Tag Archives: Euthanasia

Roundup: A lack of self-awareness in the face of a violent mob

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The cancellation of Justin Trudeau’s planned rally on Friday evening because of the growing number of angry protesters has given some pause to members of the media about how things got so bad, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of self-reflection on too many people out there. While both Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh have denounced the violent protesters, and O’Toole and local candidate Kyle Seeback kicking their volunteers who were part of the mob off of their campaigns, there remains a complete lack of self-awareness on their part. O’Toole not only endorses the kinds of shitposters that fuel this toxic outrage, but he has gone so far as to hire them, both for his leadership and for the campaign. The actively contributes to this discourse through winking and nodding to them, repeating their conspiracy theories in the House of Commons either directly or indirectly, and he directly contributes to this kind of poisoned discourse. Likewise, Conservative Michelle Rempel Garner is speaking out about being accosted and harassed on her campaign, but there is nary a word of acknowledgement about how she has fed this crowd, or the fact that she sends her own army of trolls and flying monkeys against those she disagrees with (and I know people who have been on the receiving end of this).

Most galling, however, are the media figures like John Ivison, who have essentially blamed Trudeau himself for this state of affairs.

There are others who have been bringing up the testimony of former Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, during the hearings into the Double-Hyphen Affair, when he sounded the alarm about the rising incitements to violence that were happening on social media – statements that were roundly ridiculed by members of the media. I’d say that perhaps we should be looking for some self-awareness out of this, but I have serious doubts that it’s even possible among the majority of them. But maybe I’m just getting cynical.

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Roundup: On not electing first ministers

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There was something going around the Twitter Machine yesterday regarding past prime ministers, and Kim Campbell in particular, and it appealed to my sense of pedantry/exactness in our civic discourse – no, Kim Campbell was not “elected” as prime minister, but no prime minister is actually elected in the Westminster System.

She was not the first prime minister not to have been appointed to the position without leading their party to victory in a general election. We had two early prime ministers who were sitting senators and not MPs. John Turner didn’t have a seat in either Chamber when he was sworn in as prime minister. At least Campbell had a seat and had led several high-profile Cabinet portfolios (first female justice minister and defence minister), and she made significant reforms to the structure of Cabinet upon her appointment as PM, many of which have been lasting. She did not have to face Parliament as prime minister, but neither did Sir Charles Tupper, not John Turner. Trying to somehow insist that because her appointment did not follow a general election victory as somehow denigrating or making her lesser-than as a prime minister is ahistorical and ignorant of how Westminster parliaments work.

Part of this, however, is tied up with narratives that our pundit class keeps importing from the US, and which our media stokes out a sense of general ignorance of civics. We recently saw in places like Nova Scotia, where they just appointed a new premier, that the media are jumping up and down for him to get “his own mandate” – meaning going to a general election – which goes against how our system works. In Newfoundland and Labrador, their premier was appointed without a seat, which he promptly won in a by-election, and then called an election “to get a mandate” and lo, it turned into a gong show because they had a sudden outbreak of COVID. But this false notion about “mandates” keep cropping up, because media and pundits keep feeding it. It’s not how our system works, and it places false expectations on new first ministers, and creates unreal expectations for those, like Campbell, who did everything according to our system’s actual tenets. It would be great if we had a better sense of civics in this country to counter this ongoing nonsense.

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Roundup: Ford’s sick days deception

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The issue of paid sick days went completely sideways in Ontario after the murderclown government, thinking they were clever, tried to propose that the federal government simply double the payout of the federal sickness benefit programme, promising that they would cover the difference, and leave it at that. Not surprisingly, the federal government said no, because the federal sickness benefit is not paid sick leave, and everybody knows it. Doug Ford knows that, because he repealed the paid sick days that were legislated in the province, at the behest of business owners (because when Ford says he’s looking out for “the little guy,” he means the business owner). Reinstating them is a simple fix in the province’s labour code, unlike “fixing” the federal benefit, which is an impossibility because a) it’s not their jurisdiction, and b) they are limited by their back-end IT infrastructure, which in no way could allow them to have seamless paid sick days the way amending the provincial labour codes would allow. (The federal government could do more when it comes to the sick leave provisions in federally-regulated workplaces, but they are not starting from zero like provinces are).

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While on Power & Politics, Ontario’s labour minister, Monty McNaughton, did let slip that they didn’t want to implement actual paid sick days because it would be a burden on businesses, which were already suffering from the pandemic – as though having an outbreak in their facility won’t hurt them even more, or having their employees die of COVID. That, and they have options available to them, such as using the wage subsidy to pay for their employees’ sick leave – that’s one of the reasons it’s there. The whole gods damned point of the federal sickness benefit is for those who don’t have employers, like the self-employed, who could need some kind of income support if they can’t work because of COVID. It was never supposed to replace actual paid sick leave, but premiers decided that they could try to get around their own obligations with it.

