Tag Archives: Doug Ford

Roundup: Refusing to enforce quarantine orders

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There were a couple of notes around the border and quarantines yesterday that I thought bear some additional note, particularly in light of the rhetoric we’re hearing. The first is that it looks like as many of a third of air travellers are able to avoid hotel quarantine and the Public Health Agency of Canada won’t provide a breakdown of figures as to why. There is a fairly obvious answer to this, which is that as part of the hotel quarantine programme, the government also allowed for a metre-long list of exemptions that are applicable to these travellers, because remember that there is ostensibly very little non-essential travel happening right now – I heard a figure that travel volumes are about five percent of what they were pre-COVID. Given how many of these hotel quarantine exemptions have to do with certain essential travel reasons, it should not be a surprise that as many as a third of these travellers are able to bypass that system. The fact that there are as many exemptions as there are should be up for debate, however, because it does undermine the whole point of quarantine, but it’s hard to have that discussion when every time you turn around, someone else is demanding another exemption – and it really doesn’t help when the party in the Commons howling that the border is too lax is at the very same time trying to get an exemption for returning snowbirds.

And then there is the question of enforcing the Quarantine Act, and we find that Alberta hasn’t signed onto the Contraventions Act, which makes it easy for their police to do the enforcement, and to issue fines for those who break it. (Saskatchewan also hasn’t signed onto the Act, but there are no airports currently open to international travel in that province). And this is completely baffling, because you would think that the provincial government would want to empower their peace officers to do the enforcement work if they are so concerned about variants coming in over the borders that they would want to ensure that they are actually enforcing quarantine orders in the province, but apparently not. This makes it all the more difficult to swallow Jason Kenney’s insistence that the federal government hasn’t done enough about the border – they have clamped down as much as they are really able to under the constitution, and they have empowered the provinces to enforce quarantines, but oh, Alberta refuses to take responsibility for doing so, while they complain.

I will also note that the fact that Ontario has signed onto the Contraventions Act means that their own complaints about quarantines and lax borders are all the more hollow. They have all the tools they need to enforce the orders, and they are also largely refusing and blaming the federal government. And worse, nobody is holding them to account for their failures to exercise their own powers in their own areas of jurisdiction to do so – especially not the media. This is a problem, but hey, keep writing stories about “finger-pointing.” That’ll help.

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Roundup: Accusing your opponents of encouraging mass deaths

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My patience for the current round of blame-shifting in the handling of this pandemic has pretty much reached its breaking point, and Alberta’s justice minister has crossed a line. Recall that a week ago, NDP MP Heather McPherson accused the prime minister of rather watching Alberta burn than help Jason Kenney – a statement that borders on psychotic and ignores the billions of dollars in federal aid that has been extended that Kenney has either sat on or declined. Of course, McPherson, like her leader Jagmeet Singh, seems to think that the federal government should be invoking the Emergencies Act and swooping in to take over the province, which is nothing more than a recipe for a constitutional crisis the likes we have never seen in this country. (Can you imagine the reaction in the province if Trudeau did this?)

Well, yesterday Alberta’s justice minister declared that the provincial NDP opposition, the federal government, and the media, were all cheering on a COVID disaster in the province, which is absolutely boggling. To think that your opponents literally wish death upon Albertans is some brain worm-level thinking, and yet here we are – and no, the minister would not apologise, citing that his opponents were trying to exploit the pandemic for political purposes. This is nothing short of insane, and yet this kind of thinking is clearly rearing its head as the provincial government flails, under attack by all sides, and frankly, reaping the unhinged anger that it has been sowing for years and thinking they were too clever to get caught by.

