Tag Archives: Danielle Smith

Roundup: Only premiers can make pharmacare happen

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The Star takes a deep dive into the notion of pharmacare as a nation-building project, instead of just thinking of mines, pipelines or other major infrastructure, and it’s an interesting piece to read. This being said, it once again ignores the problem of the premiers in the equation, which is starting to feel like a pattern for a newspaper that actually has the resources and the bench depth in their Queen’s Park bureau to actually take on this state of affairs. You can’t look at an issue that is almost entirely squarely within an area of provincial jurisdiction, whether that’s pharmacare or bail courts, and then ignore provincial culpability, and yet, this is what keeps happening in legacy media.

As for the pharmacare issue, yes, there are plenty of good arguments to be made for a universal single-payer system, and yes, the Liberals did spend years trying to build up this system on the back-end before the NDP made this a condition of their supply-and-confidence agreement, and put in the work of doing things like establishing the Canadian Drug Agency and getting an agreement with PEI off the ground for a full co-pay system (because they had no provincial drug plan), but that went entirely unrecognised as the NDP demanded a useless piece of legislation that tried to do things backwards, to legislate before an agreement had been made with provinces, and this is what the media kept their focus on, in particular because the NDP made such a dog-and-pony show about it, while at the same time, refusing to call out their provincial counterparts who actively resisted signing onto a federal pharmacare programme. Former BC premier John Horgan was particularly vociferously opposed, but did Jagmeet Singh, Don Davies or Peter Julian say a gods damned word about it? Nope.

Premiers have been allergic to this issue for decades now, because they don’t want to have to pay for one more thing, particularly as they are trying to starve the existing healthcare system in the hopes that they can privatise it to relieve themselves of the burden of paying for it. But nobody wants to hear that. They’d rather blame the federal government for supposedly under-funding (they don’t), or that they aren’t working hard enough to get a pharmacare deal with the provinces when the Trudeau government worked for years before NDP made their demands, and got an extremely limited agreement and called it a win. And premiers continue to be let off the hook.

effinbirds.com/post/7813695…

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-27T13:08:08.642Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian forces are reinforcing positions in Pokrovsk as some 200 Russian troops have infiltrated the city in small groups. A UN inquiry has found that Russians have been using drones to hound and hunt down civilians who live near the front lines.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1982823855799554100

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Roundup: Jivani’s tour for disaffected young men

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Something that has gone largely unnoticed has been Conservative MP Jamil Jivani’s campus tours, modelled after the late fascist Charlie Kirk’s campus tours that were deemed essential to youth outreach for Trump’s MAGA movement. There has been some acknowledgement that under Poilievre, the Conservatives have been attracting a lot of disaffected young men, but as Jivani’s little campus tour is showing, this is much more explicitly about disaffected young white men, who are tired of being confronted about the concept of toxic masculinity, who don’t think that they can speak freely, and who can’t find jobs.

If anything, there is some bitter irony in Jivani cultivating this particular demographic because he has been beating the anti-DEI drum that Poilievre has appropriated from the MAGA cult, but part of this tour is about getting these young white men to present themselves as the real victims. To suggest that they need special policies to address their needs is pretty hard to square with the whole cry about “merit” that is supposed to replace DEI. If they need special programs, then they are not able to get ahead by merit alone, no? Of course, we know that the real reason why they want to eliminate DEI is precisely because they can’t compete based on merit, so they want to return to a system that systemically discriminates against those who are deserving but can’t get a fair shake.

This of course gets to the real issue in play—that these rallies are attracting groups who are Diagolon-aligned, and whose talk about “remigration” is code for ethnic cleansing. Sure, Jivani can tell them that it’s “complicated,” but this is not a group that believes in nuance. The fact that Jivani can’t denounce that kind of rhetoric but instead tries to mollify it is an indictment about where the Conservative party is headed in this country. Someone remarked that this is no longer the party of Stephen Harper. Unfortunately, it’s becoming the party of Donald Trump, whether they want to believe it or not, and that’s a very terrifying prospect for where things could be headed in this country, because there is no “good parts only” version that they think they can achieve.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-23T21:27:02.365Z

Ukraine Dispatch

An attack on Kyiv overnight Wednesday wounded nine people. Two Ukrainian journalists were killed by a Russian drone in Kramatorsk, while an investigation has been launched into Russian soldiers killing five civilians in a village in the Donetsk region.

