Tag Archives: Elections Canada

Roundup: Ford’s vaccine certification falsehoods

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Ontario’s science table released some dire modelling yesterday that showed that unless vaccination rates reach over 85 percent, we may need yet another lockdown to prevent the healthcare system from becoming overwhelmed – yet again. Thus far, only 76 percent of people over the age of 12 are fully vaccinated, so we have a way to go if we don’t want things to get dire, once more.

With this in mind, Doug Ford begrudgingly agreed to finally roll out vaccine certificates (not calling them “passports”) as of September 22, with the app coming a month later, but as with anything Ford and his band of incompetent murderclowns do, it’s half-assed and largely inadequate. In this case, they’ll require these certificates to enter non-essential businesses like indoor dining and theatres, but at the same time, they won’t require staff at these places to be fully vaccinated, because that makes so much sense. And most gallingly, Ford tried to claim that he has to do it because the federal government won’t – which is, frankly, bullshit because this is firmly within provincial jurisdiction, and after provinces grudgingly allowed the federal government access to their records for international travel purposes, many of them either refused to allow the same data to be used domestically (including Ford up until yesterday), or stated that they were moving ahead with their own certification so no need to bother with a federal one (thinking especially of Quebec).

Here’s Justin Ling with receipts about why this is bullshit, including when Ford’s flacks tried to “prove” that they wanted national vaccine certification, when it was in fact for international travel, and they’re content to lie to us to try and shift the blame when the anti-vaxxer crowd starts protesting (and yes, they did immediately after).

And because it was too spot-on, here’s Brittlestar’s take.

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Roundup: Curious demands for suspended campaigns

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The situation in Kabul seems to have had a secondary effect during the campaign, which have been repeated calls for the prime minister and/or affected ministers to suspend their campaigns in order to deal with the crisis. While it sounds like a good idea, I can’t help but feeling that this is strictly performative, especially given the situation on the ground.

For starters, having them in Ottawa at this point wouldn’t make that much of a difference, as the vast majority of civil servants are still working from home, and these ministers have just been through a year of remote or hybrid Parliament, and managed to do their duties from home for much of that, so why they couldn’t just keep doing it during this situation – and by all accounts that’s what they are doing – just strikes me as odd, but again, this instinct of performativity – being seen to be looking like they’re doing the job, as opposed to just doing it. And it’s not like they would be micro-managing the civil servants processing these approvals either, so again, I’m not sure why the need to suspend their campaigns is really there. The prime minister attended a G7 teleconference while on the road, other ministers have been providing daily briefings to the press from their homes over the past week or so, so again, there doesn’t seem to be a genuine need to suspend.

Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh is declaring the airlift mission to be a “failure” without necessarily understanding the situation on the ground, while Erin O’Toole, with his military experience, is simply proclaiming that he would have had “a plan,” as though any plan survives the first engagement. It was a fast-moving situation where we didn’t have assets of our own on the ground and were reliant on our allies, who weren’t necessarily dependable in their own right – made all the opaquer by the need for operational security. Of course, their real goal is to make the current government look like they’ve been incompetent on the file, and while I will agree that some of what happened can be attributed to our culture of risk-aversion, I think we need to try and keep some of the context of the situation in mind, rather than jumping to knee-jerk conclusions.

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Roundup: The “brother” meltdown

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Because we’re in an election and it ramps up the absolute stupidity across the board, we had another so-called “gaffe” that made a bunch of people performatively lose their minds, and I can’t even, you guys.

In a press conference about the situation in Afghanistan, Maryam Monsef, the minister responsible for the status of women and gender equality and a former refugee from Afghanistan, who fled when she was a child, made a direct address to the Taliban about letting people out of the country, and used the term “brothers.” And people lost their gods damned minds. She was asked about it and said that the context was cultural and she absolutely considers them to be terrorists, and yet the insinuation persists that, somehow, she was using the term as being sympathetic to a group that is diametrically opposed to everything she is about. WTF.

https://twitter.com/ChrisGNardi/status/1430565362265907205

And I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to suggest that there was a racist or Islamophobic undercurrent in the media even questioning that she was somehow trying to be sympathetic to the Taliban. Because seriously, you think that somehow Monsef personally, or the Trudeau government, is going to be “soft on terror,” or some other bullshit like this? Are these the tropes by which we will repeatedly fall back into, because we have learned nothing over the past twenty years? Apparently not, especially when it’s all being done to put on a show. It’s pretty gross, you guys. Do better.

