Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: Weasel words on conversion therapy

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In the wake of the Liberals announcing that they were looking at what measures they could take at a federal level to ban “conversion therapy,” the question was put to Andrew Scheer if he opposed it. Scheer responded that while he opposes “forced” conversion therapy, he will wait to see what the government proposes around banning it before if he’ll support it. The Conservatives quickly cried foul that the Global news headline was that “Andrew Scheer will ‘wait and see’ before taking a stance on conversion therapy ban” was just clickbait that didn’t reflect his actual quotes (and Global did update their headline), but not one of them pointed out the fact that Scheer’s own words were, to be frank, weaselly.

Scheer said that he opposed “forced” conversion therapy, and that he’s opposed to “any type of practice that would forcibly attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation against their will or things like that.” And you note the weasel words in there – about only being opposed to “forced” therapy, or to change it “against their will.” The giant implication that not one conservative rushing to defend Scheer is that there are types of “voluntary” conversion therapy that he is okay with, and that is alarming because any kind of so-called “conversion therapy” is torture, whether entered into voluntarily or not – and it ignores that when people enter into it voluntarily, it’s because they have such a degree of self-loathing that they have deluded themselves into believing that they can change their sexual orientation in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and a lot of that self-loathing comes from the sorts of violence, whether physical, mental or spiritual, that has been inflicted upon them. And it does look entirely like Scheer is being too cute by leaving a giant loophole in the window for his religious, social conservative flank to not feel threatened by his position, because it lets them carry on with the mythology that there is such a thing as “voluntary” conversion therapy, and that this is all about their “love the sinner, hate the sin” bullshit that asserts that homosexuality is just a learned behaviour and not an intrinsic characteristic. So no, I don’t think Scheer has been at all unequivocal.

Meanwhile, Scheer’s apologists will demand to know why the government refused to act on a “conversion therapy” ban when presented with a petition about it in March, but again, this is an issue where there is a great deal of nuance that should be applied. The government response was that these practices tend to fall under healthcare or be practiced by health professionals, which makes it provincial jurisdiction, and that while there can be some applications of the Criminal Code with some practices, it required coordination with the provinces to address, which they have been doing. What the Liberals announced this week was that they were seeing if there were any other measures they could take federally, which might involve the Criminal Code. Again, it’s an issue where it’s hard for them to take a particular line, so they’re trying to see what it is possible to do – that’s not a refusal, it’s an acknowledgement that it’s a complicated issue.

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Roundup: Attacking his own plan

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Andrew Scheer’s sudden denunciation of the planned clean fuel regulations got some reaction yesterday, partly from the government, and partly from economists who deal with this kind of thing for a living. Scheer’s labelling it a “secret fuel tax” is more than a little odd, because it’s exactly the kind of thing he’s proposing by removing the transparent federal carbon price and replacing it with more costly regulations, which would get passed onto consumers in a hidden way without any of the rebates that the current federal backstop programme provides – in other words, doing exactly what he’s accusing the Liberals of doing. The government noted that Scheer’s 4¢/litre figure are just a guess because the regulations haven’t been finalised yet (though some economists say it’s about right based on current projections), but again, it needs to be driven home that this is exactly the kind of thing that Scheer himself is proposing, but without the added “technology is magic” sheen attached.

To that end, here’s economist Andrew Leach’s mock open letter to Scheer.

Meanwhile, Heather Scoffield points out that this latest attack by Scheer risks boxing him in, and attacks his credibility on the climate file.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1148609609424429057

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Roundup: Intelligence and context

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There was a lot of flurry yesterday about supposed revelations made in Federal Court that CSIS has been spying on peaceful environmental groups. Except, people who used to be at CSIS, will tell you that’s exactly not the case. And the reporting on this hasn’t exactly helped either because it’s in a very defined frame with tropes that somewhat credulously take what these groups are saying and putting it with the redacted documents and drawing conclusions, that again, people who used to work there, will dispute, and those voices aren’t in the reporting. So here’s Stephanie Carvin and Jessica Davis, both of who used to work at CSIS, offering some proper context for what those documents say.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148217645986131969

