Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: Agenda-setting out of the gate

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With the proclamation signed by the Governor General to dissolve parliament, the 43rdgeneral election started, with Justin Trudeau emerging from Rideau Hall to have a ready-made human backdrop assembled for him. After a mention of the anniversary of 9/11, he launched into his election pitch about the record of economic growth because they rejected the austerity of the Conservative years, and yay Middle Class™ And Those Working Hard To Join It®. He listed accomplishments, and the choice of investing in Canadians, and the choice to move forward or go back to the “Harper years.” The questions afterward were dominated by two themes – the latest SNC-Lavalin news from the Globe and Mail, and Bill 21 in Quebec, and the linguistic duality on the two questions was quite evident. On the former, Trudeau simply said that he trusted the Clerk of the Privy Council’s judgment with regard to the cabinet confidences, and on the latter, he said that he opposed the bill but that now wasn’t the time for the federal government to interfere legally.

Jagmeet Singh held his launch minutes later in London, Ontario – one of the regions where they are looking to save the seats they have. Singh spoke about his personal connection to London, as he lived there when he attended Western, then launched into the tales of woe he heard from people there about pharmacare and healthcare costs – and lo, he has a pitch about expanding coverage around them. He then said that what his party had was the “courage” to take on lobbyists, corporations, money launderers, speculators, Big telecom, big polluters, and “fossil fuel subsidies” – a long list to be sure. He then moved on to claiming that “Trudeau charmed us with pretty words and empty promises”, and that Scheer was not the answer, then turned to the human backdrop and said “These are the people I’m in it for.” Like his slogan. In the questions, he was asked a local question about the General Dynamics plant which is building those LAVs going to Saudi Arabia, and have basically saved the local economy. Singh insisted that they could still have those jobs selling equipment to the Canadian Forces and to “non-oppressive regimes.” Err, except they have their own local suppliers, so he clearly has no idea what he’s referring to.

The Bloc’s launch in Quebec City was largely a laundry lists of exaggerated grievances and talk of a renewed Quebec nationalism, and one of the phrases that leapt out at me was talking about “people who will be like you,” which seems like a dog whistle, but perhaps it was a translation issue.

Next up was Elizabeth may in Victoria, where she brought local “climate striking” children on stage, and then launched into a speech about holding the line on climate change, decrying the Trans Mountain pipeline, and touting her “Mission: Possible” climate plan. She also demanded that parties “jettison partisanship” to solve climate change – never mind that she herself is partisan, and it’s become a Green tendency to pretend that sanctimony is non-partisanship. When faced with questions about vote splitting, she asserted that “Greens don’t split votes, Greens grow votes,” and when pressed about Pierre Nantel’s declaration of separatist sentiments, she prevaricated and assured us that “we’re all Earthlings.”

Finally we had Andrew Scheer, from Trois-Rivières, Quebec – one of those seats he’d love to gain. His 9/11 mentions included the plot of Come From Away as an example of why he loves the country. Using the Harper-esque prefacing of all statements with “friends,” his pitch was that it was time to elect a government that would elect a party that would improve peoples’ daily lives, while he claimed that Trudeau would raise their taxes (err, except that the record is the opposite). And then it was a laundry list of lies and disingenuous framing of issues, hammering on the Globe story about SNC-Lavalin – again, exaggerating what the story actually said. His message to Trudeau was that “starting today, recess is over” – part of his constant attempts to infantilising Trudeau (remember the constant claims that Trudeau is busy colouring in the House of Commons, or that he “wrote” a colouring book). For his Quebec audience, he added a few references about “open federalism” and Quebec being a nation within Canada, while slamming the Bloc as being ineffective in Ottawa.

This all having been said, I did want to touch on that Globe and Mail story for one other aspect, which is the fact that they deliberately published the story about “sources saying” the RCMP has been asking questions about “possible obstruction of justice” in the SNC-Lavalin case – which is not an investigation – on the eve of the election, because they are trying to set the agenda. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t ask these questions, but agenda-setting – particularly where your stories are thinly sourced and with torqued headlines that give a misleading impression of what the story actually says – is of dubious ethical practice, and it’s something we should be cognisant of and think critically about.