But in the midst of this, there was a column in Maclean’s yesterday which declared that it was “partisans” that were the cause of this blame-shifting, and then proceeded to pathologically both-sides the issues until my head very nearly exploded. It’s not “partisans” – it’s political actors who are to blame, and trying to pin this solely on people who vote for them is ridiculous. I will say that a chunk of the blame does rest on media, for whom they downplay actual questions of jurisdiction as “squabbling” and “finger-pointing,” thus allowing premiers in particular to get away with the blame-shifting and hand-waving away their responsibilities, and it’s allowed this obsessive fantasy about invoking the Emergencies Act to keep playing itself out – especially because most of these media outlets have been cheerleading such a declaration (so that they can fulfil the goal of comparing this to Trudeau’s father invoking the War Measures Act during the October Crisis). If media did a better job of actually holding the premiers to account rather than encouraging their narratives that everything can be pinned on the federal government (for whom they have some of their own issues they should be better held to account for), there may have been actual pressure on some of them to shape up long before now, and yet that doesn’t happen. Absolutely nobody has covered themselves in glory here, and it’s just making this intolerable situation all that much worse.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1391949740896657410

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Roundup: Trying to make an election happen

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I find myself growing increasingly tired of the media’s singular focus on a snap election, wedging every possible story they can into this narrative. And every time I see it, I keep thinking “Gretchen, stop trying to make an election happen. It’s not going to happen.” Honestly, no party is suicidal enough to pull the plug with the third wave raging across the country, and the legislation to make safer elections happen still stuck at second reading and has been for months because the Conservatives have been playing procedural games in the Commons (though the government is hoping to finally get it to committee this week). And given next week is a constituency week, the soonest it might pass at this point is maybe – maybe – the first week of June. Maybe. And then it has a 90-day implementation period, so Elections Canada could not safely hold an election until maybe mid-September. Maybe. Yeah, it’s not going to happen.

Undaunted, The Canadian Press’ big story this weekend is about how parties are gearing up for a potential election, and how to do everything virtually if they can’t go door-knocking and so on. And I get that they are probably in the midst of doing some rudimentary preparations because this is a hung parliament and anything can happen, but honestly? It’s not going to happen until later in the fall at the very earliest. But this constant obsession with pumping out election stories is starting to look both desperate and tacky, especially because it’s not going to happen.

With that in mind, I found Chantal Hébert weekend column to be lacking, where she questions the need for the Liberals to have a majority if legislation is finding “dance partners” in the Commons. The problem there is that it’s a fairly facile measure of things, given that there are bigger problems than the few bills getting passed with a sufficient “dance partner” available – there have been so few bills passed this session because the Conservatives in particular are slow-walking every bill they can, and only recently did the Bloc and NDP wake up to that fact when they have bills they want to see advanced as well. Add to that, most of the committees are now in a state of dysfunction because of partisan dickishness, and most of them are in endless cycles of witch hunts on would-be “scandals” that have long-since played themselves out. I’m not sure how she sees this as being remotely productive, but that’s me.

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Roundup: Telling them nothing of consequence

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Yesterday was the big day that the Commons defence committee had been waiting for – prime minister Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, had volunteered to testify about what she knew about the General Vance allegations, and the moment that she volunteered, opposition parties should have known that she wasn’t going to actually say anything of use to them. (And the fact that she volunteered after the government has been pushing the point for weeks that staffers shouldn’t be testifying because minsters are responsible under our constitutional framework is another problem, not the least of which is that they appear to have given up on being consistent).

And for nearly two hours, full of interruptions, points of order, and a whole lot of preening for the cameras by opposition MPs, Telford basically told them nothing of any consequence. She didn’t of the nature of the allegations, but she reached out to ensure that they weren’t a “safety issue” (i.e. assault as opposed to harassment). But in spite of her concerns, they didn’t learn any details, and on a broader picture, she often looks back in hindsight to wonder if she should have been pushing harder for transformational change in the military, or to look past Vance’s assurances that he was committed to doing that work. We should have expected that there wouldn’t be any sweeping new revelations going into this, and there weren’t. Of course, to the Conservatives, this “proves” that there is some kind of cover-up, but trying to go after Telford seems like a poor use of time when Harjit Sajjan is right there, waiting to be held to account for his numerous failings on this file. There needs to be some accountability on this, but the opposition just keeps flailing around performatively rather than being focused in holding the one person to account who needs it, and it’s not Telford.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt equates Telford to someone from the bomb squad in a movie, carefully dealing with possible explosives to ensure the PM doesn’t come to harm. Matt Gurney makes the salient point that it’s hard to fathom why Sajjan or Telford didn’t do more once they learned the PCO investigation was stalled (though I’m not really keen on Gurney trying to police Telford’s feminism).