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148217647852642304

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148233105825812480

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148235622529818625

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148235624580833283

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148235626380181505

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148301752770408448

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148222236832215040

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148230145968418817

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Roundup: Nepotism versus Responsible Government

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As the nepotism scandal in Ontario picks up steam, with revelations that there were appointments made to lacrosse players and an MPP’s father, and more demands that there be a more independent review of the appointments that have been made, I think it’s time for a bit of a civics and history lesson about patronage appointments. In many ways, patronage appointments are how we wound up with Responsible Government in the colonies that became Canada in the first place – the local assemblies wanted control over who was being appointed to these positions rather than them going to people from the UK who would then come over to carry them out, and eventually we won that right as part of Responsible Government. It was also understood at the time that it was fine if the party in power put their friends into patronage positions because when fortunes turned and their rivals formed government, they would be able to do the same with their friends. That particular view we have, fortunately, evolved from.

Regardless of this evolution, the core fact remains – that under Responsible Government, it is the first minister and Cabinet who makes these decisions as they are the ones who advise the Governor General/lieutenant governor to make said appointment. It also means that they are accountable to the legislature for that advice, which is where the current nepotism scandal now hangs. There are going to be all kinds of Doug Ford apologists who say that this was all Dean French, that Ford didn’t know what was going on – even though he signed off on it. And that’s the thing. It doesn’t matter if this was French hoodwinking Ford because Ford is the one who advises the LG about the appointments, and Ford is responsible to the legislature for making those appointments (and for hiring French, when you think about it). And if his party gets too embarrassed by this particular scandal, well, there could be a loss of confidence in the offing (likely from within party ranks than the legislature, but stranger things have happened).

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1143639086231633920

On that note of accountability, we should also point out that with the appointment of yet more ministers and “parliamentary assistants,” there are a mere 27 MPPs left in the back benches who don’t have a role, which means that they will see themselves as one screw-up away from a promotion (and this is more salient in the provinces, where regional balances are less of an outright concern, and this government in particular seems less interested in other diversity balances). That does erode the exercise of accountability by backbenchers. So does, incidentally, a chief of staff who would berate MPs for not clapping long enough, but maybe they’ll grow a backbone now that French is gone. Maybe.

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Roundup: Solidifying the “new” Senate

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Another day, another badly executed wrap-up article on the Senate, this time courtesy of the CBC, which again, has a badly misleading lede in which it claims that “Legislative changes that would have made it harder for a future prime minister to reverse Senate reforms have fallen through.” This is wrong – any changes to the Parliament of Canada Act that the government was contemplating would have had zero effect on the selection process for future senators. Why? Because that’s not governed by that Act, or indeed any piece of legislation – it’s part of the constitution, and clearly spelled out as a prerogative of the Governor-in-Council, meaning the prime minister and Cabinet will advise the Governor General as to who gets appointed. There is nothing that Trudeau could do to bind that advice legislatively – recall the Senate reform reference to the Supreme Court of Canada – that would require a constitutional amendment requiring seven provinces with fifty percent of the population to do.

What would changes to the Parliament of Canada Act regarding the Senate do? The actual proposals were to ensure that leaders of any parliamentary group in the Senate would get commensurate salary increases and resources to put them on par with the what is nominally the government and official opposition in the Senate, and the ISG has been pushing for this pretty hard, but they also were demanding to be part of consideration for vote bells, though I’m not sure why it would matter (particularly given that they have demonstrated time and again that they’re not reliable negotiating partners). But I also suspect that part of the reason why these changes didn’t get proposed was because there is some legal opinion that it would require some kind of buy-in from provinces to make this kind of change, so there was likely little time for the government to add this ball to all of the other ones they were juggling that late in the parliamentary calendar (despite the cries of the ISG). Of course, this hasn’t stopped the media from falsely framing these changes as affecting the selection process, as this has been cited by more than one reporter from more than one outlet, and it’s false.