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Roundup: Cheap outrage over MPs’ spouses

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Long-time readers will know that one of my pet peeves is the propensity for my media colleagues to push cheap outrage stories, to trigger the hairshirt parsimony and tall poppy syndrome of the Canadian public, and lo, they did it again with the screaming headline that taxpayers footed the bill for $4.5 million in MP spousal travel over four years. Which is actually not a lot, particularly when you consider that we’re a big country, and that airfare is expensive here because of our duopolistic air carriers and lack of population density.

Of course, when I tweeted this out, I had all kinds of people yelling at me that Bill Morneau’s millionaire wife shouldn’t be eligible for sponsored spousal travel. The problem with this kind of qualifier is that it when you start qualifying who is and isn’t eligible for the benefits based on personal circumstances, you start running into the mentality that plagued the UK for centuries – that MPs were poorly compensated and essentially needed to be independently wealthy before they stood for office. We’ve seen enough people suggest that the Canadian Senate be run this way, with the ludicrous suggestion that it be a volunteer position. I would also add that the divorce rate for MPs is several times above the national average – if we start begrudging their ability to travel with their spouses to Ottawa and back, particularly if the distances are fairly large ones – we’d see even more divorces, or a pervasive belief that people with families shouldn’t run for office. I’m not sure who that would benefit.

Throughout this bit of cheap outrage, Jody Wilson-Raybould’s spousal flights were singled out in a separate piece about cabinet ministers and their spouses’ travel costs. That a Vancouver MP’s costs would be higher should be no surprise, and it could very well be that they are higher because they may have been booked last-minute rather than in advance (given that they are simply treated by the MP and their spouse as points rather than being given a dollar figure as their expenses limit). Suffice to say, these kinds of stories are pretty gross when you stop and think about it, and the performative outrage over taxpayer dollars that are packaged in a way to look big and without sufficient context is one of the biggest problems we have in Canadian politics, and why we make the lives of our MPs so miserable.

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Roundup: Kenney’s McCarthy-esque quest

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Over in Alberta, Jason Kenney’s McCarthy-esque Committee on un-Albertan Activities received its terms of reference and will begin taking submissions, and just like the MacKinnon Report, it was gamed to specifically look at anything that was being mean to the oil and gas sector while studiously avoiding any falsehoods used by the oil and gas lobby to state their own case. And it’s all going into feeding their “war room” to “fight back” against those un-Albertan activities. Because this is totally normal for a democratic government in the western world.

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Roundup: New Brunswick dust-up

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The situation in New Brunswick has turned to complete melodrama as it turns out that maybe it wasn’t fourteen former provincial NDP candidates who defected to the Greens, and that maybe it was only eight. Some said they were surprised to see their names on the list, others said that they were under the impression that this was really a discussion about merging with the Greens provincially to form a more progressive alternative party (given that the NDP were wiped out provincially, and it doesn’t help that their former leader crossed over to the provincial Progressive Conservatives and is now sitting as a cabinet minister). All the while, Elizabeth May is taking swipes at Jagmeet Singh for not visiting the province, while she also alleges that the NDP engaged in strong-arm tactics to force some of those former candidates to recant their cross to the Greens (which some deny). Amidst all of this are the allegations that some of this was because these NDP candidates felt that there are people in the province – singling out the Acadiens on the North Shore – would react poorly to Singh, and the howling that this is all about racism.

And it is possible that there is an element of racism in here, and we shouldn’t deny that it does exist in Canadian politics, even if it’s not overt. To that end, Andray Domise writes in Maclean’s that leftist parties in Canada don’t critically engage with issues of race because bigotry can be useful politically and economically, and it’s the kind of thing they should be engaging with but don’t. It’s a fairly damning condemnation of the state of leftist politics in this country, and nobody comes out looking good as a result (though, it should also be noted, that the Greens are not really a leftist party in most respects, and the NDP have turned themselves into left-flavoured populists over successive elections and leaders, so perhaps that makes the point even more trenchant).

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Roundup: Equalization and Spending

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Over the long weekend, one of the best things that I read was an exploration by economist Trevor Tombe about Alberta’s misplaced anger over the so-called “unfairness” of equalization, as the real issue is the fact that they have disproportionately higher salaries (and fiscal capacity) than everyone else in the country. Meanwhile, Tombe also has a good thread on the history of federal transfers to and from Alberta, and it’s interesting to get some of that perspective.

