Tag Archives: Erin O’Toole

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: Exit McKenna

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It’s now official – Catherine McKenna is bowing out of federal politics, citing that she wants to spend more time with her kids while she can (the oldest is off to university next year), but insisting that she still wants to do her part to fight climate change in other arenas. This was immediately met with questions about whether this is a signal that it can’t get done in government, which she flat-out denied, but we should remember that the federal government is limited in what it can do, because it only has so many policy levers at its disposal (which we should all realise after living through those limitations in this pandemic).

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1409621322649440256

McKenna, who also stated flat-out that she’s not going to run for mayor, dismissed the attacks against her as “noise,” and that they weren’t successful because she did the work of getting the carbon price in place, and made more tangible progress on the environment file than we’ve had since the Mulroney era. But we can’t forget that the abuse was real, it was horrific, and she needed police protection because the threats were so bad. This should be one of those moments of reflection about where we are as a society that these kinds of misogynistic are able to keep happening with little to no recourse for the victims, and few consequences if any for the perpetrators. McKenna did note that she does still want to work with social media companies to address this, but we’ll see if anything actually happens.

https://twitter.com/cathmckenna/status/1409522139380785157

Of course, this has entirely been overshadowed by the spectre of Mark Carney entering the political arena, which he categorically should not, because even if he’s been out of the Bank of Canada for seven or eight years, it still has the possibility to taint the institution by association, and him declaring himself to be sympathetic to the Liberal cause is not helping either – especially given that Pierre Poilievre is currently attacking the institutional independence of the Bank by positing that they are somehow in cahoots with the government, and that they are simply “printing money” to finance the government’s deficits which will drive up inflation – entirely ridiculous notions given that quantitative easing is not actually “printing money” and that their whole mandate is to control inflation at around two percent, which they have been very good at. Nevertheless, people are believing Poilievre’s bullshit (especially as other media won’t actually call it out as such), and this will only get worse if Carney actually enters the political arena. And because the media and the pundit class have decided that they like this narrative of Carney being some kind of heir apparent and saviour, they are trying to make it happen, damn the consequences. It’s not a good look, and yet here we are.

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Roundup: Annual amnesia and Estimates abrogation

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The House of Commons has risen for the summer, with four priority bills having made it to the Senate – including the budget implementation bill – but the rest of their “priority” bills languishing on the Order Paper. And the main party leaders spent the day sniping at one another in their respective press conferences, not necessarily telling the whole truth of the situation along the way, because that’s the way this particular game gets played.

It’s also that magical time of year when Hill reporters realise that the Senate exists and doesn’t operate in the same way that the House of Commons does, and we go through the ritual song and dance of worrying that bills won’t get passed before the Senate rises for the summer, and some usual tough talk by certain senators that they won’t be pushed around and they won’t fast track bills, until they do. We go through this every June, and every June, they push through these bills to ensure that they get royal assent before they leave for the summer. And no, the Senate’s calendar is not as fixed as that as the House of Commons, and yes, they do frequently sit later in order to get these bills passed. There is also the annual ritual of the government leader insisting that they really shouldn’t amend these bills because that would mean recalling the House of Commons, and that costs x-number of dollars per day and that’s apparently a bad thing for democracy (no, I don’t get the logic either), and with the constant speculation of an election, we’ll get additional concerns that they really can’t amend these bills because of that fact, and after some requisite chest-thumping, most senators will back down and pass the bills unamended. Yes, this happens every year, and it might behove these Hill reporters to remember this every year.

There is, of course, a more alarming aspect of what has transpired in this particular year, which is that several House of Commons committees didn’t do any scrutiny of the Estimates for the departments they are responsible for overseeing, and this is absolutely bloody alarming. This is the whole gods damned point of Parliament, and because they were wrapped up in their procedural warfare, that fundamental job didn’t get done. (And because of rules written in the sixties, Estimates that aren’t signed off on are deemed adopted, which is another outrage that they have not corrected). This should never have been the state of affairs – and I will note that some of those committee chairs offered additional sittings to ensure this scrutiny happened, but the MPs on those committees didn’t agree to it, which is an absolute outrage. That is your number one job as an MP, ahead of all other considerations, and you blew it because you were too busy grandstanding and/or protecting ministers who should have fallen on their swords, and we have further undermined our parliament as a result. Slow clap, MPs – stellar job.

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Roundup: Craven for Quebec votes

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The day was marked by reflection on the part of political leaders on the hate crime that took place in London, Ontario, that killed a Muslim family, along with vows to do better. Of course, within each of those was their own particular issues. As much as Justin Trudeau insisted that this was a “terrorist attack” before such a designation could be applied by means of police investigation, he also vowed to keep dismantling far-right groups, patting himself on the back for the designation of the Proud Boys as a terror group, even though that really just drove its membership underground. Erin O’Toole steered clear of his party’s recent history of dog-whistling and the absolute histrionics they engaged in around M-103, which you may recall was to have a parliamentary committee deal with the issue of Islamophobia in Canada. (Conservatives and their defenders will point to a similar motion on systemic racism that the Liberals voted down, ignoring that the motion was essentially the parliamentary equivalent of “all lives matter”). Jagmeet Singh loudly wondered how many more attacks needed to happen before the government did something about it, though there are limits to what the federal government is able to do, and they have been putting resources into their anti-racism strategy.