Meanwhile, BC premier John Horgan is putting on a song and dance of reluctantly implementing paid sick leave in BC – fourteen months later – and making a theatrical production of trying to claim they wanted to make this a national programme. This, dear readers, is horseshit. Labour codes are provincial jurisdiction in 94 percent of workplaces, and if the federal government had tried to come up with a national paid sick leave programme pre-pandemic, every single premier would have cried jurisdiction and refused on principle. For Horgan and other premiers to now try and claim they want a federal programme is a lie, and an attempt at giving themselves cover. They are trying to avoid the wrath of the business lobbies, and the small business lobby in particular, and trying to use a federal programme designed primarily for the self-employed as their fig leaf.

Even more to the point, I cannot abide how pretty much every single media outlet has framed this issue, painting it as either federal-provincial “finger-pointing,” or even worse, claiming that Ford’s proposal as being some kind of “compromise.” It is not a compromise – it’s more deception that these media outlets are spooning up. And they keep offering Doug Ford political cover. I cannot stress this enough. By trying to be “neutral” and both-sidesing the issue, they are providing Ford with more ability to try and pin this on the federal government when it’s his issue, in his jurisdiction, and he needs to own it.

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Roundup: Ending the defence committee study

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Something unexpected happened yesterday, in that the Defence committee voted to end the study on the allegations against General Jonathan Vance – the Liberals moving the motion, and the Bloc supporting it (which was the real surprise). Of course, ending the study comes with a number of different narratives. For the Conservatives and the NDP, this is all about the government trying to “cover up” what happened, because they won’t allow staffers to testify – nor should they. The concept of ministerial responsibility is inviolable in our constitutional framework, and the government should be fighting to maintain it, and yes, they have put the minister forward in this case several times, so that does matter. For the Liberals’ decision to move to end the study, it’s also at the request of some victims’ groups, who have stated that every past government is at fault, and that the committee is simply using the victims in order to score partisan points – and they are 100 percent correct in that assertion.

I do find it disturbing, however, that in most of the reporting on what has gone on, media have followed the opposition narrative that staffers are being “blocked” from appearing, and that the only time that ministerial responsibility is mentioned, it’s in quotes and being both-sidesed in terms of the government’s response. This is a real problem because it is undermining this fundamental principle in our democracy. This is something that should be explained, including why it’s wholly improper for the opposition to be demanding that this important principle be violated, and why when the Conservatives were in government, they repeatedly invoked the same principle as well to keep their staffers away from committee. Constitutional principles matter – they’re not just to be dismissed as a “process story” as so many journalists and editors are wont to do in this city, and it cheapens the discourse when this context is being left out of the stories, and when the government’s correct position is being spun as being improper.

Of course, if the government is going to claim ministerial responsibility, that doesn’t just mean Sajjan has to show up (which, to his credit, he did for six hours) – Sajjan has to actually take responsibility as well, and he hasn’t. And more to the point, Sajjan should fall on his sword for this, because he did drop the ball. He remained way too incurious about the allegations and whether an investigation was being carried out – which is not the same as involving himself in the investigation or meddling in it. It’s basic due diligence for someone who is responsible to Parliament for the armed forces and its leadership, and he failed in that due diligence. Sajjan has no choice but to resign over this, and it will be a giant sign that Justin Trudeau is not taking this seriously if he doesn’t insist on a resignation in short order.

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Roundup: The importance of our distinctions

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There has been no shortage of columns on the future of the Canadian monarchy over the past few days – I’ve even contributed my own – and they are all over the map between “Our current system works” and “Barbados is going republican so why can’t we?” But one of the fundamental problems with many of these pieces is a fundamental lack of basic civics. Like, the most basic, which then gets even more compounded with wrong-headed expectations about what our other political actors should be doing. A huge example is the importance of keeping the ceremonial head of state functions away from the head of government functions, but this is failing to find as much traction these days, and that’s a problem.

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I would dispute with Philippe a bit here in that people would get fussed about honours being handed out by prime ministers or ministers, particularly if it’s a PM that they disagree with. That’s one of the primary reasons why honours should be with the Queen via the Governor Genera/Lieutenant Governors, because it keeps it out of the hands of politicians and the whims of the government of the day. When you start turning honours over to politicians, bad things happen – recall the gong show that was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medals, where MPs and senators were given a number to hand out apiece, and some of them went to certain individuals that would never have been eligible for any other honours in this country.