Meanwhile in Alberta, the McKinnon Report on public expenses was released yesterday, detailing that there needs to be some $600 million in cuts if the budget is to be balanced between 2022-23, and while it notes that it the province needs more stable revenues (*cough*sales tax*cough*), though it didn’t get into their revenue problems, as it wasn’t their mandate. That means that there are going to need to be cuts to healthcare and education. Here are three surprising tidbits from the report (but also ones that I think need to be drilled down into – for example high public servant salaries are not because of cost of living, but competition with the private sector, and high college drop-out rates are likely to do with jobs in the oil patch). More in this thread from Lindsay Tedds.

In reaction, Jason Markusoff points to the fact that the report’s conclusions were predetermined, given that it was created specifically to find cuts as raising revenues was not an option they were allowed to present, and it bears reminding once again that Alberta is in deficit because it chooses to be so – they could raise their revenues and not rely solely on oil royalties anytime they wanted, but they don’t want to (so all of those pundits taking this report as proof that the province has a spending problem are being a bit too cute about it). On a broader perspective, Max Fawcett argues that if Alberta wants to send a message that if they really want to have their issues taken seriously, they need to stop voting Conservative – and then enumerates all of the ways in which the federal Conservatives have taken the province’s votes for granted as they did things that disadvantaged them.

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Roundup: Importing the culture war

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We’re not even in the writ period, and the imported culture war bullshit is already at a fever pitch. In order to capitalize on it being Ottawa Pride this weekend, the Liberals started passing around a video of Andrew Scheer’s 2005 speech denouncing same-sex marriage, under the rubric of Ralph Goodale calling on Scheer to attend his hometown Pride in Ottawa this weekend. (Note: We’ll see if Trudeau makes it to Ottawa Pride this year, as he may not be back from the G7 meeting in France. Trudeau has only ever appeared at Ottawa’s Pride parade once). And off they were to the races. Scheer’s director of communications said that Scheer “supports same-sex marriage as defined in law,” and would uphold it as prime minister – and then proceeded to name Liberals who previously voted against it.

What’s particularly cute about this defence of Scheer is that it does not say that Scheer’s views have evolved, and the use of “as defined in law” is that the law was a result of a Supreme Court of Canada reference, so there is no way that any government could try to repeal it without invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to escape a Charter challenge. But beyond that, Scheer’s people have not offered any kind of defence that he voted against the trans rights bill in 2016, which is more current and pressing of a rights issue than where we are with same-sex marriage. But it’s not really about same-sex marriage at all – it’s all about our political class being high on the fumes of the American culture war that they’ve been inhaling, and are trying desperately to recreate here because they all think it’ll be a political winner for them, rather than the fact that it will simply burn the house down around them.

In amidst this, Jagmeet Singh decided that he wanted to get in on the culture war action and declared that he wouldn’t prop up a Conservative government in a hung parliament based on this (fourteen-year-old) homophobia – which essentially means that he’s conceded that he’s not running to be the prime minister in the election, but is content to stay as the third party. There’s realism, and then there’s bad strategy. Singh then went on to list all of the Liberal failures on the LGBT file – except most of the ones he listed are in areas of provincial jurisdiction. Oops. This election is already so, so very stupid.

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Roundup: Narratives about radicalization ahead

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One of the sub-plots from the 2015 election is about to get a rerun as the UK decided to revoke citizenship from “Jihadi Jack” Letts, who has joint-UK and Canadian citizenship. That essentially leaves him with only Canadian citizenship – dumping their problem on our laps (likely in contravention of international law, incidentally). And that means a return to Trudeau’s decision to revoke a Conservative law that would have had a similar effect in Canadian law, because as you may recall, “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.”

Where this will be compounded with the Conservative talking points that Trudeau thinks that returning fighters are “powerful voices” that can be reformed with podcasts and poetry lessons – which is a gross distortion of both Trudeau saying that people who were de-radicalised (not returning fighters) could be those powerful voices in their communities, and de-radicalisation programmes themselves, which again, are not for returning fighters but preventing people from taking that step once they’ve been radicalised. And lo, they will talk about how “naïve and dangerous” the notion that returning fighters can be de-radicalised is, when all of the things they point to are about de-radicalising people before they leave the country or do something violent here. But why should they let truth get in the way of a narrative?

