Tag Archives: Environment

Roundup: Threats and compromises over dental care

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After spending the weekend talking tough on healthcare, Jagmeet Singh made some threats and shook his fist in the direction of Althia Raj yesterday, insisting that if the promised dental care programme doesn’t happen by the end of the year, that he was walking away from the supply-and-confidence agreement with the federal government. As this was hitting the wires, so was a leak that said the government was looking at a temporary cash transfer for eligible households in lieu of dental care this year, because it’s taking longer to implement (even though they insist they are on track). But the federal government hasn’t even decided on a delivery model yet, which is a problem, and premiers haven’t signalled any willingness to work with them on this either, and that’s a problem for all involved. Singh was naïve to believe this could happen in a few months, and the Liberals were stupid to promise that it could, knowing that this was going to be tricky because of the jurisdictional hurdles. And I suspect this is just going to drive cynicism on all sides, because new national social programmes can’t be done on the back of a napkin and rolled out in a few weeks, and everyone has set up expectations that will be nigh-impossible to meet. So good job, everyone. You’ve really helped.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 167:

There are international concerns after Russians shelled the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, in what is believed to be an attempt to cut power to Ukrainian-held cities in the southern part of the country. We also got word that a Ukrainian grain ship has reached Turkey, but it seems there has been a dispute with the cargo’s buyers in Lebanon, so they may be looking for a new buyer for the corn haul. Because of course. Over the weekend, Russians targeted the eastern cities of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, in the Donetsk region.

In case you missed it:

  • My column on Michael Chong’s latest round of reform ideas, and some of them are actually good, while others may not be practical given current limitations.
  • For National Magazine, I wrote about the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision around condom refusal and how that can lead to a sexual assault trial.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take on the (then-forthcoming) leadership debate and how you shouldn’t count anything out when there’s a ranked ballot in the mix.
  • My column on why we can’t keep ignoring the link between climate change and what it’s done to crops, and by extension, rising food inflation.
  • My Xtra column on this government’s poor record on HIV funding, while they were busy patting themselves on the back at the International AIDS Conference.
  • My column calling out Senator Dasko’s morally bankrupt poll trying to drum up support for the continuation of hybrid sittings, with no mention of the human toll.

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Roundup: Harper gives his predictable endorsement

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It’s day one-hundred-and-fifty-three of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and Russia’s foreign minister openly admits that they want to topple president Volodymyr Zelenskyy because they consider his government “unacceptable” or some such nonsense. Russian forces continue to shell Ukrainan cities in the east and south of the country, as well as in the Kharkiv region. This while a lot of people who initially fled from the Donetsk region have returned home after either feeling alienated further west in Ukraine as Russian speakers, or because they ran out of money, only to be killed by Russian shelling once they’re back. Meanwhile, the push to prosecute Russian war crimes continues in Kyiv even while the fighting rages on, while Slovakia is considering giving Ukraine their fleet of Soviet-era MiG warplanes.

Closer to home, Stephen Harper came out with his endorsement of Pierre Poilievre yesterday, and no, this is not a sign that he’s worried about Charest. Quite the opposite—it’s a sign of his absolute enmity for Charest. Harper has bad blood with Charest, dating back to when Charest was Quebec premier. He had sold Harper on the fantastical notion that Quebec was suffering from some kind of “fiscal imbalance” with Ottawa, which was all bullshit, but it made a good talking point for Charest, and lo, Harper decided to be different from Jean Chrétien and buy peace with Quebec, so he gave Charest the money he was demanding to fix said fictional “fiscal imbalance.” And lo, Charest immediately turned around and turned that payment into a tax cut in the province, and Harper was furious. I mean, it shouldn’t be a surprise, and it’s exhibit eleventy-six for instances of provinces taking federal dollars and not doing what they’re supposed to with it (which is why Justin Trudeau is so insistent upon strings being attached to future healthcare transfers), but Harper has nursed a grudge ever since. His endorsement of Poilievre is just more of him nursing said grudge—he’s not actually worried about Charest winning.

