Tag Archives: Elections Canada

Roundup: Expanded help, pending the provinces

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For his daily presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau opened by talking about his meeting with G7 leaders, talking about the need for a global response to a global pandemic, and the need to help more vulnerable nations – leaving it unspoken that it will be harder to do that if the WHOs funding takes a big hit thanks to Trump’s conspiracy theorism around it. He mentioned his upcoming meeting with the premiers, and noted that Quebec had made an official request for assistance with its long-term care workers – and while many reporters wanted details on what exactly the ask was, the response through the day was that it came late the night before and they were still talking with the province about how best to support them (though the theme seems to be that they want the army to help with these long-term care facilities – something they may have some ability to help with). Trudeau also noted that when things weren’t going as well as hoped, “we make changes,” and then announced that they were expanding the eligibility for the Canada Emergency Business Accounts, as well as gave a few more details about the planned Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance, which would provide loans (some of them forgivable) to commercial property owners on the condition that they provide rent reductions to commercial tenants in May and June – though the coordination of this is still happening with the provinces.

One thing that did emerge, both in the Q&A with Trudeau and during the ministerial one that followed, were questions relating to the modelling of the pandemic, and how we’ve had nearly twice as many deaths as projected by this point, prompting questions about what went wrong with the models. And my head exploded. These models were not predictions or forecasts – they’re an exercise to help with resource planning, which has been stated over and over again, and yet we had more than one journalist try and treat these models as credible data. And because these reporters been told time and again that they’re not data, they’re not forecasts, they’re planning tools, and the fact that this doesn’t sink in, is crazy-making.

Meanwhile, here’s economist Kevin Milligan’s evaluation of the Conservative demand for a GST rebate, which is harder than it looks, and probably not as helpful as the Conservatives think it would be.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1250802992565022720

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1250804375259246592

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1250805682078543873

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1250807414795849728

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Roundup: The crash and the cries for stimulus

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It was a tough day on the markets yesterday as stock markets plunged at record levels over panic-selling because of COVID-19, and oil prices cratered while Saudi Arabia and Russia got into a pissing contest. Bill Morneau held a post-market-closing press conference to assure Canadians that there was fiscal room to deal with the situation, but he spoke in frustrating platitudes and generalities as he so often does (because this government is largely incapable of communicating their way out of a wet paper bag), but it needs to be acknowledged that his budget challenge has become a lot more complicated, particularly as the oil shock is going to impact federal revenues as well as Alberta’s. But seriously, the whole Conservative “spent the cupboard bare” narrative is bogus and economically illiterate, and they are actively spreading misinformation about it.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1237104005425139712

Around the same time, Jason Kenney held his own press conference, saying that all options were on the table for dealing with the downturn on the province’s economy – and then immediately ruled out a sales tax, which would stabilize the province’s revenues. Because that might make sense. Rachel Notley says that he should scrap the budget and re-do it, given that its assumptions are now proved to be useless, but other economists say it’s likely not worth it at this point, and it would be better to have a fiscal update in the near future.

And then come the demands for some kind of fiscal stimulus plan, but one of the things they’re pressing is that measures need to be timely. Maclean’s talks to four economists about what they think such a plan could look like for the best impact.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1237235733762473984

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Roundup: Expecting a regulatory overhaul

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I’ve been keeping my eye on the Orphan Well issue in Alberta from a distance, somewhat in part because of everything I learned about the problem when writing about the Supreme Court of Canada challenge around how the obligations to clean them up interacted with federal bankruptcy law. As it turns out, the Supreme Court said no, companies can’t offload these environmental problems in order to salvage other assets, so Alberta was left with a problem as the huge problems with the way their regulatory system operates has been left with a very big problem. The province’s energy regulator (which has long been accused of being captured by the industry) is finally admitting that their system for determining liabilities has been flawed all along, and the province is saying they’ll be releasing new regulations soon, but we’ll have to see how much more stringent they’re going to be with the provincial government constantly worried that they’ll unduly harm the industry in its weakened state (which is another reason why Kenney has been pressing for those so-called “equalization rebates” from the fiscal stabilization fund in order to put toward remediating orphan wells – because why not get the federal taxpayer to deal with the remediation of environmental liabilities that the province deliberately under-funded in order to keep the good times rolling (and their tax base unsustainably low).

Meanwhile, the number of smaller oil and gas companies who haven’t been paying their taxes to municipalities or rents to farmers and landowners is climbing, leading to a great deal of frustration in the province, and there are calls essentially for these smaller companies to be allowed to go bankrupt so that larger ones can take them over, and they’ll be better capitalized to deal with their environmental liabilities, as happened in Texas several years ago. Then again, seeing as the provincial government and their federal counterparts seem to be so much more beholden to the smaller oil and gas players than they are the big ones (for whom they will deride as being big corporations, because don’t forget they’re right-flavoured populists), so we’ll see how far that line of argument gets them.