The rest of the story is again more of the same voices opining on how great the “new” Senate is working, but we fortunately got a bit of pushback from Liberal Senator Lillian Dyck, who did point out that the lack of organisation among the Independents has held up bills and slowed down the process – and she’s right. But nobody wants to talk about that as they’re busy patting themselves on the back for “not being whipped.” There’s more to the Senate than that, and they need to get off this self-congratulation because things aren’t working as well as they like to claim.

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Roundup: The hand that feeds the Senate?

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Over at The Canadian Press, Joan Bryden wrote a wrap-up piece about the near-defeat of a few government bills in the Senate during the final days of the parliamentary sitting, but some of the piece has been rankling me, in part because of how it frames the state of play. So if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to pick it apart just a little, because I think it’s important to understand these things.

The lede is very awkward “In the final hours of Justin Trudeau’s four-year experiment with a less-partisan Senate, Independent senators came within a whisker of biting the hand that feeds them.” It’s a nonsense sentence that doesn’t make any sense – Trudeau’s experiment with a “less-partisan Senate” isn’t over by any stretch of the imagination, and there were no final hours to it – saying that it was the final hours of the parliamentary sitting or even session (since the chances of a prorogation and Speech from the Throne before the writs are drawn up in September are infinitesimal), or even the 42ndParliament would make sense, but not as written. I’m also really bothered by the notion of the “biting the hand that feeds them.” By feeding them, is it supposed to imply the person who appointed them, because that’s not the same thing. Is it supposed to imply that their posts continue at the beneficence of Trudeau, and that he could be rid of them at any point? Because that’s clearly not the case in the slightest (particularly constitutionally), but the phrasing implies the latter instead of the former, which is why it’s weird and misleading in all kinds of ways.

The rest of the piece is the usually bit of sniping between the leader of the Independent Senators Group, the Conservative whip, and the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, wherein Harder and the ISG insist that everything is fine, this is exactly what the Senate should be, and the Conservatives cry that the Independent senators are just Liberals by another name. The wrench in here is that Senator André Pratt calls the Conservatives out for supporting a government bill that more Independents opposed because they didn’t really want to set up a precedent for the Senate voting down government bills because when they form power next, there could be a real problem for them (though one has to say that the bill in question, C-83, was of very dubious constitutionality as it had court rulings against it before it was even law). As we approach the election, we can expect more of this sniping going on, particularly once the Independents start trying to agitate for continued independent Senate appointments to be an election issue – which is essentially an endorsement for Trudeau – and it could start to get very uncomfortable for all involved really quickly.

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Roundup: A queen and her prime minister

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It was Pride weekend in Toronto, and Justin Trudeau was in attendance once again this year, with several Cabinet ministers and his Toronto-area MPs. The only Conservative MP in attendance appears to have been Lisa Raitt, while Jagemeet Singh and Elizabeth May were also present.

But most importantly? This years RuPaul’s Drag Race runner-up from Toronto, the Queen of the North, Brooke Lynn Hytes was also in attendance, and got to meet her prime minister, as any good queen would.

https://twitter.com/AdamScotti/status/1142852635780927488

https://twitter.com/Bhytes1/status/1142870645673484294

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Roundup: It’s TMX Day

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Today is the day that the government will make their decision on the Trans Mountain Expansion, and it should not be a surprise to say that they are almost certainly going to approve it, having spent $4.5 billion on the existing pipeline to “de-risk” the project, and far more in political capital at the cost of some of their BC, Indigenous, and environmental base while trying to insist that this is necessary for the transition to a cleaner economy. Of course, if they could communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, it might help them to make that case, but they seem incapable of it. The real question is going to be what kinds of changes to the route will be made in order to accommodate Indigenous groups, or other conditions to be mandated as part of it.

There will be much talk about the “pipeline crunch” that the TMX will hope to address, which has to do with added oilsands production and not enough ways to get it to market, given ongoing delays on the American side of both Enbridge Line 3 and Keystone XL – projects which have been approved in Canada, and the Line 3 construction has been ongoing on the Canadian side. But as much as TMX will help, we also need to remember that the projected growth capacity is limited, which is another reason why Energy East doesn’t make economic sense. The concern that the sector needs all kinds of new pipelines isn’t actually borne out in the data (as Andrew Leach has pointed out repeatedly, including here).

