Tag Archives: CSIS

Roundup: False narratives about the Q2 GDP

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The figures for second quarter GDP were released yesterday, and they weren’t as good as had been expected. There was a surprise contraction of 1.1% annualized, which caught economists off-guard (and perhaps Statistics Canada as well, as their flash estimate a month previous had still shown growth). The majority of these declines were in the months of April and May because of the third wave, as June had shown robust growth in nearly all sectors as economies around the country re-opened – and those declines were largely in the areas of home resales and exports. To an extent, the home resales was a bit of a correction – after giant increases in previous quarters, most especially Q3 of 2020, the market slowed down.

For Erin O’Toole and Pierre Poilievre, however, these figures were a cataclysmic sign that Trudeau can’t “manage” the economy, and that it’s deficits that are leading to inflation, which is insane. A lot of the weakness is attributable to the Third Wave and its associated lockdowns, and that is squarely the fault of premiers who opened up too soon, reduced restrictions too fast, and then were too slow to re-impose them (and we’re going to get more of that in the oncoming fourth wave). More than anything, it’s reflective that O’Toole and Poilievre aren’t even bothering to read the data beyond the headlines, and are slotting it into pre-arranged talking points which are so divorced from reality that it should be concerning to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. The fact that Poilievre is goading the Bank of Canada over Twitter is a Very Bad Thing. He’s continuing to politicise them, and feeding into a bunch of poisonous populist narratives, and O’Toole is joining him for the ride. This is a very bad thing for our economy, and it doesn’t matter that they’re doing it all for show and that they probably will keep things status quo should they form government – the fact that they are polarising the debate and riling up these same toxic mobs that have been following Trudeau’s campaign around is absolutely a problem. This kind of rhetoric should be disqualifying for anyone who seeks higher office in this country.

Meanwhile, as you may have heard, Erin O’Toole reiterated his promise to balance the budget without making any cuts (in spite of promising earlier to cut things like the CBC) because he’s going to grow the economy enough. Why does that sound familiar?

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1432799152266694657

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Roundup: Just the Speaker doing his job

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We got our first glimpse at the court documents related to the challenge of the House of Commons’ order demanding the production of secret documents related to the firing of the two scientists from the National Microbiology Lab. The Speaker, Anthony Rota, put in his submission that the case should be tossed because of Parliamentary privilege, and there was no explicit waiving of parliamentary privilege under the Canada Evidence Act, which is what the Public Health Agency is following in refusing to turn over unsecured documents. As a reminder, they have turned over the documents, both in redacted form to the committee that requested them, and in unredacted form to NSICOP, which has appropriate security clearances and safeguards, so it’s not like this is a blanket refusal to defy Parliament – it’s that they have their own obligations to follow. It’s also somewhat problematic that the committee wants the Commons’ Law Clerk to then redact the documents on his own, without appropriate training or context, so they ultimately claim they’re not looking for unredacted documents – only for someone else to do the redacting, at which point this is just becoming absurd.

The way this is being spun is also somewhat irritating – because this was a Canadian Press wire story, outlets who ran the piece sometimes did so with altered headlines that stated that it was the Liberals interfering with the “exclusive jurisdiction” of the Commons rather than the government, which is not really true. This isn’t a partisan issue – it’s different parts of the government acting according to the laws that Parliament passed. When the demands were made, PHAC was bound in legislation to inform the Attorney General, and while it is the same physical person as the minister of justice, under his Attorney General hat, he had obligations to follow the law and test these demands in Court.

The other commentary that is somewhat maddening is people pointing out that the Speaker is somehow going against his party in doing his job as Speaker in defending the Commons’ privileges. Again, this isn’t actually a partisan issue on either side (well, the Conservatives making these demands for the documents, with the support of the other opposition parties, are behaving in an extremely partisan manner and trying to embarrass the government, but that’s neither here nor there for the purpose of what we’re discussing). Trying to make it a partisan issue when everyone is doing their jobs is just degrading the discourse and muddying the understanding of what is going on (which is what certain parties would like to happen because it makes it easier for them to lie about the state of play). We shouldn’t be doing their dirty work for them.

Programming Note: I’m taking the next week off (as much as I am able), because it’s probably my only opportunity in advance of the possible election, and I really don’t want to have to deal with election coverage while battling burnout. Take care, and I’ll see you on the far side of the long weekend.