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Roundup: PROC needs to grow up

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I find myself losing all patience with the state of Commons committees in the current parliament, and the shenanigans happening at the Procedure and House Affairs committee right now are really not helping matters – and to be clear, it’s all sides that are to blame here, with particular blame going to the prime minister himself for starting this particular farcical exercise of tabling a prorogation report and patting himself on the back for it, and then watching it all blow up in his face.

The notion of a “prorogation report” was always stupid. I get that the idea was supposed to be about trying to increase openness and transparency, and finding a way to demonstrate that tactical prorogations would be avoided, and so on, but it was dumb. The better alternative, as I pointed out in my book, was to restore prorogation ceremonies, where the government would have to have a public accounting of what they accomplished in the session and outlining how they felt that they accomplished the goals set out in the previous Throne Speech, before they set out for a new one. You get public accountability, and you get some pomp and ceremony from the Governor General or the deputy reading that speech (and it should be the GG – the practice of it being the Chief Justice is another one of those particular pieces of historical trivia that is infuriating in how it perverted norms that were carried on unthinkingly). But Trudeau didn’t go that route, despite having publicly mused about it, and here we are today.

The fact that the Liberals are filibustering at the committee is everyone’s fault. Yes, Trudeau should appear at committee to testify why he decided to prorogue – it’ll be a useless exercise in him delivering talking points, but it’s his decision and he should be questioned for it if this is the route that he chose to go. But trying to get Katie Telford violates the issue of not calling staffers because of ministerial responsibility, and summoning the Kielburgers and the people who run Speaker’s Spotlight to testify as well is beyond ridiculous, because they have absolutely nothing to say about the prime minister’s decision. Sure, the prime minister quite likely prorogued because of the constant WE Imbroglio circus going on – but those particular figures aren’t going to say anything useful to the committee about the prorogation report, which is what they are supposed to be debating. It’s all about trying to keep the WE Imbroglio in the spotlight for as long as possible, never mind that most Canadians have long since moved on from it, because the opposition parties think they can still use it to score points. Nobody is doing their jobs anymore, the notion of a prorogation report is a sham, and this whole exercise is just wasting parliamentary time, and exhausting the limited resources of hybrid sittings (especially the interpreters). Everyone needs to grow the hell up, and maybe, just maybe, Trudeau will have learned his lesson that this report was a dumb idea and he’ll do the right thing next time and restore the prorogation ceremony instead.

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Roundup: The good and the bad of Star Wars Day tweets

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It was Star Wars Day yesterday (May the Fourth be with you…), and as happens every year, various government departments put out Star Wars-themed tweets, and some of them are good, and some of them are…not so good. For example:

Some really missed the mark.

As you can imagine, I am a pedant over social media about naming Grogu.

Some of the better ones were these:

As for party leaders, Erin O’Toole’s was…bad. Not quite as bad as last year’s shoddily-animated Grogu video (for which the person who was in charge of it needs to have their ass removed), but still bad, especially because it’s not done in good fun, but is trying to spin the notion that the government is trying to turn the CRTC into a personal Twitter censorship bureau. (There are issues with Bill C-10 – this is not one of them).

Jagmeet Singh’s was painfully earnest.

Justin Trudeau, being a true fan, hit a pitch-perfect note.

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Roundup: Offering disinformation in a clownish motion

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Yesterday was a Supply Day for the Conservatives, and they decided to push a motion about access to vaccines – but because they are committed to a certain number of narratives that don’t belong in the real world, it was about as cartoonish as one might expect.

