Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: Compromising positions vs oversight

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As the fallout from his sexting “scandal” continued, MP Tony Clement was booted from caucus yesterday, which shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. First thing in the morning, Andrew Scheer said that he was assured that it was a one-off so Clement would be allowed to stay, but by Question Period, Clement was out, meaning that more stuff has come to light (possibly the raft of women over social media describing their creepy encounters with Clement online).

While Cabinet ministers including Ralph Goodale don’t believe that this incident with Clement actually breached national security, the bigger worry by experts in the field is the fact that the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians is still nascent and building trust, and the fact that Clement was a member of that team and obviously ignored the training he was provided about not putting himself in compromising positions could shake the domestic trust of this new committee, especially given that this level of parliamentary oversight of our national security is new and largely untested.

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Susan Delacourt notes the three ways in which Clement has damaged himself, and possibly his party as well. John Ivison ponders the security implications of this whole sordid affair. And on Power Play, Stephanie Carvin explains why this is an issue with national security considerations.

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Roundup: Sexts and extortion

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Conservative MP Tony Clement has resigned from Conservative shadow cabinet and his parliamentary duties (but not from caucus) after he was victim to an attempted extortion after sharing “sexually explicit images and video” with someone.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1059976854415659008

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Some observations:

  • Clement is part of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, which is of the highest security classification. Being a target for blackmail on that is a Very Big Deal, and can’t be excused by those who don’t want to be involved in any kind of shaming for sexting. Clement apparently notified PCO about this a few days ago, so this is serious in how it affects his role with NSICOP, and now they will need to find a new member to fill that vacancy.
  • This is likely to get bigger. Already a number of women are coming forward over social media about his creepy behaviour on Instagram and this kind of thing has apparently happened before (sans extortion attempt).
  • The Conservatives can stop being so smug about the fact that they haven’t had to boot anyone from caucus for being sexually inappropriate. Clement is still in caucus for the moment, but we’ll see how this grows in the next few days.
  • Clement says that he’ll be “seeking treatment,” which is the really gross part here, because it employs the language of trying to medicalise sexual harassment or inappropriate behaviour. And when you try to medicalise it, you try to diminish personal responsibility – as this Tracey Ullman sketch so amply demonstrates.

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Roundup: A StatsCan privacy check

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While the ongoing issue of Statistics Canada looking for financial transaction data continues, the actual privacy practices in the institution aren’t being adequately explained to Canadians – and they certainly aren’t being represented accurately by the opposition. So with that in mind, here’s professor Jennifer Robson to explain just what she has to go through in order to access data for her research at StatsCan, in order to give you a better sense about how seriously they take this kind of thing.

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This is why the complaints that the data won’t be secure as it’s being anonymized is pretty specious, and the pearl-clutching that StatsCan would have a person’s SIN is also overblown considering that they already have it – they matched up people’s tax returns with their census forms to ensure that they had accurate data regarding household incomes, and lo, nobody made a peep about that when it happened. Again, this overblown rhetoric around what is being planned about this financial transaction data is not only risible, but it’s actively mendacious (particularly when Conservative MPs keep saying things like this is a project by the Liberal Party or by Justin Trudeau himself). And yes, StatsCan has done a woeful job as to explaining what it needs these data for, and this government is largely too inept to communicate any of that information either. And yet here we are.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne points out that while the Conservatives have been spending years attacking StatsCan, the real privacy threat comes from the unregulated use of personal information by political parties, not the country’s statistical agency.