Meanwhile, Letts’ parents are imploring the Canadian government to do something, and they are prepared to move here if that helps, but it also leaves questions as to what Letts may be charged with – though there is no evidence he was actually involved in any fighting. Nevertheless, it’s a problem the UK dumped on us that will become a partisan election issue, with all of the nonsense that entails.

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Roundup: The inevitable committee bat-signal

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And now, the hangover from Wednesday’s Ethics Commissioner’s report, starting with the inevitable demand from the opposition parties that the Commons Ethics Committee reconvene for an emergency meeting to hear from the Commissioner, plus a list of witnesses, to fully explore the whole thing in front of the cameras yet again. And while a meeting has been called for next Wednesday, it will inevitably be that the Liberals on the committee (or rather, those from nearby ridings who have come to the meeting to fill the seats) will say that with the report, we’ve heard everything we need to and Canadians can make a decision in October, and deny permission for the meeting, which will then be followed by the other parties bemoaning the cover-up and secrecy, and then we’ll move onto campaigning. As you do.

Elsewhere, we heard from Jody Wilson-Raybould who said that the revelations about how deeply SNC-Lavalin was working with the department of finance was a surprise to her. Jane Philpott said she felt sad by the whole affair, and troubled by the attempts to discredit Wilson-Raybould in the prime minister’s submissions to the Commissioner, and she thinks an apology is warranted. Trudeau, however, is steadfastly not doing so. Mario Dion thinks that his office needs the power to levy sanctions for breaches like this one, as there currently aren’t any. SNC-Lavalin will be carrying on with their Federal Court of Appeal bid to get judicial review for the Director of Public Prosecution’s decision not go discuss a DPA with them.

Another emerging theme from this whole sordid affair is the issue of the post-retirement careers of Supreme Court of Canada justices, several of whom became embroiled in the affair. Amid calls for new rules around what constitutes proper activities for these retired justices, there does seem to be a recognition by the current Chief Justice and the Canadian Judicial Council that there may be an issue, and they are having these discussions.

Meanwhile, Chris Selley notes that the Commissioner’s report seems to impugn the way that governments do business, especially when they make a big deal about investing in a company and showing up with a giant novelty cheque (though we’ve seen a lot fewer of those under this government than the previous one) – and he thinks it’s about time. Law professor Errol Mendes details how Dion has made a serious misinterpretation of his enabling legislation and jurisdiction in the creation of this report, which should be concerning (and We The Media need to be far less deferential to Officers of Parliament because they are not always right).

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Roundup: These aren’t the bots you’re looking for

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The discussion of misinformation, “junk news,” and bots have been going around a lot, as have the notions of what journalists can and should be doing to fact-check these things. To that end, here’s a thread for thought from Justin Ling about how this can be working against us in the longer term:

And national security expert Stephanie Carvin adds a few thoughts of her own, to contextualize the problem:

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1161424183185854464

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1161424186214158336

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1161424188500058112

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1161424197408702465

Chris Selley. meanwhile, respectfully suggests that if the government is so worried about online misinformation, that they stop pushing it themselves with their own particular bits of spin and torque that plant the same kind of false notions and expectations in people’s minds – and he’s absolutely correct.

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Roundup: Figures without context for outrage

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You may have noticed that the Conservative Party’s Twitter feed recently is trying to make “100 days of Trudeau fails” a Thing – because their overriding narrative has been to put “Trudeau” and “fail” in the same sentence for the past two years now, but it still feels a lot like trying to make “fetch” happen. But as they essentially regurgitate old headlines as part of this campaign, you will find that most of the posts are missing key context, which ensures that it’s often a big figure with nothing to support it. Given that We The Media have trained Canadians with our fixation on cheap outrage stories, I’m sure this is a tactic that they feel is a slam dunk, but in any case, here are a few examples from the past few days. In other words, don’t take anything at face value, but remember that there is context (that is easily Googled) to what they are posting, and most of it makes them look pretty petty – particularly the repairs and upgrades to the official residence at Harrington Lake, given that Trudeau has been entertaining foreign leaders there as they can’t do it at 24 Sussex.

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