Part of the premise of why this so ridiculous is because the notion that sufficient vaccine supply could have been delivered in January and February – let alone right now – belies a belief that we live in some kind of post-scarcity society like in Star Trek: The Next Generation, where replicator technology basically eliminates these kinds of problems, such as supply chain issues, or the time it takes to scale up manufacturing, or the time to actually make the vaccine itself. It also seems predicated on the belief that Canada is apparently the only country in the world suffering from the pandemic, and that we should have some kind of claim to all of the vaccine first (even though we were far less badly hit than many, many other countries). There is a blatant falsehood in the motion where it claims that it was the federal government that recommended that the interval between first and second doses be extended to four months – that was not a federal decision. It was a recommendation by the arm’s length National Advisory Committee on Immunization, and they weigh their recommendations based on the current epidemiology, and it was in there considered opinion that there was a greater good in getting as many people their first dose as quickly as possible given supply constraints, and that the four months is likely to shrink as more doses arrive. More to the point, provinces decide whether or not they will accept NACI’s guidance or not, and not the federal government. The inclusion of this in the motion is pure disinformation designed to stoke anger. Finally, it ignores that the reason there are increasing “lockdowns” (and in most parts of the country, they’re not real lockdowns) are because premiers failed and didn’t properly control spread – most especially in those provinces where they re-opened too early, in spite of warnings that the new variants would cause spread faster, and yet they went ahead and did it anyway. This, again, is not on the federal government and it was always a fallacy that we could have vaccinated our way out of the second or third wave without lockdown measures.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1387827704204906497

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Of course, this is happening in the shadow of an oncoming surge of new vaccine deliveries, which has Ontario and Quebec are promising that everyone should be eligible to get a first dose before the end of May, which is not far from what O’Toole and company were demanding in their clownish motion. So, was this is a play to try and claim victory when the vaccination numbers start to climb? Or is this just a play to the base where facts don’t matter when there are emotions? Either way, it’s not the best look for the party that considers itself the government-in-waiting.

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Roundup: The flailing incompetence of Ontario’s new sick days

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If there was any doubt that the murderclowns in Doug Ford’s government were flailing incoherently, they announced a new paid sick leave programme yesterday, and wouldn’t you know it, it defies all common sense or logic. The idea is that employees get up to three days of paid sick leave – temporarily, because heaven forbid they stand up to the small business lobby and make this permanent – and employers can claim up to $200 per day for those employees, but they have to do it through the Workers Compensation bureaucracy, for some unknown reason. And we still have no idea what kinds of protections are actually in place for the workers if they use those days, because that’s a very big part of this. Furthermore, this was the province doing the bare minimum – they chose three days apparently because a) it’s what is currently in the Canada Labour Code for federally-regulated workers, and b) after three days, a person could claim the federal sickness benefit (because it pays out for the week), so they’re still trying to fob people off on to a system that was designed for those who can’t access employer-paid sick leave because they don’t have a traditional employer. And possibly the most galling part was how much the provincial labour minister was patting himself on the back for these woefully inadequate half-measures (which people were having to say was a “great first start” through gritted teeth all evening).

It shouldn’t have been like this. The easy fix was to simply allow sufficient days (probably up to ten given the current circumstances) under the provincial labour code, and employers could then access rebates either through the federal wage subsidy, as it’s been designed for, or a provincial stop-gap if they’re not currently on said subsidy, and it would have been easier, it would have protected jobs and workers’ rights, it would have been seamless, and we wouldn’t have the same problems that we’re having right now with those trying to access the federal benefit (which was not designed for these circumstances). But that would have angered the business lobbies, and Doug Ford would never want to do that, because they’re whom he considers the “little guy” that he looks out for. So here we are instead, with another badly designed system that seeks to do the bare minimum, and because this was done in haste, and with this government’s usual flailing incompetence, I suspect we won’t be out of problems with it anytime soon – just like everything else that has gone to wrong in this province, because it’s being run by incompetent murderclowns.

In case you were wondering what all of this flailing was trying to cover, it would be the Auditor General’s report on long-term care, which was a not unexpected recounting that there was a woeful lack of preparation, where long-standing problems quickly got amplified, while the ministry of long-term care was not prepared or equipped to deal with those issues. Again, not a surprise, but damning nevertheless. And what did the minister responsible for long-term care do? Blame everyone else including the NDP – who haven’t been in power since 1995 – for “starting the fire,” and she insisted that she was the one who ran into the burning building to save people, which…is a novel interpretation, especially considering that her government reduced the number of inspections and made things worse. Of course, we are in a system of Responsible Government, and she is the minister in charge of the portfolio, and guess what – she is responsible. If she had any modicum of shame or decency, she would tender her resignation for allowing the deaths of thousands on her hands, but this band of murderclowns are absolutely incapable of decency or shame.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1387459497803796481

