Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: Blaming the wrong government

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It appears that Conservative leader Erin O’Toole has decided to use his need for a COVID-test after one of his staffers tested positive in order to be performative about the whole affair. Despite there being a dedicated testing services available to MPs and their families (because yes, Parliament is an essential service), O’Toole and family apparently opted to attempt the public route, which in Ottawa has been backed up for days because of a lack of testing capacity. O’Toole then put out a press release to blame the federal government – not for inadequate capacity, which is the domain of the provinces, and O’Toole couldn’t possibly be seen to criticize Doug Ford and his lack of appreciable action on the pandemic – but because rapid testing hasn’t been approved by the regulators at Health Canada. Hours later, Michelle Rempel, the new Conservative health critic, doubled down and demanded that Cabinet force Health Canada to work faster (and misusing an analogy about the bourgeoisie and “let them eat cake” in the process).

There are a couple of problems with O’Toole’s demands, and one is that Cabinet should be interfering in the work of a regulator, which sets up all kinds of bad precedents – you know, like the one the Conservatives set when they fired the nuclear safety regulator because she refused to restart a nuclear reactor during a crisis of isotope production. The other is that Health Canada has good reason not to approve these tests as they are, because they produce false negatives more often than the regular tests, and that creates a false sense of security among people who may be spreading the virus. “Oh, but the FDA approved it!” people say, ignoring that it’s an emergency approval that relies on self-reported results and not independently verified ones, which again, should be concerning – not to mention that infections in the US are still spreading rapidly. The fact that Health Canada is doing the job that the FDA didn’t shouldn’t mean that we’re “falling behind” – we’re doing the due diligence that they’re not.

As well, I’m not exactly mollified by the notion that O’Toole attempting the public route when he had an option available already because it’s the kind of performative “We’re like real people” nonsense – especially if it took a spot away from another local family who doesn’t have access to the private test that O’Toole did. It’s not heroic or setting a good example – it’s political theatre that could hurt other people in the process.

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Roundup: The Energy East distraction

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After wide reporting that Jason Kenney’s poll numbers have been tanking and that he’s currently tied with the provincial NDP, it was predetermined that Kenney was going to have to start coming up with something new to blame the federal government about in order to whip his voter base into a new round of irrational anger. He also, apparently needed to provide some cover to his friend Erin O’Toole after O’Toole’s meeting with the Quebec premier, and so Kenney’s distraction of choice was going to be Energy East, and blaming the federal government for its demise. Of course, that’s not true at all, and energy economist Andrew Leach has the receipts.

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Roundup: Exit one arm of WE

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The big news yesterday was that WE Charity is folding their Canadian operations – and putting a hefty share of the blame on the political situation around the whole WE Imbroglio. Never mind their pre-existing problems, convoluted structure, reported financial problems with some of their properties, problems with their board of directors and the resignations therein, and the fact that their whole modus operandi of voluntourism and White Saviour complexes turned into an existential problem for the organization – no, it’s so much easier to blame the slow-motion scandal around them that laid bare many of those pre-existing problems. (For a history of the organization, Maclean’s has a great longread here).

In response, the NDP are crowing that this means that the pre-existing problems that WE faced, exacerbated by the pandemic and the Imbroglio, just proves that the Liberals were trying to help them out all along – erm, which is a bit of a leap. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have demanded that WE still turn over all of the documents that the committee has requested (which WE’s lawyers laughed at given that the committee does not currently exist). And Liberal partisans all over social media are wailing and gnashing their teeth that this organization that did so much good was being killed by the petty partisan games of the opposition. (And, erm, they didn’t actually do that much good, and they are still carrying on their US and UK operations, as well as their for-profit arm – only the Canadian charity arm is being folded).

Meanwhile, Matt Gurney makes the very salient point that this whole situation happened because the Liberals were inept enough not to ensure that Justin Trudeau and Bill Morneau do the simplest of steps and recuse themselves from any decisions involving WE because of their personal investment in the organization and its causes. It’s possible Morneau would still have his job as he wouldn’t have made his continuation in the role untenable (thought I have previously contended that even before this all blew up, he was probably overdue to be shuffled because he wasn’t terribly suited for it), and Trudeau wouldn’t be in as precarious a situation as he is (though the cultural problem of not caring about the rules and letting the ends justify the means because they mean well would still be there) if they had simply been a little more aware of what they were doing. Alas, they weren’t, and here we are.