And while we’re here, no, Harper is not still pulling all of the strings in the party. He’s a micro-manager. If he were, they wouldn’t be in as much disarray as they are now. Also, the IDU is not some kind of fascist plot—it’s a gods damned social club that Harper is the convener of. Yes, it’s comprised of small-c conservative parties (including Angela Merkel and her party), and yes, Harper has made some very, very questionable statements from it, but it’s a social club. It has no power, and it’s not pulling any strings. He’s not a Bond villain. He was a mediocre prime minister who now spends his time swanning around the globe pretending he used to be important. That’s it. Stop giving him any more credit than that.

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Roundup: The Pope arrives, and snubs Indigenous women

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We’re on or about day one-hundred-and-fifty-two of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and wouldn’t you just know it, the day after Russia signed a deal to allow grain shipments out of Black Sea ports, they attacked Odessa, killing civilians. Because that’s who Russia is. They don’t respect their own cease-fires, and they act with impunity at every opportunity. (One might note that Justin Trudeau stated immediately that he didn’t trust Russia to uphold their end of the deal, and lo, was proven right). Elsewhere, Russian forces are blocking people trying to flee the Zaporizhzhia region, and they struck an apartment building in the port city of Mykolaiv.

Closer to home, the Pope’s visit to Canada has begun as part of the apology for residential schools, and both the Governor General and prime minister were in Edmonton to greet him. There are a lot of questions about how substantive this apology is really going to be, and whether he’s willing to do substantive things, like rescinding the Doctrine of Discovery that justified colonial behaviours. AFN national chief RoseAnne Archibald has been told she won’t be part of the welcoming ceremony at Maskwacis today, and she notes there are no women in leadership positions in the event (but this is the Catholic Church we’re talking about—they’re not exactly in favour of women in any leadership positions, or really of women in general). There has also been some irony noted that these events are being translated into Indigenous languages that were forbidden in residential schools, for what it’s worth.

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Roundup: Trying for a left-wing populist narrative

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It’s day one-hundred-and-forty-nine of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian forces have been pounding Kharkiv, mostly by randomly shelling residential areas to inflict civilian casualties. But as this shelling takes place, the head of MI6 in the UK says that their analysis shows that Russia’s army is nearly exhausted, and that this will open up opportunities for Ukrainian forces to counter-attack in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, Turkey says that Russia and Ukraine are about to sign a deal that will re-open Black Sea ports and allow grain shipments to pass through again, and hopefully avert the threat of famines (and likely lower world grain prices). There are still a lot of questions—including whether Russia can actually be trusted—but we’ll see what happens in the coming days.

https://twitter.com/AnitaAnandMP/status/1550193058809090054

Closer to home, Jagmeet Singh is trying to play the populist card, and it’s just laughable. It’s like the satire of a populist’s talking points (not that the NDP hasn’t morphed itself from a principled left-wing party to a left-flavoured populist one more than a decade ago). Like Singh and his inner circle looked at Pierre Poilievre’s traction and said “get me a piece of that action,” so they tried to ape his talking points. It’s risible, and it’s a sign of the intellectual vacuum at the centre of our political parties (and no, Liberals, you don’t get to be smug about this one either as your party can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag).

https://twitter.com/theJagmeetSingh/status/1550180051152404482

There are no “Ottawa elites” who are “enraged” by your suggestion. Yes, it got a bunch of scorn from, well, everyone because the last thing you want to do when you’re facing high inflation is to just give everyone even more money. Targeted help, sure, but social assistance and disability are provincial programmes, whereas the Canada Child Benefit is too broad a programme that it has been considered stimulus by the government and every credible economist, which is the last thing you want right now. The GST credit can maybe be a vehicle as it’s more targeted, but you need to be specific about that. As for the notion that corporate price gouging has caused inflation is flat-out wrong (even if it has contributed in a small way). Taxing oil companies won’t solve inflation, and an “excess profit tax” is a fraught move because it gets very tricky to come up with a workable definition of “excess,” particularly given the fact that a) the economy is overheated so of course businesses are going to be making more profit, and b) the world price of oil has more to do with supply constraints and capacity constraints for refining, so just taxing it more doesn’t actually solve any problems. But this kind of ham-fisted economic illiteracy does nothing for Singh’s credibility, and just drags the discourse even further down.