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Roundup: Ford’s sick days deception

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The issue of paid sick days went completely sideways in Ontario after the murderclown government, thinking they were clever, tried to propose that the federal government simply double the payout of the federal sickness benefit programme, promising that they would cover the difference, and leave it at that. Not surprisingly, the federal government said no, because the federal sickness benefit is not paid sick leave, and everybody knows it. Doug Ford knows that, because he repealed the paid sick days that were legislated in the province, at the behest of business owners (because when Ford says he’s looking out for “the little guy,” he means the business owner). Reinstating them is a simple fix in the province’s labour code, unlike “fixing” the federal benefit, which is an impossibility because a) it’s not their jurisdiction, and b) they are limited by their back-end IT infrastructure, which in no way could allow them to have seamless paid sick days the way amending the provincial labour codes would allow. (The federal government could do more when it comes to the sick leave provisions in federally-regulated workplaces, but they are not starting from zero like provinces are).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1387006526406209538

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While on Power & Politics, Ontario’s labour minister, Monty McNaughton, did let slip that they didn’t want to implement actual paid sick days because it would be a burden on businesses, which were already suffering from the pandemic – as though having an outbreak in their facility won’t hurt them even more, or having their employees die of COVID. That, and they have options available to them, such as using the wage subsidy to pay for their employees’ sick leave – that’s one of the reasons it’s there. The whole gods damned point of the federal sickness benefit is for those who don’t have employers, like the self-employed, who could need some kind of income support if they can’t work because of COVID. It was never supposed to replace actual paid sick leave, but premiers decided that they could try to get around their own obligations with it.

Meanwhile, BC premier John Horgan is putting on a song and dance of reluctantly implementing paid sick leave in BC – fourteen months later – and making a theatrical production of trying to claim they wanted to make this a national programme. This, dear readers, is horseshit. Labour codes are provincial jurisdiction in 94 percent of workplaces, and if the federal government had tried to come up with a national paid sick leave programme pre-pandemic, every single premier would have cried jurisdiction and refused on principle. For Horgan and other premiers to now try and claim they want a federal programme is a lie, and an attempt at giving themselves cover. They are trying to avoid the wrath of the business lobbies, and the small business lobby in particular, and trying to use a federal programme designed primarily for the self-employed as their fig leaf.

Even more to the point, I cannot abide how pretty much every single media outlet has framed this issue, painting it as either federal-provincial “finger-pointing,” or even worse, claiming that Ford’s proposal as being some kind of “compromise.” It is not a compromise – it’s more deception that these media outlets are spooning up. And they keep offering Doug Ford political cover. I cannot stress this enough. By trying to be “neutral” and both-sidesing the issue, they are providing Ford with more ability to try and pin this on the federal government when it’s his issue, in his jurisdiction, and he needs to own it.

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Roundup: Ontario requests military assistance

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We have reached the point in Ontario where things are so bad with the pandemic that the province has requested military assistance, and arrangements have been made for three medical assistance teams to be dispatched by today, along with other Red Cross personnel. As well, nine healthcare professionals from Newfoundland and Labrador, including the premier’s wife, are also being flown to Ontario by means of military transport.

But what is Doug Ford and his murderclown regime doing to help the situation? Absolutely nothing! They voted against another attempt at getting paid sick leave implemented, and they are keeping their focus solely on the border, rather than their need to enforce quarantine measures locally. (Oh, and it’s not just Ford balking at paid sick leave – every premier is doing it, even those in the Maritimes who have had relative success in containing the virus so far).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1386359274415214598

Meanwhile, there is a bit of good news in that a Federal Court judge refused to grant an injunction to end the hotel quarantine programme, saying it will go to a full hearing in June, and saying that the infringements on freedoms are reasonable in the public health context. Granted, we have enough people who can’t seem to pick a lane between demanding stricter border measures while also demanding an end to hotel quarantines, but since when has consistency been the strong point of political parties or MPs?

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