawson’s resignation after comments he made about sexual misconduct, and wondered why the same Trudeau did not demand the resignation of General Vance when allegations were raised in 2018? Trudeau merely read a prepared statement about them taking it seriously and ensuring that they are followed up on, and that the changes they are making in the Canadian Forces need to go further, which they are committed to. O’Toole was not mollified and tried again, and this time, Trudeau said that they allegations were directed to independent authorities and they didn’t get enough information to go on. A third time got the same answer, that his office was aware of the direction of the ombudsman to authorities, but no more. A fourth time, this time wondering why Vance’s term as chief of defence staff was extended, and Trudeau repeated his answer. For his final question, O’Toole switched to French to ask why the government was allowing second doses to go up to 40 days in spite of pushback from Pfizer, for which Trudeau reminded him that they listen to science and that the vaccine task force is independent from government. 

Yves-François Blanchet was up for the Bloc, wondering why the government wasn’t increasing supports for all seniors, to which Trudeau reminded him that they did increase the GIS across the board and they have supported seniors. Blanchet complained that seniors’ purchasing power has been diminishing, to which Trudeau listed supports they have given seniors during the pandemic.

For the NDP, Jagmeet Singh appeared by video, and in French, complained that certain documents were only tabled in English, which was treating French as a second-class language.  Trudeau rejected the characterisation, and reminded him that they have been producing millions of documents and are moving as fast as they can. Singh switched to English to demand that long-term care be made non-profit across the country, and Trudeau recited the actions they have taken to help seniors.

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Roundup: Support on a closure motion

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There appears to be some marginal progress with the government attempting to move legislation in the House of Commons, now that the NDP and the Bloc are starting to realise that something needs to be done. To that end, the Bloc have agreed to support a motion on closure for Bill C-7 on assisted dying – as there is a court deadline and only eight more sitting days between now and then – with tentative NDP support. And the NDP are also starting to realise that the current impasse could give the government ammunition to call an election (even though the only people who want said election are bored pundits), and want other bills to move.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, did pass a motion yesterday to fast-track debate on the Canada-UK trade agreement implementation legislation and MPs sat until midnight as a result, but there will be a battle over the assisted dying bill. From there, it becomes a contest of wills as to which bills are getting prioritised. The government has been trying to pass Bill C-14, which implements measures from the fiscal update back in December, before the budget is brought down (likely next month). And there is another bill to close loopholes in pandemic supports, which the Conservatives have refused to fast-track, while complaining about said loopholes. But the NDP want other bills fast-tracked instead – the creation of a Day of Reconciliation with Indigenous people, the UNDRIP bill, and finally passing the conversion therapy ban bill, which is at third reading whenever it can be brought forward. The government is also trying to get some bills past second reading so that they can get them off to committee, which you’d think opposition parties would relish.

I do find the Conservatives’ complaint that the government keeps introducing bills to be somewhat ludicrous, as though the government doesn’t have a legislative agenda that they laid out, and that they can’t try and walk and chew gum at the same time. The parliamentary calendar is finite, and there are a lot of things that this government needs to be able to do, and the Conservatives have been putting a damper on much of that for weeks now. Now that the Bloc and NDP are looking more willing to play ball with the government, one presumes that we’ll see some time allocation motions upcoming to prioritise more bills, and get them through the process, rather than give the government “more ammunition” for the election nobody actually wants.

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Roundup: Stop hitting yourself!

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Yesterday, the Conservatives had the gall and the cheek to put out a press release blaming the Liberals for the fact that none of their legislation is going through in a timely manner, never mind that it’s the opposition using procedural delay tactics to hold bills up. In particular, Conservative House Leader Gérard Deltell accuses the Liberals of not calling bills “in a logical order,” scheduling “insufficient time” (never mind that some bills recently have had more debate than budget bills), and then sounding wounded when the Conservatives are the ones being accused of playing games.

While most of this statement really reads like Detell holding the government’s arm while telling them to stop hitting themselves, while trying to craft the narrative that the Liberals are deliberately causing problems in order to engineer an election – err, except that it’s not the Liberals who are calling for concurrence motions and debates on committee reports rather than proceeding to government orders every day.

But hold up, you may say – surely the government could cut a deal with the Bloc or the NDP! What do you think those terms would be? The Bloc demand unconditional transfers to the provinces, which the federal government would be foolish to agree to, while the NDP want an intrusion in provincial areas of jurisdiction on things like rent, sick leave, pharmacare, dental care, and long-term care – things that the federal government cannot make unilateral change on, and are already negotiating with provinces on in most cases, and that is a time-consuming process. Nobody wants to play ball, even though nobody says they want an election (and really, the only people who do are bored pundits), but nobody wants to look like they are helping out the Liberals too much because they think it’ll cost them at the ballot box. Accusing one another of wanting an election while essentially engineering excuses to have one is making for a very irritating sitting, and I don’t imagine it will get any better the longer it lasts.

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QP: Weaponizing International Women’s Day

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For International Women’s Day, it was mostly women in the Chamber, except for the Liberals, though Catherine McKenna was present as a designated front-bench babysitter. Candice Bergen led off for the Conservatives by video, and she accused the government of covering up when they knew about the General Vance allegations, to which Harjit Sajjan stated that he disagreed with the statement, and he looks forward to setting the record straight when he has the right opportunity. Bergen stated that if Sajjan wasn’t part of the investigation, he was part of the cover-up, to which Sajjan repeated that he directed the allegations to the Privy Council Office, and they followed up. Bergen tried to make this an International Women’s Day issue, to which Sajjan started that no politician should be part of the investigation process but that they should be done independently. Gérard Deltell took over in French and asked the same thing, and Sajjan repeated that politicians should not be part of investigations and he looked forward to setting the record straight at committee. Deltell accused the government of lacking courage, for which Sajjan hit back by saying he wouldn’t take lessons from the Conservatives on gender rights.

Christine Normdin led off for the Bloc, and demanded increased health transfers for the provinces, to which Patty Hajdu reminded her of all the money that the government already transferred to the provinces for the pandemic. Normandin the claimed the government was abandoning the women in the healthcare system by not increasing transfers — another ham-fisted way of trying to wedge into International Women’s Day — and Hajdu countered with actions the government took including topping up the wages of essential workers, most of whom are women.

For the NDP, Jagmeet Singh led off by video, and in French, he demanded a plan to protect women in the Canadian Forces, for which Sajjan reminded him of the actions they have taken to reform the military justice system and victims rights. Singh repeated the question in English, and Sajjan reiterated that there should be an independent investigation process to ensure it has credibility.

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