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Roundup: Dollarama Trumpism back on blast

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I regret to inform you that Pierre Poilieve is back on his MAGA-lite™ bullshit, and he’s going after DEI in order to “bring back merit.” It’s Dollarama Trumpism where they think that they can harness the “good parts only” energy of authoritarian populism without the overt racism—but they’re still going to wink to that racism. And it’s been pretty relentless, whether it’s deciding to target “DEI” or “wokeness,” the recent decision to go hard after immigration—sorry, “Liberal immigration policy” *wink*— or birthright citizenship. I’m not sure who they think they’re fooling, other than maybe that segment of the party’s base that Poilievre wants to keep on-side ahead of his leadership review.

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3m3bgx3sgek2d

The thing with insisting you want to focus on “merit” is that we have empirical proof that “merit” is only ever applied to straight white men who don’t have to fairly compete with women or minorities. They can’t get a fair shake because of ingrained prejudices, but if they get their positions entirely based on merit, they are dismissed as “DEI hires.” (It’s even more hilarious when women in the Conservative caucus insist that they got their positions due to merit, but any women in the Liberal Cabinet are just “DEI hires.”) All of this is entirely well-founded, but they have decided that they’d rather wink to racists and claim that they’re doing it to avoid “bloated bureaucracies” and “checkboxes” when it really just boils down to racism/misogyny/homophobia, every single time, but they insist on lying to themselves about it.

Hits harder than any legacy media outlet.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-10-15T14:37:40.489Z

Meanwhile, Poilievre is ramping up his “get out of the way” bullshit, and has his caucus not only repeat it to absurd lengths, but also try to force it into situations that don’t make any sense. For example, one Conservative MP was on Power & Politics and trying to insist that if government “got out of the way” that we would have spent the past decade building critical mineral mines and pipelines to tidewater and that would have given us leverage over Trump. And while David Cochrane pushed back on this, none of it makes any sense because you would think that American dependence on our oil/aluminium/steel/softwood lumber/electricity would already give us leverage, but that doesn’t actually matter with Trump. Nobody was in a rush to build pipelines to tidewater because the Americans were a captive market. We weren’t in a rush to build critical mineral mines because the market was being well-supplied by China, and nobody builds mines overnight. And frankly, putting aside the fact that these projects were in fact advancing, this notion that governments should just abandon all environmental regulation, property rights, or Indigenous rights and title for the sake of letting industry loose, so that they could line their own pockets while forcing the environmental and social devastation in their wake onto governments to take care of—at a time when CO2emissions are spiking because of wildfires—is frankly just incompetence and lunacy.

I mean, who cares about things like the environment, or property rights, or the rights of Indigenous people whose land these projects are on? We should just let it all burn and watch the dollars flow in (to the pockets of a few select rich people).

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-10-16T02:31:38.710Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian attacks hit power infrastructure in seven regions across Ukraine. Russian drones are getting more precise, and are increasingly targeting Ukraine’s rail infrastructure.

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Roundup: A last-minute trip sans journalists

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Prime minister Mark Carney took a last-minute trip to Egypt over the weekend to attend the Middle East peace summit, where he did things like praise the release of hostages, and commend the “leadership” of Trump in reaching this moment (which ignores a whole lot of what has happened up until this point). But a lot of things about this trip were unusual. For one, he ended up chartering a private plan because no military aircraft were available on short notice, which is odd in and of itself (and I can’t wait for the pearl-clutching when the Access to Information request is released about the costs of said charter). For another, he did not alert the media to the trip until he was taking off, and no accredited journalists accompanied him on the trip.

Statement from the president of the Parliamentary Press Gallery:

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-10-14T23:14:12.452Z

This is a very big warning sign about how Carney is treating the office, and his obligations to transparency. Perhaps more egregiously was the fact that the PMO comms team spent the long weekend emailing journalists and pointing them to links to his posts on Twitter, as though that was some kind of substitute. It’s not. Social media posts are carefully curated and present a very stage-managed view of the world, which is not a substitute for journalism. In fact, it’s usually a form of propaganda, because it delivers a carefully crafted message in a way that is intended to influence the voting public in a certain way.

To be clear, Carney is not the first prime minister who has tried to limit media access in favour of his in-house photographers and media team, and these photographers and videographers are given privileged access to both document history, and set up carefully curated narratives. And yes, the press is going to complain about it because it’s our job to present a wider view than what the PMO wants us to see, and the public expects more transparency, which has been in retreat under Carney’s leadership because he still thinks that this is like being a CEO where you don’t say much because it might affect your stock price. That’s not how you behave in the top political office of the country, and he needs to get that message.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian glide bombs hit a hospital in Kharkiv in the early morning hours of Tuesday, while attacks on the energy grid continued. A UN humanitarian convoy in southern Ukraine was also hit by Russian drones. Ukrainian authorities have ordered the evacuation of dozens of villages near the city of Kupiansk given the deteriorating security situation, while Russia claims they took control of another village in Donetsk region. President Zelenskyy says that Ukrainian troops have advanced in their counter-offensive in the Zaporizhzhia region.

