Tag Archives: Elizabeth May

Roundup: Equalization and Spending

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Over the long weekend, one of the best things that I read was an exploration by economist Trevor Tombe about Alberta’s misplaced anger over the so-called “unfairness” of equalization, as the real issue is the fact that they have disproportionately higher salaries (and fiscal capacity) than everyone else in the country. Meanwhile, Tombe also has a good thread on the history of federal transfers to and from Alberta, and it’s interesting to get some of that perspective.

Meanwhile in Alberta, the McKinnon Report on public expenses was released yesterday, detailing that there needs to be some $600 million in cuts if the budget is to be balanced between 2022-23, and while it notes that it the province needs more stable revenues (*cough*sales tax*cough*), though it didn’t get into their revenue problems, as it wasn’t their mandate. That means that there are going to need to be cuts to healthcare and education. Here are three surprising tidbits from the report (but also ones that I think need to be drilled down into – for example high public servant salaries are not because of cost of living, but competition with the private sector, and high college drop-out rates are likely to do with jobs in the oil patch). More in this thread from Lindsay Tedds.

In reaction, Jason Markusoff points to the fact that the report’s conclusions were predetermined, given that it was created specifically to find cuts as raising revenues was not an option they were allowed to present, and it bears reminding once again that Alberta is in deficit because it chooses to be so – they could raise their revenues and not rely solely on oil royalties anytime they wanted, but they don’t want to (so all of those pundits taking this report as proof that the province has a spending problem are being a bit too cute about it). On a broader perspective, Max Fawcett argues that if Alberta wants to send a message that if they really want to have their issues taken seriously, they need to stop voting Conservative – and then enumerates all of the ways in which the federal Conservatives have taken the province’s votes for granted as they did things that disadvantaged them.

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Roundup: A carbon reality check

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A couple of weeks ago, Paul Wells did one of his CPAC interviews with Elizabeth May, the transcript of which is now available, and she talked a lot about how she thinks Canada can transition to a cleaner economy, and said a bunch of things about the oil and gas industry as part of that. The problem, of course, was that she was wrong about pretty much all of it, as energy economist Andrew Leach demonstrates.

Leach, meanwhile, also takes Jason Kenney’s rhetoric about carbon pricing to task in this Policy Options piece, and lays out the danger of that rhetoric, which has a high probability of blowing up in Kenney’s face. And as a bonus, he proposed a tool for conservatives to check their policy instincts against.

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Roundup: Federal jurisdiction wins again

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It should have been no surprise to anyone that the BC Court of Appeal rejected the province’s attempt to dictate the content of federally-regulated pipelines in a 5-0 decision. In other words, the province could not reject the transport of diluted bitumen through the Trans Mountain expansion by stealth, and in no uncertain terms. The province quickly announced that they would appeal this to the Supreme Court of Canada (though the 5-0 decision makes it more likely that they’ll simply say no thanks, and let the BCCA decision stand).

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While Jason Kenney was quick to crow over the Twitter Machine about how this was great news for Alberta, it seems to me that it’s rather great news for the federal government, because it upholds that they continue to have jurisdiction over these pipelines, and lo, they didn’t need to do some song and dance to “declare” or “invoke” it – because Section 92(10)(c) isn’t a magic wand, and it was already federal jurisdiction in the first place because it crossed provincial boundaries. And just like with the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal decision on the carbon price reference, it again showed that yes, the federal government has jurisdiction. After all, Kenney kept saying that the federal government should invoke 92(10)(c) because there BC’s position on this case showed that there was apparently some confusion around jurisdiction. But there never was any confusion – BC was trying to be too cute by half, and it didn’t work for them.

Speaking of Kenney, he was apparently in Toronto having a meeting with the Globe and Mail’s editorial board yesterday, and said that investors looking at climate risk was “flavour of the month” and they should instead focus on all of those “ethical oil” considerations instead. The problem there is that climate risk isn’t flavour of the month – it’s an existential threat to our economy. The Bank of Canada realized this and now lists it as a major risk to the country’s economy. The insurance industry really knows it’s responsible for billions of additional dollars in their spending over the past couple of years alone, thanks to flash floods, major forest fires, and so on. And have those “ethical oil” lines ever worked on anyone? I didn’t think so. But expect more of them to be bombarded at us in the near future as his “war room” gets underway to wage their propaganda campaign in “defence” of the industry.