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Roundup: Inviting premiers to shift the blame

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It’s now day one-hundred-and-forty-seven of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and while Russian forces pound cities like Kramatorsk in the east, and targeted Odesa in the south, they are planning to begin annexing Ukrainian territory with installing proxy officials, false referenda, replacing the local currency and forcing people to apply for Russian citizenship. We know this because they did it in 2014 when they annexed Crimea, and they have a familiar MO.

Closer to home, there was a report out from Ontario’s Financial Accountability Officer yesterday that showed how Doug Ford and his merry band of incompetent murderclowns have been under-spending in a number of significant areas like healthcare, education, social supports that include things like autism therapy. Now, put this underspending into the same context of Ford crying poor and insisting that the federal government pony up more cash for healthcare, but he’s not even spending his own current budget allocation, he hasn’t reversed his cuts to nurses’ salaries, and he didn’t do enough when it comes to testing or tracing when it comes to the pandemic. The same report shows he only spent 58 percent of the pandemic funds the federal government sent over, putting the rest directly onto his bottom line to reduce the province’s deficit. And you wonder why the federal government wants strings attached to future funding, to ensure that it actually gets spent on the things it’s supposed to be spent on, and not being used to pad bottom lines.

On a related note, reporters were asking Justin Trudeau yesterday about the strain that emergency rooms are under, and when Trudeau noted the money they’ve sent to the provinces and that those dollars need to come with results, those same reporters frame this as “punting it” back to the provinces.

No.

It’s not punting—it’s the provinces’ gods damned jobs. And while this was justified as Trudeau campaigning on hiring more doctors and nurses, no—the campaign promise was to send $3.2 billion to the provinces to hire doctors and nurses, and it’s not rocket science to understand that this is the kind of thing he’s trying to attach strings to before he sends those cheques to the provinces, so that he knows that they’re going to actually spend it to hire doctors and nurses (and one presumes actually pay them properly) and that it won’t wind up padding their bottom lines like we just watched Doug Ford do. And I’m not trying to insinuate that the reporters are playing gotcha or that they’re being partisan, because they’re not—they’re trying to do their jobs, but they’re doing it with a grave misunderstanding about how jurisdiction works, and this nonsense belief that nobody cares about it. The problem is that they have to care, because that’s how we hold people to account for the work they’re supposed to be doing, which the premiers aren’t. Because media keeps giving them this out and trying to pin things on Trudeau “because nobody cares about jurisdiction,” and the only lever he has is to try and attach strings to funding and nothing else—the federal government cannot hire doctors and nurses because they have no authority to do so—it gives the provinces an out so that they can shift blame when it’s their gods damned responsibility. We need the media to understand this and hold the right people to account for their failures, and right now, that’s the gods damned premiers.

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Roundup: Collapsing hospital care is a crisis for premiers

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It’s on or about day one-hundred-and-forty-six of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian forces have shelled the city of Toretsk in the Donestk region, smashing more buildings as they continue to try and take control of the area. Ukraine is also calling out Russia’s conduct when it comes to prisoners of war, citing illegal treatment.

Meanwhile, there are no assurances around weapons that Canada is sending to Ukraine that they’re being tracked so that they can ensure they won’t wind up on the black market. NATO partners are having discussion about this, but Canada is merely monitoring rather than participating. Ukrainian officials assure Canada that they are closely monitoring any movement of weapons, as are our allies, and are insisting that information to the contrary is likely Russian disinformation.