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Roundup: Unnecessary panic about inflation

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It was predictable that it would happen – yesterday was the day when the Consumer Price Index figures are publicly released, and for the past few months, this has turned into a political gong show. Why? Because the Conservatives have decided to misconstrue what the data shows and to light their hair on fire about the top-line figure and wail that we’re in a “cost of living crisis.” Which is false – inflation is running hot for everyone right now, not just Canada, as a result of economies re-opening and global supply chains being disrupted by the pandemic, which affects prices, on top of the fact that there is some distortion in the year-over-year figures as a result of last year’s price crash. And to add to that, much of what is driving the July numbers are higher gas prices – which is a global issue, and good for Alberta’s economy – and higher housing prices, which is a driven by a lot of different factors. And hey, clothing and food prices were down, so there are upsides, right?

The problem, of course, is that this is being politicised – wildly so. When it came up on the campaign trail, Trudeau said that he was going to let the Bank of Canada do their job and worry about monetary policy while he worried about families, but this was truncated in the reporting, and which also got trimmed into Conservative shitposts, and O’Toole was given fresh cause to decry the “crisis.”

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1428104169009909763

Of course, O’Toole isn’t proposing any solutions that actually deal with inflation (and his plans will actually make it worse), but if he wants to start banging on about it and monetary policy, then he needs to start talking about what he thinks the Bank of Canada’s mandate should be – especially as that mandate is coming up for renewal. Should they continue to target inflation between one and three percent? He seems to sound like he wants them to target deflation, so good luck with letting the economy grow under that kind of mandate. Parliament should have this kind of discussion, but they need to actually have it – not just talking points and shots taken that assume people are ignorant about what it means. And the reporters on O’Toole’s campaign need to step up and start asking him these questions rather than just typing up his talking points.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1428094182531510282

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1428096342342213637

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Roundup: Paul’s disqualifying blunder

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It was not a good day for civic literacy or basic constitutional knowledge on the campaign trail, as Green Party leader Annamie Paul suggested that the Governor General “reinvoke” Parliament to hold an emergency debate on the situation in Afghanistan, and worse, cited a section out of the Emergencies Act to make it happen, and my head nearly exploded from the sheer stupidity of it all.

First of all, and this is crucial – the Governor General does not have that power. She has already dissolved Parliament. She can’t un-dissolve it with the stroke of a pen, and there is no mechanism to “reinvoke” Parliament, not even under the Emergencies Act. Parliament has been dissolved. There is nothing to recall in order to hold a debate, which again, is a useless gesture in the current situation. The most that would happen is that MPs would read speeches into the record for about five hours, and that’s it. Paul is perfectly welcome to read a twenty-minute speech to the media if she so chooses, and it would have exactly the same effect as an “emergency debate” would in the House of Commons (and I do use the term loosely). More to the fact, this is not a situation for which the Emergencies Act could be invoked, because it is not a national emergency in any shape or form. Additionally, the section she cites says that Parliament needs to be recalled at its earliest opportunity, even if it’s been dissolved – in which case it means as soon as there’s a new parliament that can be convened.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1427347519751720965

The fact that we have another party leader who is just pulling this out of her ass is bad enough, but she’s also a lawyer and should know better (and this goes doubly for Jagmeet Singh, as he too is a lawyer, and has been inventing powers for the Governor General). The fact that you can’t recall a dissolved Parliament is basic civics – and the fact that she doesn’t know this and is trying to issue demands to the Governor General should be disqualifying. It’s a complete embarrassment – but you wouldn’t know it if you watched the CBC, who glossed over the whole incident and didn’t mention it during their roundup of the day’s speeches. (We had other reporters covering themselves in glory today by asking the prime minister who was in charge during the election. No, seriously). An utter farce all around. This is why we can’t have nice things.