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Roundup: More deficit vapours

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The deficit pearl-clutchers have continued their parade through the op-ed pages of the nation, and some of them worry that the government’s planned green and inclusive recovery package could cost *Dr. Evil finger* ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS! Some of the usual suspects are getting the vapours over this, so here are a couple of reality checks to start your long weekend off with. Enjoy.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1301931200152567809

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1301933193436819456

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1301933884750401536

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1301944987043627012

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Roundup: Trading in NWO conspiracies

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On Saturday, Conservative MP and former minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay retweeted a shitpost put up by a QAnon follower that contained a video of a pre-politics Chrystia Freeland interviewing George Soros, and worried that Soros was trying to get China on board with the New World Order – a particularly pervasive conspiracy theory which goes back to the anti-Semitic tropes of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Findlay’s quote-tweet – since deleted – had her proclaiming that Freeland was “listening carefully to him like a student to teacher. The closeness of these two should alarm every Canadian.” When called out, Findlay insisted that it was “about economics,” before she finally deleted her tweet, apparently after Liberal MP Anthony Housefather (who is Jewish) reached out to her to explain why the Soros/NWO conspiracy theories are inherently anti-Semitic. Findlay then made a qualified apology, claiming she “thoughtlessly shared content” and that she doesn’t endorse hateful rhetoric, but didn’t explain her won statement about why Freeland interviewing Soros should be “alarming.”

Why does this matter? Because other Conservatives including Pierre Poilievre were retweeting Findlay uncritically, which means that this kind of conspiracy theorism and anti-Semitism is getting more normalized. And then there’s the fact that Andrew Scheer spent his farewell speech promoting sites like True North and The Post Millennial which also trade in these kinds of narratives, and was touting them as credible and “objective,” when they are not. What this is saying about where the Conservative party is at in terms of what kind of narratives they trade in should be alarming, especially when you think of the fact that fourteen percent of the party voted for Derek Sloan’s outright parroting of Trump talking points, which includes the racism, misogyny and homophobia.

Over the rest of the weekend, Erin O’Toole was silent on the tweet, as were the other Conservatives who retweeted Findlay. That should also be concerning, especially because it means they are either ignorant of the anti-Semitic tropes they were trading in, or they were complicit in them. That’s not a direction that we want Canadian politics to be heading down, and Findlay owed an explanation of why it was “alarming” that Freeland interviewed Soros as a journalist, and O’Toole owes an explanation for his silence in not shutting this down when it happened.

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Roundup: Alberta’s big budget hole

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Alberta released a fiscal update yesterday, and it was pretty abysmal, projecting a record-breaking $24.2 billion deficit. The problem? Was that the province’s finance minister spent much of it lying to the legislature and Albertans about the state of their books going into the pandemic, not to mention not having a real plan for the recovery. But it to put some of the staggering numbers in context, the province is taking in more revenue from gambling, alcohol and cannabis than they are from oil revenues – you know, what they have based their economy on. Meanwhile, their non-existent recovery plan is bro-heavy, and they still insist that they have a spending problem on services rather than a revenue problem from having the lowest tax rate in the country and no sales tax – and you know that’s going to mean the province is looking to slash and burn services, and they’ve already started by picking fights with doctors in the middle of a global pandemic, and those doctors are already shutting down their clinics and moving away. So yeah, Alberta’s got problems.

Economists Andrew Leach and Lindsay Tedds have more, starting with this preview thread by Leach that set the stage for the speech of lies that was to come.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1299171987655327744

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1299173816577347584

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Roundup: First attempts to define O’Toole

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It was not quite ten o’clock Eastern when the Liberals fired their first salvo across Erin O’Toole’s bow. Liberal MP Pam Damoff put out a press release highlighting three of Derek Sloan’s most egregious comments – questioning Dr. Theresa Tam’s loyalties, comparing women’s bodily autonomy to slavery, and calling banning conversion therapy “child abuse” – and said that if O’Toole didn’t repudiate those claims that he was condoning them. It seems the Liberals took a cue from the Conservatives before them and are trying to define the party’s new leader before he can define himself – payback for Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff (tough Justin Trudeau proved resilient to those attempts).

A short while later, O’Toole had his first press conference as leader, where he told people to ignore the Liberal spin, and reiterated parts of his victory speech where he welcomed all kinds of Canadians into the Conservative fold, before he took questions for a whole 15 minutes. To wit, when pressed about how concretely he wants the prime minister to address “Western alienation,” he blustered about support for getting resources to market, as though Trudeau controls the world price of oil. Asked about the social conservatives and Sloan’s comments, O’Toole shrugged them off as an attempt to highlight differences in the context of a leadership but said that he would “have a talk” with Sloan, but gave no indication that Sloan was on thin ice. O’Toole also called himself pro-choice – but in the same breath defended voting for a bill that would give rights to foetuses by claiming it was a “public safety” bill about sentencing, which was the weaselliest thing I have seen in ages. He also said that he supported trans rights more than Trudeau did because he was one of 18 Conservatives that voted for one of the private members’ bills and Trudeau had missed that vote – ignoring of course that said bill died and that Trudeau revived it and passed it in government. He also intimated that it was Trudeau who was trying to force an election, not him, for what that’s worth.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1298277863297298434

Meanwhile, here’s a look at some of the raw feelings inside the Peter MacKay camp as the “co-founder” of the party has been repudiated, while O’Toole is rushing to try and unify the party behind his leadership in spite of the things that were said during the campaign.