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Roundup: Kenney announces his next big distraction

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By now you’ve heard that Jason Kenney has announced the referendum questions that Alberta will be voting on in October as part of Kenney’s mass distraction plans. It’s unheard of to have multiple referendum questions – in this case, daylight savings and removing equalisation from the Constitution – on top of an unconstitutional sideshow of Senate “nominee elections,” and yet Kenney is putting these all together with the upcoming municipal elections. This has the bonus for Kenney of muddying the waters of those elections, where more progressive candidates tend to do better, particularly in the cities, and he gets to claim that he saves money by holding them at the same time, but this is a lie. Municipal elections are run by the municipalities themselves, while these referenda and bogus “nominee elections” are held by Elections Alberta, and just because they happen at the same time and can co-locate spaces doesn’t change the fact that it going to cost more.

The thing is, the referendum on equalization won’t actually do anything because even if they sent a message to the rest of Canada and brought everyone to the table to negotiate, the only thing that’s in the Constitution is the principle of equalization – the formula itself is federal legislation, because the programme is paid out of federal general revenues. But Kenney is content to keep lying to the public and pretending that Alberta signs a cheque every year that Quebec cashes and pays for its child care system with (which it doesn’t – they pay for that out of their own taxes, and they reap the direct economic benefits from it as well). As well, the myth that Quebec killed Energy East is being invoked (Quebec had nothing to do with it – the proponent couldn’t fill both Energy East and Keystone XL with their contracts, so Energy East was abandoned as Keystone XL looked like the more likely to reach completion – not to mention that it wouldn’t have actually served the Eastern Canadian market), which is again about stoking a faux sense of grievance. The fact that Kenney is stoking this anti-Quebec sentiment because he thinks it’ll win him points (and hopefully distract the angry mob that is gathering outside his own door) is not lost on Quebeckers when it comes to Kenney’s good friend, Erin O’Toole, looking for votes in the federal election.

But as economist Trevor Tombe keeps saying, Alberta doesn’t need equalization in the same way that Bill Gates doesn’t need social assistance – Alberta is still making way more money than any other province, even with their harder times economically. The province’s deficit is not a result of equalization or money supposedly being siphoned east (again, equalization comes out of federal taxes) – it’s a result of a province that refuses to implement sales taxes or other stable revenue generation, and expecting everyone else to subsidize that choice (while also cutting corporate taxes under the illusion that it would create jobs, but didn’t). This is just Kenney handwaving and shouting “look over there!” because he knows he’s in trouble, and he needs to keep everyone focused on a different enemy. He shouldn’t be rewarded by people falling for it.

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Roundup: Ford’s eagerness to please

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The Star had a very interesting, if very infuriating, longread out yesterday, which charted the ways in which Conservative-affiliated lobbyists impacted on the decisions that Doug Ford made over the course of the pandemic – the laundry list of exemptions that kept growing by the day, the fact that the long-term care industry has insulated itself from any and all accountability and is getting their licenses renewed as if the deaths of thousands of seniors aren’t on their hands, the illogical restrictions for small retail but not box store, right up to the illogical closure of playgrounds.

The piece was illuminating not because of the look at lobbying – all of which is legal, above-board, and not the same as we’d understand from an American context of the cartoonish Hollywood portrayals – but rather because of what it shows us about Ford himself. He’s someone out of his depth – his sole experience was a single term as a junior city councillor while he brother was mayor – who was not only struggling to understand his job, but who also has a pathological need to be liked, and to be seen to be doing favours for people he knows. People like these former Conservative staffers and operatives who are now in lobbying firms. It less that these lobbyists are cozy with the provincial Progressive Conservatives – it’s that Ford wants to please them and do them favours because he knows them. That’s why the pandemic in this province turned into such a clusterfuck – because Ford needed to please the people he felt close to.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1415672572574715909

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Roundup: A dubious plan for the next pandemic

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Erin O’Toole unveiled his party’s pandemic preparedness plan yesterday, and it was very curious indeed. His framing was a lot of revisionist history about border closures, and some outright fabrications about supposed contracts that went to people with close connections to the Liberals, which has not been shown anywhere other than the fevered imaginations of what happened around the WE contract, and the bullshit story they concocted around Baylis Medical. More than this, however, a number of things that O’Toole was critical of were things that dated back to the Conservatives’ watch – including changes to the management structure of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The fact that O’Toole is saying he would essentially undo changes the government he was a part of made – without acknowledging that they made the detrimental changes in the first place – is quite something. The fact that they’re going on about the pandemic stockpile without acknowledging that its management failed under their watch, going back to at least 2010 – and we have an Auditor General’s Report that confirms this – is not unsurprising. Other aspects seem to be dubious at best, such as doing something about pharmaceutical patents and doing away with PMPRB (Patented Medicines Price Review Board) regulations in order to appease these companies in the hopes that they will do more research and manufacturing here seems both unwise at best, and will mean higher drug prices for Canadians going forward.