But the part that really reflects poorly on Trudeau is the fact that at his media availability afterward, he was asked if he thinks that Quebec’s Bill 21 (dubbed their “secularism” law but really disproportionately attacks Muslim women) fosters hated or discrimination, and he said no. We’re not sure if he was simply saying no about the hatred part, given that he has called out the discrimination inherent in said bill before – but he also still hasn’t taken any moves to combat it, apparently waiting for it to reach the Supreme Court of Canada before he’ll intervene. Which is more than the other leaders would do (well, Singh has reluctantly said he also might intervene at the Supreme Court if he were prime minister, but that’s after being pressed). Trudeau also mused that perhaps all of the mask-wearing in the pandemic will change Quebeckers’ opinions on religious symbols and face-coverings, but apparently François Legault is not moved. Either way, it’s a sign that every federal leader is way too craven to stand up to Legault on this because they’re all eager for Quebec votes, and that’s pretty gross all around.

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1402432194564526080

To that end, Susan Delacourt calls out Trudeau, O’Toole and Singh for their refusal to discuss Bill 21 (or in O’Toole’s case, acknowledge their past dog-whistles about “veiled voting” and “barbaric cultural practices tip lines”), and praises the courage of that former PC candidate who acknowledged the racism of his community that he shrugged off at the time.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1402313600602157058

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Roundup: An errant tweet begets irresponsible reporting

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As I reserve the right to grouse about bad journalism, I’m going to call out a particularly egregious CBC article that appeared over the weekend about a deleted tweet about a judicial appointment, and the way in which the story was framed, being that said potential judge was a donor to the justice minister’s nomination campaign and later to the riding association. The fact that a tweet was made and quickly deleted because the appointment process was not completed is bad form, and embarrassing for the minister’s office, but it need not be a sign that there is anything improper going on if you look at the facts in their totality. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the article omitted any context about how the appointment process is made, framed it like the minister is appointing his donors out of patronage, and got quotes from the Ethics Commissioner to “prove” that the conflict of interest rules are too lax.

The minister does not get to appoint anyone he wants on his rolodex. I mean on paper he has that ability, and constitutionally it’s his responsibility, but in practice it’s not how it works. The judicial appointments process – and I have written extensively about this – starts with lawyers applying to Judicial Appointments Committees in provinces, who then vet them and those which are deemed “Recommended” and “Highly Recommended” are forwarded to the minister’s office. At that point, there is a political vetting process because the government is politically accountable for these appointments if they go bad, but this particular process has been routinely mischaracterised both by media and the opposition – so much so that they have dragged in others on this point. In this case, it is likely that the candidate in question had passed the JAC and was forwarded to the minister’s office as either Recommended or Highly Recommended, and it was in the process of the political vetting when the errant tweet was made, but by deliberately omitting the role of the JACs in these appointments, the CBC article deliberately created a false impression for the sake of building their narrative.

It’s a problem when the media refuses to report this particular situation properly, with context of how appointments work, because they are more interested in a narrative that there is either rampant patronage, or that any lawyer who wants to be a judge should never donate to any party ever for fear of somehow tainting themselves. Political donations are part of how our system works, and it’s not a sign that someone is either a rampant partisan, or that they are trying to buy a judgeship – as the CBC seems to be alleging – especially given the donation limits in this country. Whether that is because there is an element of American political envy here, where we want to feel like we have the same problem of money in politics like they do (seriously, we do not), or whether there is a particular streak of misplaced moralism, in either case the reporting is tainted, and it’s completely irresponsible.

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Roundup: Justice Abella’s farewell to the Court

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Yesterday was a bit of a sad day at the Supreme Court of Canada, as Justice Rosalie Ahella, the senior puisne justice on the court and the longest serving judge in Canada, heard her last case before her mandatory retirement date on July 1st. She will have another six months to finish writing up any judgments that she sat on before the retirement date.

As her final speech, she spoke of being born a refugee, her parents Holocaust survivors, and they moved to Canada, in order to give their children a better life. Abella went to law school, was the youngest judge appointed to the provincial bench at age 29, and went on to have a very influential career chairing commissions and a royal commission, before she was appointed to the Supreme Court – the first Jewish woman appointed, and the first refugee – where she has been for 17 years. And it was a lovely speech. (You can see the video here).

It’ll be interesting to see who the government chooses as her replacement. Because it’s an Ontario seat, there will be an increased focus on finding a more diverse candidate, given that we have yet to have a person of colour on the Supreme Court, and there is more likelihood to find one who can also meet the bilingualism requirement that this government has deemed so important.