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Roundup: Green wins, and the AG’s report

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After the Green Party won their second seat in Monday night’s by-election in Nanaimo–Ladysmith, it was inevitable that we would be subjected to a litany of hot takes about what this means for the upcoming federal election, most of which I’m not going to bother reading because frankly, I’m not sure it means anything at all. The Greens have been doing well provincially on Vancouver Island, where this riding is, and more than that, this particular candidate was once an NDP candidate who was booted from the party (apparently for views about Israel), and when the Greens picked him up, he won for them, while the NDP vote collapsed. Add to that, Green wins in BC, New Brunswick and PEI were also predicated by incumbent governments who had been in place for a long time (well, in New Brunswick, it was a constant PC/Liberal swap), and that’s not necessarily the case federally. While Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh tried to spin this as “proof” that Canadians care about the environment (for which both will try to tout their party policies on the same) we can’t forget that Canadians want to do something about the environment in the same way that they want a pony – it’s a nice idea that nobody has any intention of following up on because it’s a lot of effort and mess. This has been proven time and again. I would also caution against the notion that this means that “progressive” votes are up for grabs, because the Greens, well, aren’t all that progressive. If you read their platform, it’s really quite socially conservative, and they had whole sections essentially written by “Men’s Rights Activists” because they have little to no adult supervision in their policy development process. So any hot takes you’re going to read about the by-election are probably going to be full of hot air (quite possibly this one as well).

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Auditor General’s Report

The big news out of the Auditor General’s report was of course the backlog that the Immigration and Refugee Board faces regarding asylum claimants in Canada. The Conservatives, naturally, have jumped on this to “prove” that the current government has somehow broken the system, but every single expert that was cited over the day yesterday said that the Liberals inherited a system that was already broken (some went so far as to say that the Conservatives deliberately broke it in order to force a crisis that would allow them to adopt more draconian measures – though those backfired in a spectacular way, worsening the backlog), and that they have taken steps to increase the IRB’s resources. I wrote about some of these issues a while ago, and the IRB was starting to streamline some of their processes and start making use of technology like email (no, seriously) that cut down on some of the bureaucracy they were mired in – but as with anything, these kinds of changes take time to implement and have an effect. But expect the narrative of the “broken” system to continue in the run up to the election. Meanwhile, here are the other reports:

  • Half of Canadians who call a government call centre can’t get through, which is blamed on technology that was allowed to go obsolete
  • The RCMP are still not adequately prepared to deal with active shooter situations.
  • Our tax system hasn’t kept up with e-commerce and needs modernization
  • The mechanism to prevent governments from doing partisan advertising has little documentation and rigour.

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Roundup: Cluelessly demanding reforms

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Over the long weekend, Independent Senator Tony Dean posted an op-ed over on iPolitics to decry the supposed partisan attempts to block reform in the Senate – but it’s a dog’s breakfast that betrays a complete lack of understanding about the institution. It’s indicative of the attitude of a cohort of the new senators who think that they know best, despite not having a working knowledge of Parliament as a whole, or the Senate in particular, and yet they feel as though they know definitively how it needs to change. And more dangerously, Dean brings up that recent poll to show how Canadians apparently love the “new” Senate as a means of bashing Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives, who have no intention to continue the new appointment process – in effect campaigning for the Liberals, which should be uncomfortable for “independent” senators.

The core of Dean’s argument is that the Senate needs a business committee in order to get things done – which is both wrong, and wrong-headed. He complains that individual senators can delay bills, which he fails to grasp is the whole point. The Senate does not exist to rubber-stamp government bills, and yet Dean seems to miss that point. It’s not just that the Conservatives are partisan and therefore Bad – it’s because the Senate has a constitutional role to fill, and a business committee won’t stop delays. All it does is institute time allocation on all legislation before the Chamber – and it’s ironic that he’s pushing for that notion because in the very same piece he complains that the Conservatives were draconian about time allocation when they were in charge. He complains that there is no “TV Guide” for the Senate because debates aren’t organised, which is another wrong notion because the whole point about the way in which the Chamber has operated, where there are days between speeches between proponents and critics on bills is because it allows for thoughtful responses rather than the canned speechifying that happens in the House of Commons. And “organising” debates for the sake of TV is just time allocation in disguise. Which he fails to grasp.

Pointing to the programming motions on the assisted dying or cannabis legislation are not necessarily good examples of programmed debate in the Senate, because those were extraordinary bills, which the majority of Senate business is not. Dean was also known for insisting that the Conservatives would refuse to let those bills go to a vote when the Conservatives were proposing timetables for negotiation (and we all know that neither the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Peter Harder, nor the Independent Senators Group, seem to believe in negotiation or horse-trading to get things done in the Senate, because they mistakenly believe it to be “partisan,” which it’s not – it’s how stuff gets done). A business committee is a bad move for the Senate, and Dean needs to get a clue about that. It won’t stop the Conservatives from being partisan, and simply time allocating all business could set a bad precedent for when the Conservatives get back into power – which they will one day – and the impulse to return to some of the “draconian” measures of the Harper era come back, and suddenly they may feel differently about time allocating everything. But this cohort of new senators doesn’t get that because they’re not familiar with how parliament works, and they need to get on that because change for the sake of change may sound like a good idea in the moment, but can have lasting, damaging consequences for the institution as a whole.