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Roundup: Cold water on that fantasy pipeline

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Ever since Alberta premier Danielle Smith started her latest scheme of trying to get the ball rolling on a bitumen pipeline to the northwest coast of BC, everyone has been trying to get some kind of answer as to whether this project—which has no actual proponents, no route, and no hint of buyer contracts—is going to get some kind of fast-track approval. Of course, that’s the kind of thing that the government’s Major Projects Office push has engendered by its very existence, because Smith and the Conservatives federally have been ratcheting up their rhetoric to stake the future of the country on this imaginary project.

At a committee appearance, Major Projects Office CEO Dawn Farrell didn’t answer MPs questions as to whether her powers include being able to violate the BC tanker ban, which would be essential for such a project to happen. But of course, this response was because there is no project, no route, nothing to judge any hypotheticals on, so the safest course is not to answer, because hypotheticals have a way of spinning out of control. And such a question may not wind up mattering at all, because natural resources minister Tim Hodgson came out to say that any pipeline through BC needs approval of the provincial government and affected First Nations. So good luck with that.

So now we will start seeing the fallout from this, with more threats from Danielle Smith, and howling denunciations from the Conservatives. Apparently, the country can’t work so long as we have things like environmental laws, and who cares that oil production increased while emissions as a whole declined (though not necessarily within the sector), so it’s not like those laws were exactly detrimental to the sector. “Oh, but we could have been making even more money!” Really? Would pumping more supply into the market not have possibly depressed prices? There is no guarantee that just trashing our environmental laws would increase investment and make us more prosperous, because things are complex, and climate change has costs. We need to start talking about that fact.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-09T14:05:25.084Z

Programming Note: I’m going to take the full long weekend off, so have a great Thanksgiving everyone.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian attack on Kyiv hit an apartment building and targeted energy sites. Here is a look at the use of saboteurs in the war, both in Russia recruiting them in Ukraine, and Ukraine employing them within Russia. President Zelenskyy is taking credit of the gas shortages in Russia, thanks to new missile and drone strikes against Russian energy facilities. That could be one reason why the Russian war economy has stalled, forcing producers to furlough staff.

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Roundup: Empty-handed at the White House

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After all of the build-up, the managed expectations, and all of the blustery accusations in Ottawa that prime minister Mark Carney is an inept negotiator, he came away from his “working lunch” at the White House with pretty much nothing. Carney gave Trump his usual quasi-flattering/quasi-shady “transformational president” line (because once Carney has a line he likes, he sticks with it), and he laughed off another annexation “joke” from Trump, and Trump rambled some nonsense about competing in the same ecosystem for cars, but that was about it.

Carney later on had dinner with couch-fucker vice president JD Vance, while Dominic LeBlanc was sent out to deal with the press, and said pretty much nothing other than the fact that they’re going to negotiate further and hoping for some “quick deals” on a few specific issues, which we’ve heard so many times now, and capitulated on so many particular issues that it just feels all the more meaningless. And it is meaningless, because everyone knows that there is no deal to be had because Trump will not live up to any “agreement” he signs. So naturally, the auto sector is concerned that they’re going to be thrown under the bus because Trump refuses to give up the notion that Canada stole auto production from the US, in spite of facts and evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, we’re in for another round of QP where the Conservatives denounce Carney as the incompetent negotiator when Trump is not a rational actor who can be negotiated with, because why unite against a common enemy when you could be scoring Internet points?

There wasn’t much in the way of pundit reaction so far, but Shannon Proudfoot points out that Keir Starmer figured out the key to flattering Trump before everyone else did, and how it reflected in Carney’s meeting. Althia Raj correctly calls this a cringe-worthy performance on both sides, which accomplished nothing.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-07T14:08:04.476Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Putin claims that Russia has seized 5000 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory this year, and that they retain the strategic initiative; Ukraine says they have failed to seize any major settlements and that their initiative is stalled.

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Roundup: Managing the expectations from Washington

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Monday was a weird day of expectations management as prime minister Mark Carney headed to Washington for a “working lunch” with Trump to happen today. There were murmurs from Senior Government Sources™ that there could be some kind of relief for some—but not all—of the steel and aluminium tariffs, but those were heavily caveated and is not going to be any kind of comprehensive tariff deal, because Trump loves his tariffs. (And there is no deal to be had). Oh, and while all of this expectations management was going on, Trump declared new 25 percent tariffs on medium and heavy-duty trucks. Because of course.