Victoria Day

As a reminder, Victoria Day is the official birthday of the Queen of Canada, so be sure to raise a glass in her honour (gin and Dubonnet being Her Majesty’s favoured tipple).

https://twitter.com/Canadian_Crown/status/1395810388319539200

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Roundup: Offering disinformation in a clownish motion

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

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

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

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1387847095357485057

 

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

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Roundup: Federal damage control while Ford playacts

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While Ontario continues to be on fire, Doug Ford spent much of the weekend walking back his ridiculous pronouncements on Friday, re-opening parks and playgrounds, followed by walking back the increased police powers (which was not helped by the fact that most police forces declared publicly that they would not use them – though stories of arbitrary accosting of people of colour did resonate over social media. This was then followed by news that Ford plans to shutter the legislature this week – apparently it’s the one workplace he doesn’t consider “essential” – while there is also talk about a Cabinet shuffle, because gods know this band of murderclowns needs to rearrange the deckchairs on their own personal Titanic one more time. (Speculation here is also that he is facing a very restive caucus, and closing Queen’s Park would make it easier to avoid them). And then, to make it look like he was doing something, Ford engaged in some performance art to phone up consulates and try to secure vaccines from international allies, as though they wouldn’t all laugh in his face. But he’s committed to the narrative that all he needs is more doses to vaccinate his way out of the burning building rather than doing the public health measures he needs to in order to stop the spread of the virus.

Meanwhile, prime minister Justin Trudeau announced some additional help for Ontario, some of which will wind up bypassing the provincial government and go directly to municipalities and businesses with things like additional testing and tracing capacity. Even these measures, however, are little more than damage control because they can’t do the things that need to happen, like stopping the spread in industrial workplaces, because they don’t have the requisite jurisdictional authority.

As for the doctors in this province, they’re at a breaking point. Thank the murderclowns for that.

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Roundup: Ontario is on fire, and Ford offers performance art

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I will admit that I am currently vacillating between rage and despair right now, as Doug Ford and his band of murderclowns looked at the new modelling data that shows us still on a course for disaster, and decide to do the barest minimum effort to merely prolong the state of affairs, rather than to take meaningful action.

It’s not just half-measures – it’s theatre. Closing parks and playgrounds will do nothing to halt the spread of the virus, but workplaces deemed “essential” continue to operate with few protections for workers – which is where much of the new infections are happening, and then spreading when those “essential” workers return home, often to crowded, inter-generational households – and most of all, Ford is still not budging on paid sick leave. On top of that, he’s giving police the power to randomly stop people to ask why they’re not at home, and essentially reintroduced carding (which is unconstitutional), and will inevitably target Black, Indigenous and other minorities because that’s what police do. (Several police forces have pledged not to use these powers, but we’ll see if that holds). And then Ford lies and says that Ontario has had the toughest measures anywhere, and pats himself on the back while he blames ordinary people for not following rules – rules which change on a daily basis and are never clear to begin with – and blames the federal government for not magically providing vaccines fast enough when it is mathematically impossible to vaccinate our way out of this.

None of this needed to happen. That’s what is just so gods damned enraging about this whole thing. They were warned repeatedly back in February not to re-open until the reproduction rate of the virus was lower, and they didn’t listen. They rushed to re-open just as variants were starting to spread in the community, confident that they could let a little bit of COVID circulate and everything would be find (when it grows exponentially), because they needed to “protect the economy,” and lo, things got worse like everyone knew that they would, and we had to restrict again, and it will keep happening like this until they can finally squash the curve of transmission.

If there is one silver lining, it’s that we know that Doug Ford can be swayed, because Uncle Doug doesn’t like being the bad guy. He wants to be the fun uncle. And maybe now, people in Ontario will finally be outraged enough to stop being guiled by his folksy bullshit, and finally start demanding action in a consistent and coherent manner. That may be what finally spurs action, months and thousands of unnecessary later, assuming the anger is directed in the right way. That may, however, be easier said than done, but the possibility exists, and perhaps we as a province should seize it.

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Roundup: Launching a laughable climate plan

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With much fanfare – and a moving backdrop that was dizzying to watch – Erin O’Toole rolled out his much-ballyhooed climate plan yesterday morning, and it was…underwhelming. And bizarre. Replacing climate rebates with a special “savings account” that can only be used to purchase “green” items like bicycles and high-efficiency furnaces? Yeah, that’s not an improvement, you guys. And lo, it’s not winning O’Toole any plaudits in his own party either, with caucus members telling media that they were essentially blindsided by this, and many feel it’s a betrayal, and a sign that he has no credibility because he’ll say anything to get elected. And they probably have a point.

Here is some reaction to the news, with additional threads from Nic Rivers and Jennifer Robson.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1382694545398317066

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1382716424087605252

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1382722697159925764

Meanwhile, I have a beef with CBC’s coverage of the issue, because they insist on framing the existing Liberal carbon price as a tax – which it’s not because it doesn’t go into general revenue, and the Supreme Court of Canada said this – but they insisted on calling the Conservative plan a “levy,” when it’s the exact same gods damned mechanism as the existing Liberal plan that just recycles the revenues differently. You can’t call one a tax and the other a levy because that is massively misleading. It places a wholly negative frame around the Liberal plan and not the Conservative one when, again, it’s the same mechanism. “Taxes” come with particular preconceived notions around them, in particular the gem about “taxes are theft,” and so on. CBC’s editorial decision to use this framing device biases the conversation and perceptions around the programmes, which is a very big problem.

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