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Roundup: Competing economic illiteracy

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As someone who covers a fair bit of economic stories, the absolute inability of this government to come up with a definition of “middle class” is exhausting – and those of you who read me regularly will know that I will instead use Middle Class™ as a means of showcasing that it’s a meaningless branding exercise. And lo and behold, when challenged to offer up a definition during one of his year-ender interviews, Justin Trudeau said that “Canadians know who’s in the middle class and know what their families are facing and we focus more on the actual issues.” And I died a little bit inside. For a government that keeps insisting they’re all about data, and evidence-based policy, their refusal to offer a meaningful measure of what their core narrative is all about is entirely about branding. By not offering a definition, they don’t have to exclude anyone – because everyone believes they’re middle class (whether they had ponies or not). And more to the point, by not offering a metric, they can’t measure whether they’ve succeeded for failed – it’s only about feelings, which makes their talk of data and evidence all the more hollow.

And then there’s Pierre Poilievre, who, when challenged about the definition of a recession, makes up a bullshit response and thinks it makes him clever. It’s as economically illiterate as the Liberals’ Middle Class™ prevarication, but the fact that the Conservatives keep cheerleading a “made-in-Canada recession” that no economist sees on the horizon, and which they can’t even fit into the actual definition of what a recession is (two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth) sets a dangerous path of spooking markets. It’s all so stupid, and reckless, but the party’s current path of pathological dishonesty makes them blind to the danger of it all.

On perhaps a related note, Trudeau’s director of communications, Kate Purchase, is leaving to become a senior director at Microsoft, and good luck to her – and she really is one of the nicest staffers and was actually helpful to media in stark contrast to the Harper crew. But I also hope that perhaps this means that her replacement can start ensuring that this government can start communicating its way out of a wet paper bag, because cripes, they have done themselves zero favours over the past four years.

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Roundup: Performative fiscal demands

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In spite of the fact that Bill Morneau strongly hinted on Thursday that there would be a “fall” fiscal update this week (and technically it is still autumn for another couple of weeks), the Conservatives dispatched Pierre Poilievre yesterday to performatively demand one – along with a bunch of the usual demands for tax cuts and “cutting red tape” (as though governments haven’t been trying to do just that for years). The tax cuts are coming – at least, the planned increase to the basic income exemption, targeted at lower-income brackets – which the government has stated repeatedly will be their first order of business, thought the Conservatives demand more tax breaks for “entrepreneurs,” while the NDP want that income exemption to phase out earlier so as to pay for dental care – ignoring, or course, that such a programme would rely on negotiations with the provinces, just like pharmacare. But hey, once you’re on a talking point, best to stick with it, right?

Meanwhile, the first confidence vote of the new Parliament will likely be tomorrow, as it’s the final Supply Day of the year, and when the Supplementary Estimates need to be passed, and we can imagine that it’ll be a long day of votes and Committee of the Whole to deal with them, before they head off to the Senate, where they might – might – get a bit more scrutiny than they’ll get in the Commons. But a vote on the Speech From the Throne is unlikely to take place until after the Commons comes back from their break in January, just looking at the math on the calendar.

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Roundup: Fair deal to direct anger

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Jason Kenney was determined to swallow much of the news cycle over the long-ish weekend (depending on where you were in the country), first by announcing on Friday that he had appointed a “fair deal” panel to look at ways in which Alberta can assert more independence – but many of those items don’t make any sense, especially as they will be more costly in the long run (or look particularly suspicious, like replacing the RCMP provincial policing contract with an Alberta Provincial Police when the RCMP is deep in investigating the UCP leadership contest corruption). In fact, the former chair of the province’s “Firewall” panel from 2003 says that this is just an exercise in blowing off steam that won’t amount to anything that they didn’t learn back then, which will be amplified over social media into promises that could never be fulfilled – which is a problem. Kenney then doubled down with a lengthy speech at the Manning Centre conference in Red Deer on Saturday, where most of these items were further listed.

This all having been said, I’m hearing from my friends and family in Alberta that Kenney’s cuts are already starting to affect them, and that anger may start to hurt him sooner than later. (Family examples: I have a nephew with special needs whose school aide’s hours are being slashed, and my brother-in-law is a volunteer firefighter, and their training budget has just been decimated). I fully expect that Kenney is going to go hard on trying to direct the anger to Justin Trudeau and Ottawa in order to deflect the anger from his cuts, and you can bet that he’s going to go to absurd lengths to stoke it.

Meanwhile, here are some reality checks into the kinds of things that Kenney is proposing for his “Fair Deal” nonsense, whether it’s for the creation of their own provincial pension plan, or to collect federal taxes on their own.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1193379952961277952

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1194018713629904897

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1194072739243446272

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1194075167506386945

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1194092599918944256

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Roundup: The knives and the Reform Act

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The Conservatives are having their first post-election caucus meeting today, and there is talk that the discontent may be more serious than the public picture they’re letting on in public – not that that’s surprising. But all of the talk of forcing an early “leadership review” of Scheer rests – whether from the talk of the disaffected Conservatives, or in the public musings of Andrew Coyne and Stephen Maher to name a couple – haven’t made a very careful study of the Reform Act beyond its stated good intentions when the bill is actually garbage.