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Roundup: Immigration concern trolls

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Amidst the other disingenuous, fear-based campaigns going on in the political sphere right now – Statistics Canada, and the carbon price, in particular – the issue of immigration is also threatening to get worse, in part because the simmering issue around irregular border crossers is being conflated with the government’s announcement of new immigration targets. And we need to drill this into people from the start – immigration and asylum are two very different things, and shouldn’t be treated or conflated. We don’t accept refugees because we think they’ll fill out our workforce – we accept them for humanitarian reasons, which is why the expectations that they’ll find work right away is also problematic, as usually they’re traumatized upon arrival. That’s why it’s especially problematic when you have partisan actors like Michelle Rempel standing up in Question Period to decry the new immigration targets as having some form of equivalency with the irregular border crossers – they’re not the same thing, and conflating them is using one to demonize the other. Even more problematic is the kind of concern trolling language that we’re seeing from other conservatives – that they “support immigration” but are concerned about the “confidence in the system.” There is a certain dogwhistle quality to those “concerns” because it implies that the “confidence” in the system is undermined by all of those bad newcomers arriving. It’s subtle, but the signals are still there.

To that end, the government decided to launch a pro-immigration ad campaign, which the Conservatives have immediately derided as an attempt to paper over the irregular border-crosser issue, despite the fact that they’re separate issues, and they’re actively undermining confidence in the immigration system that they claim to support by conflating it with the asylum seekers they’re demonizing. And this cycle of conflation and demonization gets worse when the federal minister pushed back against the Ontario minister’s politicizing of the issue and attempt to blame asylum seekers for the city’s housing crisis (and more importantly pushed back against her claims that “40 percent” of shelter residents are now irregular border crossers and that they used to be 11 percent as being fabricated because the shelter system doesn’t track that kind of data). The Ontario minister responded by calling Hussen a “name-calling bully” (he didn’t call her any names), and on it goes. Would that we have grown-ups running things.

Meanwhile, The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ checks the government’s claim that they’ve reduced irregular border crossings by 70 percent (it was one month’s year-over-year data), and Justin Ling gives an appropriately salty fact-check of the political memes decrying the planned increase in immigration figures.

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Roundup: On MPs’ sanctimony

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My patience for self-aggrandising bullshit is at an all-time low, so you can image just how hard my eyes rolled when I heard that Justin Trudeau was telling a school group that was touring Parliament that his side is “serious and respectful” and the other guys like to shout, and how it was because when a there isn’t a lot that they can go after the government on, they make noise instead. Trudeau’s capacity for sanctimony is practically legendary, but this was gilding the lily more than a little. Now, I will grant you that since he’s been in charge, the Liberals have been far better behaved in QP than they used to be, and the clapping ban has lowered the level of din in the chamber by a great deal (though said ban is not always honoured). And yes, the Conservatives do yell and heckle a lot, but some of it is deserved when you have ministers or parliamentary secretaries who read non sequitur talking points rather than doing something that resembles answering a question. (They also yell and heckle to be childish and disruptive as well, but it bears pointing out that it’s not entirely undeserved). It’s also cheap theatre, and there is a time and a place for that in politics, and if we didn’t have it during QP, then I daresay that there might be an outbreak of narcolepsy on the Hill. But as with anything, it should be done judiciously and cleverly, and that’s not something that these guys are any good at, and so we return to the sounds of jeering, hooting baboons no more days than not, but that’s no excuse for sanctimony. There are no saints in that chamber.

With that in mind, my tolerance for the whinging and crying foul over the removal of Leona Alleslev as chair of the NATO Parliamentary Association is also mighty thin, for the sheer fact that when she crossed the floor, she wouldn’t be able to chair a parliamentary association. The way these things work is that a government MP chairs, and an opposition MP vice-chairs, and lo, the Conservatives already had a vice-chair on said association. Her removal was not retaliation, but it is a consequence. Now, there are definite questions that can be asked about the timing of said removal – two weeks before a NATO meeting that she has worked toward, and weeks after she crossed the floor (but I don’t know how often this association meets, so this may have been the first opportunity) – but that is far different from the caterwauling from the Conservatives about how the “supposedly feminist” prime minister was being mean to a woman and a veteran. (As an aside, could we please stop with this policing of the PM’s feminism? 99 percent of attacks attached to said policing have nothing to do with feminism). This attempt to claim the moral high ground is exasperating.

To add to all of this, the meeting where the removal happened was met with a bunch of disruptive, juvenile behaviour by Conservative MPs and staffers that included butchered singing, and *gasp!* drinking! Oh noes! Nobody behaved admirably in this situation, and nobody has any high ground to claim, so maybe we should all behave like adults around this.