Closer to home, emergency rooms are closing in some parts of the country as hospitals are facing a severe staff shortage, particularly among nurses. And gosh, it’s quite a coincidence that Ontario gave nurses an effective pay cut that they haven’t reversed, or that Alberta tried to cut nurses’ pay because they said they were making too much relative to nurses in other provinces. No, seriously, that’s their case. This is while the premiers have mishandled COVID, refuse to do the simplest things like mask mandates at this point, and then wondering why the hospitals, which never recovered from the previous waves of the pandemic, are once again collapsing. A very cynical person might think premiers have created this situation, either to pressure the federal government to hand them more money without strings, or to set up the conditions to force more private delivery of care (which won’t actually do anything about staffing or resources other than distribute them toward those who can pay), but it looks clear that they aren’t prepared to give the necessary damn that the situation requires, and that’s a problem.

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Roundup: Premiers playing the deflection game

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We’re in day one-hundred-and-forty-five of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian forces have been intensifying their shelling of cities in Ukraine, and not just in the Donetsk region (and here is a look at what life is like in that region currently). Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired the head of the country’s security services and the prosecutor general, citing Russian collaborators within their departments.

Closer to home, there was some more discussion/whinging over the weekend about last week’s Council of the Federation meeting, and how it was mostly a gripe-fest directed at Ottawa. CBC’s Janyce McGregor wrote an excellent piece summarising the event and the arguments on both sides, but made a very salient observation in that the premiers were conspicuously silent on agenda items that were solely in their own wheelhouse, over things like harmonising regulations, or regulatory bodies, or interprovincial trade barriers. All of those require zero input from the federal government, and yet the premiers were silent on any progress made on these (intractable) issues in favour of simply a chorus of blame Ottawa. And it’s a very good point, because it points to the absolute deflection of the performance art that John Horgan and the others were engaged in. They’re not doing their own jobs. It was their lack of action during the pandemic that cratered the healthcare systems that they starved beforehand (particularly when they were getting higher federal transfers that they then spent on other things). Now they’re trying to deflect from their culpability by trying to rope in Ottawa, who has been sending them a lot of money, which many of those premiers have either not spent and just applied to their bottom line to pad their surpluses, or if they did spend it, didn’t track it so we know how it was actually spent. That’s on them. Trying to blame Ottawa is their way of avoiding culpability, and the media shouldn’t be simply acting as stenographers for them along the way.

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Roundup: Summer showboat season has begun

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It’s day one-hundred-and-forty-three of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and a missile strike in the more central city of Vinnystia killed a four-year-old disabled girl, which was used by president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and others to demand that Russia be declared a state sponsor of terrorism as a result. There have been other strikes in Dnipro, near the centre of the country, and in Mykolaiv, which is closer to the front lines in the south. CBC has a video of the week in the war here.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is preparing a counteroffensive in the south, particularly to reclaim Kherson, which is a strategic objective that could give them control of the region, including of giving them the ability to strike Russian positions in Crimea. The fact that the Ukrainians have now accepted delivery of the American HIMARS rocket system is giving them a new advantage over the Russians, and could turn the campaign, which is in a “grinding” phase of attrition currently. There have been no Russian advances in the east part of the country for over a week now, so the supposition that Russia needs time to regroup seems to be proving true.

Closer to home, summer showboat—err, committee season has begun, with two emergency meetings yesterday, being the foreign affairs committee, and the industry committee. In the former, they have committee agreed to meet over the summer to discuss the return of those gas turbines to Germany, and will call ministers to testify. The latter used the day to plan meetings on the Rogers outage, where they plan to call ministers, Rogers executives, and the CRTC, and you can bet that MPs from all parties are planning who their best performers on camera will be in order to give some outrage and sanctimony clips that they can then use for shitposts and fundraisers. Because that’s what our Parliament has devolved to.