There were some other things buried in there, not the least of which were contradictions around raising tariffs on PPE in order to ensure they are manufactured domestically, while also trying to “secure the North American supply chain” to reduce reliance on imports – but imports from the US and Mexico are still imports. There were also a number of jabs at China in the document, some of which will limit our ability to have international cooperation around research of emerging viruses, and he managed to wedge in the current drama around the National Microbiology Lab firings into his piece as well. The problem of course is that a lot of this sounds like it makes sense on the surface, but the moment you start reading their backgrounder (which doesn’t appear to be online – just emailed to reporters) and scratching beneath the surface, the more apparent it is that a lot of this is hot-air, blame-shifting, and disingenuous rhetoric masquerading as a plan.

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Roundup: Ambrose’s bill becomes law

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Bill C-3 passed the Senate yesterday and received royal assent. Many of you will know this as Rona Ambrose’s bill to mandate sexual assault training by judges, and it’s been a weird little ride through the parliamentary process, starting with Ambrose’s original bill in the previous parliament, dying on the Order Paper at the election, and the current government resurrecting it in principle, but not the same bill. Why? Because the original bill was blatantly unconstitutional in how it infringed on judicial independence, and was entirely unworkable in terms of how lawyers who wanted to apply to be judges needed to conduct themselves.

In order to make the bill palatable, it had to be rewritten as a hollow shell – essentially a suggestion for future judges, because anything else would be untenable. So we now have a useless but symbolic bill on the books that will do very little to solve the problem that Ambrose perceived, but instead will have new unintended consequences – namely, as former Supreme Court of Canada Executive Legal Officer Gib van Ert outlines here, that it has opened the door to new bills demanding that judges take training on any other area of law or policy that is the flavour of the day, and while they may be important in and of themselves, it is corrosive to judicial independence because it portrays them as being beholden to the whims of the government of the day rather than maintaining a distance and independence from that government’s wishes.

The more concerning aspect of this bill’s particular path however was just how uncritically it was treated by media outlets around the country. Ambrose would appear on the political talk shows every few months to complain that it was being held up by the “old boys’ club,” and not once did anyone mention the list of valid and legitimate complaints and concerns about the bill, in particular its dubious constitutionality. Not once. The first time it happened, I timed myself in that it took me twenty minutes to review Senate testimony at second reading to compile the list of problems that were raised. Twenty minutes of homework, and not one report or producer of a political show bothered to put in the work, and they simply let Ambrose talk about her bill uncritically, and unchallenged. Not one. It’s kind of alarming that something as important as judicial independence was quite literally ignored by every major outlet in the country, because they wanted to promote a feel-good bill about sexual assault training. That’s pretty concerning.

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Roundup: Ending the defence committee study

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Something unexpected happened yesterday, in that the Defence committee voted to end the study on the allegations against General Jonathan Vance – the Liberals moving the motion, and the Bloc supporting it (which was the real surprise). Of course, ending the study comes with a number of different narratives. For the Conservatives and the NDP, this is all about the government trying to “cover up” what happened, because they won’t allow staffers to testify – nor should they. The concept of ministerial responsibility is inviolable in our constitutional framework, and the government should be fighting to maintain it, and yes, they have put the minister forward in this case several times, so that does matter. For the Liberals’ decision to move to end the study, it’s also at the request of some victims’ groups, who have stated that every past government is at fault, and that the committee is simply using the victims in order to score partisan points – and they are 100 percent correct in that assertion.

I do find it disturbing, however, that in most of the reporting on what has gone on, media have followed the opposition narrative that staffers are being “blocked” from appearing, and that the only time that ministerial responsibility is mentioned, it’s in quotes and being both-sidesed in terms of the government’s response. This is a real problem because it is undermining this fundamental principle in our democracy. This is something that should be explained, including why it’s wholly improper for the opposition to be demanding that this important principle be violated, and why when the Conservatives were in government, they repeatedly invoked the same principle as well to keep their staffers away from committee. Constitutional principles matter – they’re not just to be dismissed as a “process story” as so many journalists and editors are wont to do in this city, and it cheapens the discourse when this context is being left out of the stories, and when the government’s correct position is being spun as being improper.