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Roundup: Farewell, 43rd Parliament, and good riddance

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Parliament is dissolved, and the 44th General Election has begun. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterised the election as a chance for Canadians to weigh in on the direction they want to see the recovery, calling it the most important election since 1945 – and he didn’t go the route of pointing to just how toxic the House of Commons was all spring as his justification (though he easily could have), because this is Campaign Trudeau™, and everything needs to be upbeat and positive. He also put mandatory vaccinations (for areas under federal jurisdiction, including air travel) as one of the centre planks of his campaign and dared people to contrast it to the other parties, with both Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh spending the weekend prevaricating and talking around it, so even though it may seem that the distinctions between them are subtle, they are there.

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/1426929811071635458

Erin O’Toole has pretty much retreated to his studio in downtown Ottawa, and spent the first day holding telephone town halls from there, and will do so again today. His pitch has been that the election is pretty much a vanity project by Trudeau in the hopes of a majority, but the fact that he has so far stumbled out of the gate, both with a disastrous shitpost video and his waffling on mandatory vaccinations, has not been terribly auspicious.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1427054892338884611

Jagmeet Singh started his day in Montreal, as he had already committed to attending the Pride parade there – but there was the inherent contradiction in that parades and crowds are okay but elections are unsafe. It’s also worth noting that he didn’t criticise the Governor General for granting dissolution, which makes it apparent that his letter two weeks ago was a cynical ploy that undermined Mary Simon.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1426320404315004940

Of course, while the opposition leaders kept insisting that the election was unnecessary and in some cases, too costly (but seriously, if you think it’s a bad think that elections cost money, you shouldn’t be in the business of democracy), their own rhetoric belies the fact that they didn’t think that Parliament was working, or should have worked because they kept insisting that you can’t trust the prime minister. So…maybe be more consistent if you want people to believe you when you said that there was no reason for an election, because clearly, you think there is.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1426974226007867401

Otherwise, a campaign that is going to be digital and social-media focused has been off to a bad start, contrasting the Conservatives’ terrible shitpost video versus the Liberals’ hopeful and optimistic video that is a note-perfect recreation of a parody video of a feel-good corporate video employing stock footage. So…yeah. Everything is kind of awful, but at least we only have five weeks of this and not two years like the Americans do.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1426699232141004805

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Roundup: O’Toole wants intervenor status

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Yesterday morning, Erin O’Toole declared that he would seek intervenor status at the Federal Court in the dispute between the House of Commons and the Public Health Agency of Canada over the disclosure of classified documents. Apparently, he believes that he has a “distinct perspective” on the underlying issues raised by the case, which is…a bit novel considering that his press release was a partisan document that was not about legal arguments but rather about political calculus.

As a reminder, the process was triggered because under the Canada Evidence Act – which Parliament passed – says that when requests for secret or confidential documents are made to a government entity like PHAC, they must notify the Attorney General, and that triggered a process by which said Attorney General sought clarity from the Federal Court – does the Canada Evidence Act and its limitations supersede or otherwise restrict Parliament’s privileges in demanding documents and the production of papers as they see fit, given that they are ostensibly the highest court in the land. Plenty of people have tried to make this a partisan issue – O’Toole most especially among them – rather than a process where everyone is following the law, and the law conflicts with Parliamentary privilege.

I half-suspect that in this case, the Federal Court may not grant O’Toole standing, given that he has pretty much stated that this is going to be an attempt at electoral grandstanding inside of a court room, which the Court would be hesitant to do. Beyond that, his statement in the press release doesn’t actually make sense – the request to present the documents will die when Parliament is dissolved, and the special committee that demanded the documents ceases to exist. Beyond that, if he forms government, he won’t need to release the documents because he’d be able to read them in secret, thus eliminating the possibility that releasing them might compromise our Five Eyes obligations, or inadvertently compromise a foreign intelligence source (though I am not convinced this is a national security or intelligence issue, but rather more likely one of an RCMP investigation into policy breaches). Not to mention, the documents were released, both in a redacted form to the committee, and in an unredacted form to NSICOP, and the Conservatives want someone else to do the redacting who doesn’t have national security experience. I have a hard time discerning just what “distinct perspective” he has other than scoring points, given that the Speaker will be exercising his role in protecting the privileges of the Commons, and he doesn’t need O’Toole’s help for that.