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Roundup: Kenney and Scheer vow to repeat mistakes

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There was a conference in Calgary yesterday called “Energy Relaunch,” during which both Jason Kenney and Andrew Scheer laid out plans for how they propose to get the province’s oil and gas industry “back on track” if they were to form government. The problem is that they seemed to have learned absolutely no lessons from the past few years about where the problems and bottlenecks in the process lie, and what to do about them. Their solutions tended to be to use bigger bulldozers and to gut more legislation, and Kenney more specifically included funding the legal challenges of resource-friendly First Nations communities and targeting “foreign-funded” organisations that opposed development (because it’s all one big conspiracy by the Tides Foundation, and however else makes a convenient scapegoat). But if anyone has paid any attention to the court decisions over the past number of years, especially over Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain, the theme that emerges is that they have been slapped down because successive governments have attempted to cut corners and weasel out of their obligations rather than doing the hard work of proper assessments and consultation with Indigenous communities that would get them the approval they were looking for. The current Liberal government seems to get this fact and is proceeding accordingly when it comes to Trans Mountain, while Scheer and Kenney wail and gnash their teeth about how they didn’t appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada (without articulating what the error in law was), or somehow legislating away the problems (never mind that retroactive legislation will lead to more litigation, and you can’t legislate away your Section 35 duty to consult obligations).

Kenney also promised that if made premier, he would launch a “war room” to counter any critics of the oil sands in real time. The problem is that hasn’t worked to day, and won’t work going forward, but Kenney refuses to grasp that reality.

Energy economist Andrew Leach was also presenting at the event, and has some thoughts as to what he heard as well:

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Roundup: The big climate reveal

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Yesterday was the big day, where Justin Trudeau unveiled the final details of his carbon pricing plan, and how the rebates would work for the provinces subject to the carbon backstop, which are going to be Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, with the Yukon and Nunavut also kicking in slightly later. (You can find breakdowns here). The Conservatives and their provincial premier allies immediately chimed in to predictably call this some kind of scam, and that nobody believed the rebates would happen, and so on, and so on. Also of note is that Trudeau’s nominal ally, Brian Gallant in New Brunswick, has also grumbled about the carbon price (but if he loses and Blaine Higgs forms government, he too is opposed to it). Manufacturers and small businesses are grumbling, despite the fact that there will be rebates for small and medium-sized businesses under the scheme. Also getting larger rebates will be people in rural communities, given that they have higher carbon costs (and it’s no secret that the Liberals have a harder time winning votes there).

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With this in mind, here are some noted climate economists who can put some of yesterday’s announcement into proper perspective. (Additional thread from Kevin Milligan here, and Nic Rivers here).

Meanwhile, here’s a look at whether Trudeau can escape the problems of Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift, with points to Trudeau being a better communicator (but I’d argue that journalists prefacing every explanation of the Green Shift with “it’s complicated” didn’t help either). Chris Selley notes that this is the issue that could make or break Trudeau in the next election, which is why he needs to get it right. Paul Wells drops a bit of reality on the language that Scheer and Ford are using, and wonders whether the carbon backstop rebates will start catching on with other provinces.

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Roundup: Changing the accounting rules

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There were some fairly big changes announced yesterday, but the way in which it was reported was interesting if you compared coverage. For example, The Canadian Press led with the headline of a $19-billion federal deficit last year, but didn’t explain until the fifth paragraph that the accounting rules had changed, and described it as “confusing matters,” and then engaged in both-sidesism to have the Conservatives rail about the size of the deficit rather than really explain what the changes meant. The Financial Post mentioned the changes in the second paragraph, but focused on the size of the deficit. It was the CBC’s coverage that spent the full story focused on the accounting rules changes and what they mean, and how that affects the reporting of the figures, which has a lot to do with unfunded pension liabilities that are now being put on the books in a transparent manner that the Auditor General has been calling for, for years now. Context like this is important, and it’s disappointing to see it obscured because writing about the deficit figures is sexier without explaining what they mean, so well done there. You’re really serving your readers.