Of course, if the government is going to claim ministerial responsibility, that doesn’t just mean Sajjan has to show up (which, to his credit, he did for six hours) – Sajjan has to actually take responsibility as well, and he hasn’t. And more to the point, Sajjan should fall on his sword for this, because he did drop the ball. He remained way too incurious about the allegations and whether an investigation was being carried out – which is not the same as involving himself in the investigation or meddling in it. It’s basic due diligence for someone who is responsible to Parliament for the armed forces and its leadership, and he failed in that due diligence. Sajjan has no choice but to resign over this, and it will be a giant sign that Justin Trudeau is not taking this seriously if he doesn’t insist on a resignation in short order.

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Roundup: Stay-at-home again, complete with feigned surprise

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Ontario is now back under a “stay-at-home” order, issued its third state of emergency, and lo, there has been movement on vaccinations in that they are now going to start targeting high-risk neighbourhoods and essential workers, like they should have started weeks ago, so that’s positive. Oh, but still no paid sick leave because Ford and company continue to mislead people by claiming the federal sickness benefit is the same thing, which it absolutely is not. What most assuredly is not positive is the fact that the provincial government knew this was coming. They have been warned for weeks that this was going to happen, and they were explicitly told that loosening restrictions in the face of the new variants would be a disaster. There was that press conference on February 11th that said just that – and they didn’t listen, and now they have the gall to pretend to be surprised that the numbers are exceeding their worst-case scenarios? Sorry, but no. Get out of here with that bullshit.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1379884476054966272

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1379962777566085120

And here’s Supriya Dwivedi which lays out why Ford has completely ballsed this up and created this Third Wave and all of the illnesses and resulting deaths as a result.

Meanwhile, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization has decided to stick with their advice that second doses can be delayed for up to four months – and the “up to” is key – but given increasing vaccine supplies, that interval is likely to be less. And the reason why they’re saying this is because they are looking at the balance of ensuring that as many people get a first dose as soon as possible in order to have at least some level of protection. The problem is that this isn’t being effectively communicated by most media outlets (the Star piece linked here is actually doing a decent job) and even on Power & Politics last night, after the head of NACI patiently explained all of this, Vassy Kapelos still characterised it as NACI recommending a four-month delay, omitting the “up to” and creating a false impression of the advice, and it makes it easy for certain parties like the Conservatives to deliberately misconstrue NACI’s advice for partisan point-scoring. I do not understand what CBC thinks they are doing by reporting this way. It defies sense.

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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: Procedural shenanigans in a pandemic

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The state of the government’s legislative agenda remains mired in procedural shenanigans, and the Conservatives are largely to blame. Of course, this is being framed as giving the Liberals ammunition for calling an election to try and win a majority so that they can regain control over their agenda, despite the fact that nobody aside from a few bored pundits actually wants to go to an election in the middle of a global pandemic, especially because we won’t be getting enough people vaccinated until at least summer before this could even be a remotely plausible scenario.

The government has been trying to pass two bills in short order – the latest pandemic support bill, and the assisted dying bill, for which they needed to get yet another extension to the court-imposed deadline because the Conservatives keep denying consent to extend debate on it. The procedural tactics tend to be forcing concurrence debates on committee reports, and because the opposition has enough votes to force them through, the actual orders of the day – mostly government bills – don’t wind up being debated after all. Of course, what has been especially precious is the way that the NDP have been using Question Period to complain that the government isn’t bringing bills up for debate (including the conversion therapy ban bill and the UNDRIP bill), even though they are actively participating in these concurrence debates, and voting with the Conservatives to have the debates. (The NDP also wasted an hour of the Commons’ time the other day when Don Davies complained he couldn’t re-ask his question from QP after his video cut out, never mind that the audio was fine, he was heard, and the question got a response. But he wanted the video so that it could be clipped for his social media, which is what QP had degenerated to).

I find myself particularly bemused by the Conservative House Leader – backed up by the Bloc’s – to claim that the government hasn’t set “clear priorities” and is failing to manage the legislative agenda. This is pretty ridiculous, because they know full well why those two bills are being prioritised, and in the case of the assisted dying bill, the Liberals have several times offered to move a motion that would allow the Commons to sit until midnight and debate the bill uninterrupted, but the Conservatives keep refusing consent for such a motion. And for as much as both the Conservatives and NDP keep saying that it’s the Liberals that want an election and that they don’t want to give it to them, it’s curious how they keep trying to engineer the opportunities for such a call. The fact that this level of gamesmanship is going on while we’re still in the midst of a pandemic just breeds cynicism, but seems tactically stupid if the government can demonstrate that their ability to get help to people (as with the pandemic support bill) keeps getting stymied by these kinds of shenanigans. But most of our parties these days are all tactics and no strategy, so that’s not a surprise in the end.

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