On a related note, the government has rejected most of the Senate amendments to Bill C-48, on the tanker ban, but did agree to the five-year legislative review period, but as much as industry groups are demanding that this bill and Bill C-69 be killed, it’s not going to happen.

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Roundup: Credulous takes on the “new” Senate

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Over in the Globe and Mail, John Ibbitson has declared that Justin Trudeau’s reforms to the Senate “worked,” and that Andrew Scheer should continue to appoint independents instead of partisans, and I just. Cannot Even. Reading the piece, it’s clear that Ibbitson has no real grounding in what the Senate is supposed to do on an actual basis, the various roles it plays aside from its legislative duties, and he has absolutely no conception of the broader scope of the problem that Justin Trudeau has unleashed on future parliaments – and how he has hobbled his own party in the future, while further centralizing his own power. But Ibbitson seems to have taken the word of Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, that this is how Parliament is “supposed” to work – Harder not exactly being a credible source – as well as an emeritus professor who has been a booster not only for these reforms, but who thinks it would be great to go even further and institute a business committee (which would be an even bigger problem going forward). So no, I’m not going to take Ibbitson’s word that this has “worked.”

While I’m not going to pretend that the Senate didn’t have its problems beforehand, a good many of the problems in recent years can be traced to the fact that Stephen Harper made some spectacularly poor appointments in his rush to populate the Chamber during the prorogation crisis of 2008, after he neglected to fill its seats for long enough that what Conservative senators there were in the Chamber at the time were clamouring for more members because there weren’t enough of them to adequately spread around the workload. And rather than make thoughtful appointments, Harper panic appointed a number of partisans who had no suitability to the role, and lo, problems and scandal ensued.

There is absolutely a partisan role for senators because they’re the institutional memory of parliament, and that especially includes inside the caucus room, and that also keeps a check on the leader because they don’t have to worry about their nomination papers being signed. And the Liberals are going to find out just how necessary those roles are when they’re no longer in power and have few people with the knowledge to help them rebuild. And yes, it will happen eventually. And as for the “new” system “working,” they can’t manage the Order Paper, and they have a crisis in front of them with the election looming. But hey, Peter Harder says it’s going swimmingly, so he’s the person we should believe. Okay then.

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Roundup: Disingenuous threats to national unity

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As bullshit political theatre goes, Jason Kenney continues to exercise it to its fullest as he released an “urgent letter” to the federal government yesterday, co-signed by five other premiers (four of them conservative, one of them without ostensible party affiliation) to demand that both bills C-48 and C-69 be withdrawn, and warns of consequences to “national unity” if they are not. And it’s a bit galling to play the national unity card, considering that it’s both groundless and petulant – like a tantrum where a child threatens to hold his breath until he turns blue to teach his parents “a lesson.”

Nobody is going to pretend that these are perfect bills, but for the purposes of what is being argued, neither can do the harm that Kenney and his allies are claiming. For example, C-48 will not landlock their resources, and there has been expert testimony to say that it would have a negligible impact on the oil and gas sector because there are no pipelines along that route, nor are there any planned (thanks in large part to how badly the Conservatives botched the Indigenous consultations on the Northern Gateway project). And C-69 is not going to make major infrastructure projects impossible – if anything, it would have a better chance of streamlining environmental assessments by ensuring clearer lines and better scoping of those assessments, so that there can be more focused work with the assessments. But the status quo is simply a path of more litigation because the current system is badly flawed. The branding it as the “no more pipelines bill” is and always has been disingenuous and an outright lie, but that’s what this all boils down to.

Kenney and company have lied repeatedly about the current government’s environmental programme – abetted by the fact that this government can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, and they somehow refuse to call Kenney, Scheer, and company, on their bullshit. And given that Kenney managed to win an election by whipping his electorate into a state of irrational anger with a diet of lies and snake oil – anger that won’t abate now that he’s in charge – the attempt to export that technique to the rest of Canada is dangerous, but they don’t seem to care. That is the real threat to national unity, and it’s Kenny and company who are stirring it up, and they should be called out for it.

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