As with any of these stories, however, the best commentary came from some of the best economists on Twitter, who put it all into context. The full Kevin Milligan thread explaining it all is here, but I’ll post some select highlights.

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He also busted the myths about the deficit spending by pointing to the $70 billion hole in GDP that the Liberals were left with when they took office, in part because of the oil downturn and technical recession that the Conservative narrative keeps ignoring.

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Also, Mike Moffatt points out the significance of those accounting rules around pension liabilities on the reporting of the books.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1053342822017982465

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1053354656384962560

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Roundup: Populist myths and the lies they tell themselves

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The Nobel prize has been awarded to economists working on issues of climate change, who point to the need for carbon pricing to get markets to come to a consensus about finding solutions, and what do we get in Canada? Doug Ford going on tour to see Scott Moe and Jason Kenney to decry carbon taxation, and to lie to people about the efficacy of carbon taxes. They work, despite what Ford, Kenney, Scheer, et al. say, and we have the data to prove this.

The Ford/Kenney rally was apparently quite something, a demonstration of partisanship over politics, and a demonstration about what how this all relates to our recent discussions over populism, with the carbon tax as a wedge issue. But while this is being put against this notion that Stephen Harper is trying to put forward in his new book about how “conservative populism” is somehow trying to weed out the worst instincts of populists, but that can’t actually be true if the dog-whistling still goes on. In her piece about the Ford/Kenney rally, Jen Gerson relayed the anecdote about people attending the rally being asked to cover up their MAGA hats with oil sands stickers – but the MAGA hats are still there, even if they’re being literally papered over. Kenney and Ford still play semantic games around the same terminology that the xenophobes use (such as the use of “illegals”), and it’s still a dog-whistle. And it can’t be any surprise that because of all the dog-whistling that the Soldiers of Odin have started posing with UCP candidates in Alberta while wearing their badges and vests. You can’t simply say “Oh, it’s unacceptable these people show up to our events” when you keep inviting them with the dog-whistle language. (There’s a lesson in here for Maxime Bernier as well).

Meanwhile, John Geddes went through that excerpt of Harper’s book and deconstructed his arguments and his analysis about populism, and his nonsense construction of “Somewheres” and “Anywheres.” Aside from the fact that it’s deeply ironic that Stephen Harper, strong friend of Israel, is using the same “rootles cosmopolitan” argument used in Soviet propaganda to vilify Jews, it’s just trading on baseless mythology and trying to build an argument around it that doesn’t actually hold any water. But it also goes back to what Ford, Kenney and others are pandering to – they’re denying that problems exist, and then undermining the institutions that can help solve them. Such as with the looming climate crisis. We need a wake-up call.

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Roundup: Not appealing, just consulting

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First thing yesterday morning, the federal government announced that they were proceeding with restarting consultations with First Nations affected by the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline, and that they had tasked former Supreme Court of Canada justice Franc Iacobucci to oversee the process. Iacobucci has done a great deal of work around the Duty to Consult in recent years, as this report that he wrote with law firm Torys LLP demonstrates, along with work he’s done with Ontario over the underrepresentation of Indigenous people on juries in the province. Indigenous groups in the region have responded with some optimism, but are also warning that these consultations can’t come with a predetermined outcome if they’re to be meaningful (which may be too far to go given that the government has stated that this project will go ahead). Some of those Indigenous communities are also looking at the fact that this process could allow them to talk more amongst themselves.

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Meanwhile, Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney (among others) are bellyaching that the government has opted not to appeal the Federal Court of Appeal decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, and yet not one of them has articulated what the error in law they are looking to contest would actually be, which is kind of a big deal if they think the Court will hear it. It’s also not clear that an appeal would get them any clarity anytime soon, given that the Court usually gives about six months between granting leave and hearing the case in order to provide time for submissions, and then a decision could take another six months at least – possibly more if it’s a contentious issue, like this one is.

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