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Roundup: Refusing to learn their lessons

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A former PQ minister wants to run for leadership of the Bloc, and I just cannot. Can. Not. The challenger this time is Yves-François Blanchet, who served in Pauline Marois’ short-lived Cabinet, and has since taken on a political pundit career since being defeated in 2014. He apparently met with the caucus yesterday, and the majority of them – including their past and current interim leaders – all seem to like him, but I keep having to circle back to this simple question: did you learn nothing from your last disastrous leader?

I can’t emphasise this enough. Since their demise in 2011, the Bloc have had a succession of seatless leaders, including Mario Beaulieu (who now has a seat, incidentally, and is the current interim leader), and while he stepped aside so that Gilles Duceppe could return (unsuccessfully), they keep going for leaders who aren’t in caucus, and time after time, it goes poorly for them. Every single time, I have to wonder why they don’t simply do as our system was built to do, and select a member from caucus. Constantly bringing in an outsider does nothing for their profile (ask Jagmeet Singh how that’s going), and their leaders keep being divorced from the realities of parliament. And time and again, they keep choosing another outsider. Why do you keep doing this to yourselves? Why do you refuse to learn the lessons that experience has to teach you?

There is one current MP who is considering a run, Michel Boudrias, and if the Bloc was smart, they would choose him by virtue of the fact that he’s in the caucus, he’s in the Commons, and he knows how Parliament works. Of course, if they interested in ensuring he’s accountable (especially given just how big of a gong show their last leader was), then it would be the caucus that selects him so that the caucus can then fire him if he becomes a problem (again, if history is anything to go by). But that would take some actual political courage by the party, and given their apparent reluctance to learn the lessons from their mistakes, that may be too much to ask for.

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Roundup: Trans Mountain decision day?

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It looks like today will be the day we get some kind of answer on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion pipeline, and everything will likely be confirmed in the morning as Cabinet meets earlier than usual. The three options on the table are the previously announced indemnification, as well as the option to either buy the pipeline outright (though I’m not sure if that means just the expansion or the original pipeline itself that the expansion twins) in order to sell it once the expansion completes construction, or temporarily buying it long enough to sell it to someone else who will complete construction. The word from Bloomberg’s sources is that the government is likely to buy it outright, on the likely option of buying it long enough to find someone who can guarantee its completion.

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As for what this will mean politically, you can bet that there will be no end to the howls of outrage from both opposition parties – from the Conservatives, we’ll hear that this never should have happened, and it’s only because of the federal government’s incompetence that it did. (While one can certainly question their competence in a number of areas, this is one where they had few good options, and no, a court reference or a pipeline bill would not have helped because they already have the necessary jurisdiction they need). The NDP, meanwhile, will howl that this is a betrayal of their promises on the environment and the rights of First Nations, and that it pays billions to “Texas billionaires” rather than Canadians, and so on (though one would imagine that the NDP should be all for nationalizing infrastructure projects). And one can scarcely imagine the invective we’ll hear from Jason Kenney, as helpful as that will be. Suffice to say, the next few days (and weeks) will likely be even more dramatic that they have been. Because this time of year isn’t crazy enough in Parliament without this.

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Roundup: The 21-hour tantrum

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If there is a parliamentary equivalent to a toddler having a full-on meltdown and screaming and pounding the floors after not getting their way, then you pretty much have the setting for the 21-hours of votes that the Conservatives forced upon the House of Commons. Which isn’t to say that I don’t think there was value in the exercise – I think having MPs vote on line items in the Estimates is a very good thing given that the Estimates are at the very core of their purpose as MPs, and we should see more of this (in a more organized fashion that they can do in more manageable chunks, mind you). But this wasn’t the exercise that the Conservatives billed it as.

Scheer’s framing is completely disingenuous. These votes were not blocking their efforts, and had nothing to do with the Atwal Affair, or the attempt to get Daniel Jean hauled before a committee. That particular motion was proposed, debated, and voted down on Wednesday. Forcing individual votes on the Estimates was a tantrum in retaliation. It was not about transparency. And it was tactically stupid – there would be far more effective ways to go about grinding Parliament to a halt to get their way rather than this tactic because there was an end point to it (and one which would have been at some point on Saturday if they hadn’t decided to let everyone go home).