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Roundup: Hoping for a Canada Day with little disruption

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We’re on day one-hundred-and-twenty-eight of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it looks like shelling by Ukrainian forces have driven Russian troops from Snake Island, a strategic location in the south near Odesa (and where those border agents famously told the Russian warship to fuck itself). This could mean that the threats against Odesa are receding. Meanwhile, the fighting continues around Lysychansk, where the Russians are facing a tough road to try and encircle the city as they can’t cross the river without being exposed to the Ukrainian forces on the high ground.

https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1542426545490460672

Closer to home, it’s Canada Day, but the festivities are taking place off the Hill in Lebreton Flats, because a third of the lawn in front of the Centre Block is now a giant pit while they dig new underground infrastructure for the renovated building. As well, the Snowbirds have been forced to cancel their performance because of a serious maintenance issue with their fleet. The far-right extremists, grifters, conspiracy theorists and grievance tourists have already started to descent on downtown Ottawa and Parliament Hill, so we’ll see if things are as disruptive as they were during the occupation, but thus far, police are taking no chances and we’ve already seen arrests and vehicles being towed, so we’re off to a better start than we were in January. Regardless, I hope you enjoy your Canada Day as much as possible.

Programming Note: I’m taking the long weekend off to recuperate, so I’ll see you Monday or Tuesday, depending on how I feel (and how much news there is over the weekend).

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Roundup: On oaths to the Queen

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We’re in day one-hundred-and-twenty-six of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and much of the attention has been on the reverberations of the attack on the shopping centre in Kremenchuk, where the death toll is up to 18, with more than 20 missing, and many more wounded. French president Emmanuel Macron denounced the attack, and said that because of it, Russia “cannot and should not win” the war (but then again, Macron’s attempts to get Ukraine to give territorial concessions to end the conflict is not exactly reflecting well on him either). As well, CBC interviews a Ukrainian marine who survived the battle of Mariupol with severe injuries before spending two weeks as a Russian prisoner of war before he was able to be sent back to Ukraine for treatment.

https://twitter.com/MFA_Ukraine/status/1541839370747011072

Meanwhile, Turkey has dropped their objections to Finland and Sweden joining NATO, which means that their membership can move ahead. This while NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is talking about an eight-fold increase in Western troops being placed at an increased state of readiness, and more troops headed to the Baltic states, to make Russia very aware that they really, really shouldn’t cross their borders.

https://twitter.com/AnnLinde/status/1541877388937728005

https://twitter.com/ChristinsQueens/status/1541845991225278474

Closer to home, I spent way too much time yesterday being angry at a garbage piece of Canadian Press wire copy that was bad PR masquerading as a news story. I mean, we’re not even a week into Parliament’s summer recess, and this is what CP is using as void fill for the news hole? The piece claims that 56 percent of Canadians oppose the oath of allegiance to the Queen, then cites a “poll,” but it wasn’t actually a poll, it was online panels that are not actually random samples, but that fact isn’t mentioned until six paragraphs down. The only person quoted in the piece is the guy who runs the think tank who commissioned the panels, and he says that most Canadians are unaware that newcomers have to swear an oath to be “faithful to the Royal Family,” which is a wilful distortion of the truth. The oath is to the Queen and her “heirs and successors,” because heredity is kind of the point of monarchy. It’s not the whole Royal Family. Nobody is swearing fealty to Prince Andrew, or even Princess Anne for that matter. And for a think tank that claims to be devoted to increasing Canadians’ knowledge of their country, that kind of distortion is malpractice at best, but I suspect it’s more about trying to build a case that the monarchy is not a unifying force, particularly for immigrants. As for the CP journalist, this was simply retyping a press release with no added context. There were no basic civics in there about how we’re a constitutional monarchy, that the Queen of Canada is different from the Queen of the UK, or that the oath to the Queen is not to her natural person, but to the Crown as the central organizing principle of our constitution (which is why we would need to rewrite the entire thing if we ever were insane enough to ditch the monarchy—not that we would ever get the unanimous agreement of the provinces to do so). It’s really disappointing that CP has descended to this kind of stenography when they used to be one of the most enviable bureaux on the Hill.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1541409039330021380

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