In fact, I think that relying on the Reform Act could insulate Scheer more readily than it could push him out, given that it has a relatively high threshold to trigger the caucus vote to ouster a leader, and that high threshold can be used to intimidate any would-be usurpers or those who would use the ability to hold their leader to account for his or her sins – in this case, a bad campaign based on lies, a platform that didn’t appeal to any of the target demographics or ridings that they needed to win, and the inability of said leader to articulate positions on socially conservative issues that would offer any kind of reassurance to those target demographics and regions. (And did I mention the campaign of lies?) That intimidation can make it harder for the caucus to make a clean break and get on with choosing a new leader.

This having been said, I want to push back on something that Conservative MP Chris Warkentin said on Power & Politics last night as it pertains to this Reform Act business, wherein he said that he didn’t agree with giving caucus that power because it somehow “disempowered” the grassroots (followed by the ritual motions of insisting that they are a “grassroots party” as though that were actually true). For a century now, political parties in Canada have flattered their grassroots members by pretending that letting them choose the leader is “democratic,” when all it does is obliterate accountability. It means that the leader can claim a false democratic legitimacy and centralize their power by marginalizing both the MPs in his or her caucus, and eventually marginalizing the grassroots because that power has been centralized and those grassroots become an increasingly irrelevant means of pretending to get policy advice. It’s simply become an exercise in the grassroots willingly turning over their agency and power to the very person who will undermine them, but hey, it’s “democratic.” This is the root of the problems that have developed in our system, and we can’t just keep pretending that they don’t exist because “grassroots parties” no longer resemble that.

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Roundup: A new breakaway Senate caucus

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Expect some drama in the Senate coming up, as a group of Senators plan to break away from their existing caucuses – a couple of Conservatives, but most of them currently sitting in the Independent Senators Group – in order to form a new caucus that will concern itself with regional representation (and I have had independent confirmation of the reporting in this story). It’s expected that the formal application will be made this morning, and then the work of organizing starts, and because there are some ten to twelve senators in this group, they will have sufficient numbers for an official caucus under the current Senate rules (and will have even more right to salaries once the Parliament of Canada Act changes that Justin Trudeau promised will go through).

While I will be writing more about this later in the day, the names on the list aren’t too much of a surprise because they haven’t necessarily been playing well with the current ISG leadership, and many have bristled with some of the heavy-handed strictures in the ISG about party membership and so on. I have definite questions about how they plan to put more focus on regional issues as part of this group, and I’ll be making some calls over the day to get some more answers, but it’s going to be a very interesting next few weeks, and Justin Trudeau come to rue the day that he kicked his senators out of his caucus in order to avoid any audit revelations and pretend it was high-minded principle.

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Roundup: Last minute obfuscation

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As this interminable, awful election draws to a close, leaders were busy making their final pitches to voters, starting with Justin Trudeau in Niagara, and then to Hamilton, where he had a media availability, and he mostly talked around questions being posed to him around things like that interview from Stephen Guilbeault where he said that more pipelines were unlikely to be built (I mean, has anyone actually looked at the economic data?), or what he might do in a minority situation (which really is the right thing to do, because all of this baseless speculation without seeing the seat math is pretty dumb). Trudeau then went to Brantford, Milton, Winnipeg, and ended off with a late-night rally in Calgary, so he can at least say he visited. There, he made a pitch for progressives to consolidate around him as an anti-Kenney vote.

Andrew Scheer held his media availability in North York, where he consistently refused to say whether the stories about his party hiring a certain Cult of the Insider figure to try and discredit the Maxime Bernier Fan Club, before he simply repeated misinformation. He then headed for Don Valley North, Brampton, Scarborough, and finished off with a rally in Richmond Hill where the crowd started chanting “lock him up” about Trudeau. Scheer tried to get them to say “Vote him out” instead, but honestly? This Dollarama-knockoff LARPing of American politics is so tiresome.

Jagmeet Singh largely stuck to the Vancouver area, and he too prevaricated on yet more questions about post-election situations including whether he’d trigger an early election rather than work with the Conservatives.

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Roundup: Warnings, theatre, and lunacy

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Justin Trudeau began his day in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and after the usual warnings to those who are thinking of voting NDP and Green about a Conservative government, promised that if re-elected he would ensure that the province’s sole private abortion clinic would remain open by way of applying the Canada Health Act (though he didn’t specify how), before spending the day stopping in various communities on the way to Halifax, where he ended the day.

Andrew Scheer began his day in Quebec City where he promised to hold a first ministers’ meeting on January 6thwhere he would totally solve the intractable problem of interprovincial trade barriers…apparently through sheer force of his personality. (I previously wrote about this sort of cheap theatre here). He then toured a few other Quebec communities, finishing his day in La Prairie.

Jagmeet Singh began his day in Toronto, where he claimed that abolishing the Senate would somehow better represent Canadians, which is so much horseshit that I can barely breathe. Aside from the fact that it would require a constitutional amendment with the unanimous support of the provinces – something PEI and the rest of Atlantic Canada would not countenance as the Senate was one of the conditions by which they joined Confederation, but it would cut their representation in half, and the whole counter-balancing effect that the Senate’s structure has against the representation-by-population nature of the Commons would be out the window. It’s the most ignorant statement Singh could possibly make, but hey, applause lines.

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