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Roundup: Speculating about normal activities

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As there are only three narratives available to mainstream journalists in this country, and the first of those is speculating about an early election, that’s what we got a lot of over the weekend. Yes, it is looking more likely these days, but eventually this starts looking like a self-fulfilling prophecy more than anything else.

To that end, we got an examination of the electoral considerations that each of the main party leaders is hoping to access in BC, and why they have focused so much attention there over the past week. We got an examination of how pre-writ advertising limitations don’t apply to early elections under the current legislation – though nobody is pulling the trigger on early ads just yet anyway (especially not when TikToks and social media shitposts are free). And there was a state of play when it comes to conservative premiers around the country and how much of a fight they’ll manage to put up against Trudeau if and when an election comes, considering how badly wounded most of them are at this point.

Now, as for the summer tours and announcements that the leaders have been on, apparently much of the media either has amnesia, or they’re being wilfully blind to history because they have a narrative to maintain. While some of these tour activities may be electioneering, but this is also typical after the Commons rises for the summer – leaders always head out across the country, and there is a pent-up desire to do so after some sixteen months of public health restrictions related to the pandemic. Not to mention, the budget has just passed, and the government wants to spread the good news and largesse, which happens every year, election or not. So while I can understand why my fellows in the media want to put everything in the election speculation box, these are also the same things that happen every other normal year, so maybe – just maybe – we should cool it a little until we get some actual signs that Trudeau is going to march over to Rideau Hall to demand a dissolution. And maybe we should ban the phrase “campaign-style” for the time being (maybe permanently), because it’s starting to look embarrassing.

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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: Blanchet thinks he knows when an election will be called

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The constant assertion that we are just around the corner from another election is tiresome, and yet it keeps rearing its head, sometimes in very novel ways. Yesterday, it was Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet telling a virtual meeting of Quebec municipalities that he believes an election is going to be called on August 16th, in order to avoid a federal election interfering with municipal elections in Quebec this fall – assuming, of course, that the pandemic is largely under control by then.

No, seriously.

The logic of this assertion, however, does not hold. First of all, there would be no reason for the prime minister to go to the Governor General (assuming we have a new one installed by that point – otherwise, it would be to the Chief Justice in his role as Administrator, for which the optics are very bad), and request dissolution in the middle of August. Remember that we still have fixed election date legislation, and while it’s largely useless, it does create a situation of poor optics for prime ministers or premiers who pull the trigger early. Yes, we are in a hung parliament, so a confidence vote could be lost at any point, but the Commons won’t be sitting in August. In fact, it is not scheduled to be back until September 20th, and I doubt we’re going to be having the same kinds of summer sittings like we did last year, where there was a sense of urgency, particularly around rapidly passing new pandemic spending measures. That is unlikely to be the case this summer given the place that we’re in with the pandemic. This means the government couldn’t even engineer its own defeat over the summer without a hell of a lot of effort, which seems tremendously unlikely given the circumstances. Given the poor optics of just requesting dissolution, this seems highly unlikely.

To add to this, Bill C-19 – which would allow Elections Canada to hold a safer election in the pandemic setting – only just got sent to committee this week in the Commons. Next week is a constituency week, so even if it did pass both committee and third reading the following week (unlikely), and passed the Senate the week after that (a better possibility given the speed at which they seem to be operating these days – not that it’s necessarily a good thing) then it still has a 90-day implementation period for those changes to take effect, so it wouldn’t reach that threshold until mid-September at the earliest. Again, this makes a call for an August 16th dissolution unlikely, because Elections Canada couldn’t be prepared, and even if most of the country gets their second dose by the end of September, that both cuts it uncomfortably close for when an election would be held following an August 16thdissolution, if at all given the need for more advanced voting days and so on.

Simply put, C-19 should have passed months ago in order to ensure there were proper safeguards in case something happens in this hung parliament, and a confidence vote didn’t go quite the right way. But nobody is suicidal enough to want an election right now, and that will continue to be case for much of the fall, until we can be sure that we’re out of the grip of the pandemic. Blanchet is spouting nonsense and should be called out as such.

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