Amidst this, Pierre Poilievre released a peevish open-letter to Carney that demanded “no more losing” when it comes to dealing with Trump, and a list of things he wants “wins” on, whether it’s tariffs or softwood lumber, or what have you. Because remember, under this framing, Trump is the rational actor and Carney is the one who is the inept negotiator who simply can’t get anything done. Reality of course, is entirely the opposite, that you can’t really negotiate with Trump because he has no logical basis or consistency for his “deals,” and anything he agrees to isn’t worth the paper its written on (if it’s even written down, as some “deals” were nothing more than blank pages with a signature on it).

To that end, Andrew Scheer went on Power & Politics looking to pick a fight with David Cochrane about this, and when Cochrane pointed out that yes indeed, Trump’s tariffs are both affecting our economy and we still do have the best deal of anyone with Trump, that Scheer twisted this into “agreeing” that Carney’s ineptitude has cratered the economy and soured any deal with Trump, because Scheer is a liar and a braying doofus. But this is what everyone has to deal with when it comes to the level of rhetoric and sheer sophistry coming from the Conservatives these days, which is not exactly conducive to informed debate.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-06T22:08:02.378Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine’s forces say that Russian sabotage groups are active in the city of Pokrovsk, which Russians have been trying to capture for months. Ukraine’s long-range drones have struck a Russian ammunition plant, a key oil terminal, and an important weapons depot.

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Roundup: Forcing a pipeline project

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Believing herself clever, Alberta premier Danielle Smith is trying to lay a trap for prime minister Mark Carney, but it’s a really obvious trap and Admiral Ackbar can see it from a mile off. Because she is apparently now a socialist, Smith has decided that the provincial government will take the lead on proposing a pipeline to the northern coast of BC, with the “advice” of three pipeline companies, but none of them will actually be the proponent as this goes to the Major Projects Office. Smith claims that she is trying to get around the “chicken and egg” problem of not having any interested proponents in such a pipeline, and hopes that she can get it off the ground so that a private company will take it over, but remember that it’s not 2014, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of market demand. (Oh, and she wants to use digital asbestos to help map the route, which is even more hilariously sad).

This is very much a dare to everyone to oppose her. BC premier David Eby has called this out as a stunt because it’s not a real project, with no real proponent, and no buyers lining up for any of the product. The Indigenous rights and title-holders in the area are not interested in the project, and are opposed to a bitumen pipeline going through their territory and off their coast, because this would also require lifting the tanker ban because Smith wants to ship bitumen through it, which is a “persistent” product unlike LNG. Carney has previously said that if the province and First Nations are opposed to the project, it won’t go ahead, but he has also given himself the power to override pretty much any objection, or the tanker ban, or any of it, if he really wants to. But a refusal is largely what Smith is counting on, so that she can once again play the victim, and blame the federal government for a lack of market interest.

In a sense, the province wasting millions of dollars on this for the sake of grievance theatre is not new. Jason Kenney sunk $1.3 billion into the dead Keystone XL project in an attempt to revive American interest in it, even going so far as to proposed to fund its construction if the proponent wouldn’t to try and challenge the Biden veto. This feels like more of the same, where she is sinking money she doesn’t have into a losing prospect in an empty gesture in order to secure her political future by playacting as the great defender of Alberta and its ossifying industry. But there are going to be epic tantrums, and she’s going to try and use the threat of separatism to try and get her way (because she thinks it worked for Quebec and doesn’t understand how much it devastated the economy in that province), and we’ll see if Carney is actually prepared to handle it, because so far, he’s telling a lot of people what they want to hear, and those messages are starting to collide.

Ukraine Dispatch

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is now going the longest it’s been without external power for cooling reactors, increasing concern. This after Russia also attacked the area near Chornobyl, which also briefly cut its external power supply.

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Roundup: Lost jobs and falsely attributed blame

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The news out of Calgary yesterday was that Imperial Oil plans to reduce their workforce by about 20 percent—some 900 jobs, mostly out of Calgary—by the end of 2027, in order to realise “substantial efficiency and effectiveness benefits.” The kicker, however, is that they’re not planning to cut production, or reduce their footprint, or anything like that­—they are, in fact, making themselves more productive, and that means cutting staff.

Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the oil and gas sector knows that they have been automating and cutting their workforce for years, which is why I have always thought it foolish to count on them to create jobs.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-09-30T15:30:28.106Z

Of course, people like Danielle Smith have managed to blame the federal Liberals for those losses than the industry, which doesn't help those angry Albertans whose promise of giant paycheques in oil jobs forever won't be realized, but boy have they stoked federal tensions.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-09-30T15:30:28.107Z

Right on cue:

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-09-30T15:41:47.811Z

The thing to remember here, however, is that it doesn’t matter what is actually happening, or that this has been happening in the industry since the price crash in 2014, but that everyone is going to blame the federal Liberals for these job losses. And you can bet that that blame was happening over social media, entirely falsely, because if they had planned to cut production or their footprint, then maybe you could blame it on the emissions cap, or whatnot. But that’s not what’s happening. The problem becomes what to do about the hopes and dreams of all of those straight white guys with high school diplomas who were counting on being able to make a large six-figure salary doing minimal work in the oil sands, but that dream is fast escaping because the industry has changed. But because they are angry that said dream is slipping away, they are looking for someone to blame, and they don’t want to blame the industry for increasing its productivity, so they will try and pin this on the Liberals. Because of course they will.

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1961437440595693741

The thing about oilsands companies is that over the past decade they have focused on cutting as many jobs as possible in the name of efficiency while paying as little as possible for the pollution they cause.

— Catherine McKenna (@cathmckenna.bsky.social) 2025-09-30T23:53:16.532Z

Of course, the federal government is expressing their concern about this, because they decided to put a whole lot of eggs in this basket in spite of the fact that it’s not 2014, and it won’t be 2014 again, and that no matter how much they gut the country’s environmental regulations by stealth, it won’t make the oil and gas sector come back, or make it the economic driver that it used to be. But I’m not sure that most of them are capable of grasping this fact, and that’s a problem, because we do need an economic transformation and that shouldn’t mean doubling down on the fossil fuel industry.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian guided aerial bomb attack hit Kharkiv overnight, injuring at least six. This after a daytime attack on Dnipro that killed one and injured at least twenty, and a previous overnight attack on a village in Sumy region that killed four. Ukraine has sent a mission to Denmark to train European militaries on how to combat drones. Princess Anne made a secret visit to Ukraine in support of children affected by the war. (Still the best royal).

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Roundup: Giving credence to Poilievre’s trolling

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In spite of it being an exhaustingly packed news week, The Canadian Press took time out to get some reaction to Pierre Poilievre’s trolling tweets about prime minister Mark Carney’s many international trips of late. Yes, it’s summit season right now and there is a lot more travel coming up, but he has made a number of trips since he was appointed PM, and we have to ensure that it’s not “excessive” or something. Never mind that we’re in a moment of global crisis as the United States has turned into an authoritarian regime that is upending the post-war international order and tacitly siding with other authoritarian regimes, and this requires a global realignment of liberal democracies, but is he travelling too much? Guys.

The one thing that irked me the most in the story was the point about Carney having only attended three Question Periods since Parliament resumed last week, and only nine in the four-week spring session. There was no context to this, which is that it means once or twice per week, which is perfectly normal for any sitting prime minister. Once or twice a week was all Stephen Harper could deign to attend. Justin Trudeau started out with three a week, but then fell back to two on most weeks, but sometimes was just once. The difference of course was that Trudeau made it his practice to answer every question on Wednesdays, which no previous PM had done, and which Carney has not kept up (possibly because he may not have stamina enough to pat himself on the back for a full forty-five minute). In other words, Carney’s QP attendance is fully within the norm, and you would think that the national wire service could point this out, but that might mean that they would have to have someone with enough institutional knowledge and memory to know this, but pretty much every bureau on the Hill no longer has either. (As a reminder, I am the only journalist who goes to QP every day, because someone has to).

This being said, I think we need to once again have a discussion about the kind of insular nativism that Poilievre is stoking by making it sound like foreign travel by the prime minister is somehow illegitimate, or that every trip must come with some kind of signed agreement (even though we may already have signed agreements with countries like Mexico, and forging stronger ties is important beyond just a signed piece of paper). Trying to create this false expectation that the PM can’t go anywhere so long as there is “crime and chaos” at home is juvenile and frankly troubling, because it means that they have absolutely no idea how the real world works, and are playing with fire, especially if they ever want to form government one day.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-09-26T13:24:02.797Z

Ukraine Dispatch

The front line in the conflict has grown to nearly 1250 km in length, as Russian forces have shifted tactics to try and make breakthroughs. That said, both president Zelenskyy and his top military commander say that Russia’s 2025 offensive has failed to meet their goals, and suffered heavy losses in the process. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s assessment of the drone incursions into NATO airspace is that Russia is trying to stoke fatigue in Ukraine’s allies in the hopes of drawing down military support.

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