The other reason it was stupid is because they forced votes on line items, it allowed the Liberals to spend the whole time tweeting about the things that the Conservatives voted down, like money for police, or veterans, or what have you. They handed that narrative to the Liberals on a silver platter. (The NDP, incidentally, voted yea or nay, depending on the line item, rather than all against, looking like they actually took it seriously). And what did the Conservatives spend their time tweeting? Juvenile hashtags, attempts to shame the Liberals (“You have the power to stop these votes. Just get the PM to agree.”) And in the end, it was the Conservatives who blinked and called it off (but declared victory and that they “drew attention” to the issue, of course).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/977249513051164672

This all having been said, there are more shenanigans to be called out amidst this. There was a whole saga about whether or not PCO offered Andrew Scheer a briefing, which his office denied, and then suggestions that Scheer wouldn’t accept it because he wanted as much of it made public as possible (again, with more conflicting versions of how much they wanted to be public and how much in camera). But even with the demands for public briefings, it trips up the parliamentary notion that public servants aren’t called to committees – ministers are, because they’re responsible. (Deputy ministers can be called as the accounting officers of their departments, but the National Security Advisor is not a deputy minister). And with that in mind, why exactly would the government put a long-time civil servant up for the sole purpose of having the opposition humiliate him? Because we all know what happened to Dick Fadden when he was hauled before a committee to talk about his fears about Chinese infiltration, and it damaged our national security because MPs couldn’t help themselves but play politics over it. Nobody covered themselves in glory over this exercise, but this wasn’t some great exercise in preserving the opposition’s rights. This was a full-on temper tantrum, and the more attention we pay to it as though it were a serious exercise, the more we reward the behaviour.

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Roundup: The big Mali announcement

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The formal announcement was made yesterday – six helicopters (two medical evac, four armed escorts) and approximately 250 personnel are headed to Mali as part of UN peace operations, and while this initial deployment covers off for German and Dutch forces that are pulling out, time there will be spent evaluating other ways that Canada can help build capacity in the country, which will involve training troops from other countries. While there have been some 162 peacekeeper deaths so far in Mali, all but four of those are from less advanced militaries than Canada’s, and the four Western countries’ deaths were related to a helicopter accident and not hostile actions. Chrystia Freeland did a great interview that helps lay out more of the details as to why Mali and why it’s taken so long.

Opposition reaction has been swift, and a bit curious. The Conservatives are demanding a debate and a vote on the deployment (reminder: a vote is wholly inappropriate because it launders the accountability that the government should be held to regarding the mission), while the NDP keep pointing out that this will not fulfil all of the government’s peacekeeping promises (not that they have claimed that it would), while demanding more details. Former senator Roméo Dallaire says that this is a good deployment, and reiterates that Canadians training troop-contributing nations and mentoring those forces will help to modernize peacekeeping.

In terms of hot takes, John Ivison sticks to the point that this is a political move by the government designed to help them get their UN Security Council seat as opposed to having anything to do with national security – err, except that peacekeeping isn’t supposed to be about national security. That’s kind of the point.

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Roundup: Gaming the system a second time

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So the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party’s nomination committee has allowed Patrick Brown to run for the leadership contest, despite the fact that he was kicked out of caucus (which also rescinded his nomination as a candidate in his riding), which is going to go super well for everyone involved, be it Brown claiming that he’s been vindicated from the allegations (he hasn’t), or the other candidates who are trying (and failing) to come up with new policy on the fly as they try to distance themselves from Brown’s campaign platform. But what gets me are all of the pundits saying “It’s up for the party members to decide,” which should provide nobody any comfort at all, because the reason the party is in the mess it’s in is because Brown knew how to game the system in order to win the leadership the first time. He has an effective ground game, and can mobilise enough of his “rented” members, likely in more effective distributions (given that this is a weighted, ranked ballot) than other, more urban-centric candidates can. He played the system once, and has all the means necessary to do it again. Saying that it’ll be up to the membership to decide is an invitation to further chaos. This is no longer a political party. It’s an empty vessel waiting for the right charismatic person to lead it to victory, which is a sad indictment. Also, does nobody else see it as a red flag that Brown’s on-again-off-again girlfriend is 16 years his junior and used to be his intern? Dating the intern should be a red flag, should it not? Especially when one of his accusers is a former staffer.

Meanwhile, here’s David Reevely previews the party’s civil war, while Andrew Coyne imagines Brown’s pitch to members as his running as the “unity candidate” in a party split because of him.

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