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Roundup: A brief return to the Commons

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The Commons will be meeting today in an actual, real sitting and not an abbreviated strange hybrid committee, in order to pass Bill C-20 on disability payments, which they say is in an improved format from their previous attempt in C-17 (which one presumes is now withdrawn from the Order Paper). The bill also includes the changes to the wage subsidy that were announced on Friday, and it sounds like will also have the changes to court system timelines that were previously announced and part of C-17, but the text of the bill won’t be out until the Commons actually sits. We also know that the bill will pass, because the Bloc have agreed to everything, and this means a motion that will see the bill essentially passed at all stages with a couple hours’ worth of speeches in lieu of actual debate or legislative processes, which is less than ideal. We’ll also have a proper Question Period today, so we can look forward to that, and all of the questions on the WE Imbroglio that will come with it. The Senate has not yet announced when they will be meeting to pass it on their end, which may not be until later in the week.

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Roundup: Some strings attached

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau wound up holding an irregular presser yesterday, mid-afternoon instead of late morning, and with a specific purpose in mind – to announce that the federal government had finally come to an agreement with the provinces over the Safe Restart Plan, now pegged at $19 billion rather than the $14 billion initially put on the table. What is noteworthy is that there were still federal strings attached for this money, though some premiers noted that the strings were not as tight as before. The money is to go toward municipalities, transit, contact tracing, personal protective equipment, childcare, and ten days of paid sick leave (so now Jagmeet Singh can pat himself on the back, even though this was BC premier John Horgan’s initiative), and is to last for the next six to eight months, at which point there will be a re-evaluation of where everyone is at. Trudeau also made it official that the Canada-US border will remain closed to non-essential travel until August 21st.

During the Q&A that followed, Trudeau expressed optimism around the vaccine candidate being held up by Chinese customs, and said that in spite of the Russian hacking story, it was important to work with everyone to develop a vaccine and that they were working to get the balance right. When asked if he would appear before committee as invited around the WE Imbroglio, that his House leadership team was looking at the possibilities, but that he also looked forward to taking questions in the Commons next week during the scheduled special sitting day. Chrystia Freeland was asked about what she knew regarding the WE Imbroglio, and she gave a fairly lengthy response about how everyone accepts responsibility for what happened, and apologized, saying that “clearly we made a mistake and we’re going to learn from it,” adding that everyone knew that the PM was connected to WE but didn’t know of his family’s specific financial arrangements, and then added that she still supported the PM and that it was a privilege to serve in his Cabinet. When asked if Quebec had no problems with the strings attached to the billions on the table, Freeland said that they agreed to it like everyone else, and that it was actually a Really Big Deal to get all thirteen provinces and territories to sign onto a deal that includes the municipalities and covered several ministries, saying that it showed that Canadians have understood that we need to work together in this time of crisis.

Shortly after the presser ended, Bardish Chagger and her officials appeared before the Finance committee to discuss the WE Imbroglio. Chagger insisted that nobody in PMO directed her to make an arrangement with WE, but she kept deferring to her officials, which…isn’t really how ministerial responsibility works. There was also talk about how WE had sent an unsolicited proposal to several ministers about a youth programme before this was announced, which WE later came out and said was a youth entrepreneurship programme which had nothing to do with what became the Service Grant programme. This having been said, the senior bureaucrat on the file said that they had three weeks to come up with a programme, and that WE fit the bill for its requirements, which is why they were recommended – and pointed out that potential conflicts are for public office holders to deal with, not bureaucrats (which is true). Up today, the Ethics Committee will begin their own examination into the Imbroglio, so we’ll see if that goes any better.

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Roundup: A confirmation on uttered threats

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We got a better read of the charges against the Rideau Hall intruder from last week, including more specifics on the weapons charges – a restricted revolver, a prohibited rifle, and two legal shotguns – as well as confirmation that the uttering threats charge was indeed directed toward the prime minister. This is, of course, in direct contravention to what RCMP sources were leaking to certain journalists last week that he didn’t intend to harm anyone, which never actually was credible at the time, and yet they dutifully reported it anyway.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1278788951885721602

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1278809780392427520

What is especially galling is that the RCMP seems to have zero self-awareness that this sort of thing fuels the calls about systemic racism in their organization – doing proper de-escalation and then floating this “not intending to harm” fiction when it’s a white guy with guns as opposed to a Black, Indigenous or otherwise person of colour where they will beat, taze, or outright kill them when they are unarmed. The contrast had been made to the arrest video of Chief Allan Adam video where he was tackled and pummelled for merely mouthing off after police outright harassed him for expired licence plate tags, whereas the intruder was armed and had intent to threaten the prime minister (if not outright assassinate him – that remains for the investigation to conclude and the courts to decide), and he was apparently unharmed after a ninety-minute conversation. The fact that they would float that “no harm” notion when the guy was armed and rammed through the gates pretty much confirms in everyone’s minds that white perpetrators of violence get treated separately and less lethally than anyone else – but they remain oblivious to it. Incredible.

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