But of course, as Dan Gardner points out, so much of this stems not only from our poor civics education, but the fact that we are so saturated with American pop culture and politics that so many in this country believe that we are analogous in so many ways. Hell, we have political parties in this country who simply swallow the positions of American politicos and just divide by 10, thinking that’s all it takes, like we’re not separate countries or anything. It’s a huge problem and not enough of us are pushing back against it. The Crown is a big part of what keeps us distinct, and we need to better appreciate that. I can say from personal experience that one of the comments I’ve received most about my book is that people read the chapter on the Crown and say that it finally makes sense to them because they’ve never learned it properly before. We have a problem and we need to solve it before more people think that the solution is to become Americans.

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Roundup: Final debate on the amendments

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While the Commons is not sitting this week, the Senate is, with several bills now on their Order Paper for consideration, most especially the assisted dying bill, which is under a court-imposed deadline (that has already been extended thrice). At issue are the amendments that the government accepted, rejected, and otherwise modified from what the Senate sent back to the Commons a few weeks ago (where the Conservatives then held it up).

The Government Leader in the Senate, Senator Marc Gold, is taking the line that this is a “historic example” of collaboration between the two Chambers that has resulted in better legislation, but I’m not sure just how historic that is, and by “better legislation,” it’s a fairly marginal case because the government reduced the attempt to render this legislation fully compliant with the constitution with one of its famous half-measures that means that people’s suffering will be prolonged as a result, and yet more others will need to embark on yet more court challenges in order to fully access what should be guaranteed rights.

Ultimately it does look like this will pass without sending it back to the Commons again, as most senators are taking the line that the House has had their say, and because they’re democratically elected, it can go ahead now (though there have been instances where the Senate made a second insistence on certain bills in order to make a point – though I’m not sure that will be the case here), and that it could pass and get royal assent before the court deadline. Nevertheless, the amount of time this has taken for something that had court-imposed timelines is a sense of just how vulnerable the parliamentary calendar really is when you had determined opposition to bills, and it’s not over yet because the proposed changes in this legislation will impose a two-year timeline for more consultations on aspects of the law that currently remain prohibited (where that prohibition remains unconstitutional), but that the government is dragging its feet for the sake of politics. Ultimately, nobody comes out of this exercise looking particularly good.

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Roundup: Closure, and false hope

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The government followed through on their plans to invoke closure on the assisted dying bill yesterday, and with the support of the Bloc, they had final debate and a vote, which passed, sending the amended bill back to the Senate. (The NDP, incidentally, voted against it simply because they refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the Senate). Because the government only accepted a couple of the Senate amendments, and modified others, it will require another vote in the Other Place, but it is most likely that they will allow the bill to pass in time for the court-imposed deadline.

There have been a lot of disingenuous comments about this bill. Certain disability advocates have insisted that this makes it easy to kill them, which it doesn’t, and these advocates ignore that other people with disabilities have requested assisted dying and won in the courts – which is why this bill exists. Many of those advocates are trying to re-litigate the case they lost at the Supreme Court that allowed for the assisted dying regime to be created in the first place, which isn’t going to happen – that decision was unanimous and the Court is not going to revisit it. As well, one of these amendments puts a two-year time limit on the mental health exclusion so that more guidelines can be developed. That exclusion is almost certainly unconstitutional, and the government knows it – but again, there is a cadre of disingenuous commentary, including from some MPs, that this would allow anyone with depression access to assisted dying, which is unlikely in the extreme, and more to the point, it conflates other mental illnesses with depression, and it stigmatises mental illness by excluding it, effectively undoing years of trying to treat mental illness like any other illness.

When I tweeted about this last night, I got a lot of pushback from a certain segment that coalesced around the narrative that the government would not provide supports for people with mental illness but would let them kill themselves; and furthermore, they tried to further say that the government that voted against pharamcare was doing this. There is a lot to unpack in those statements, but there are a few things to remember. One of them is that most disability supports, as well as treatment for mental health, are both in provincial jurisdiction, so the federal government can’t offer more supports for them. Hell, they can’t even simply send $2000 per month to people with disabilities – as the NDP are demanding – because they don’t exactly have a national database of people with disabilities (and they had a hard-enough time kludging together a special pandemic payment through use of the flawed disability tax credit). They do have jurisdiction over the Criminal Code, which is what this legislation covers.

As for the pharmacare bill, we’ve already covered repeatedly that it was unconstitutional and unworkable, and would not have created pharmacare, as the NDP claimed (while the government is already at work implementing the Hoskins Report). But as we’ve seen here, they sold a bill of goods to these people, and gave them false hope as to what they were doing. They lied to vulnerable Canadians to score cheap political points. The sheer immorality of that choice is utterly shameful, but this appears to be what the party has reduced itself to. I sometimes wonder how their brain trust sleeps at night.

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QP: Curious expectations of the ombudsman

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For the one-year anniversary of the declaration of the pandemic, there were more MPs in the Chamber than we’ve seen in weeks — there was more than bare quorum for a change, and not only was the prime minister present, but so was Catherine McKenna and three other Liberals — it’s almost a miracle. Before things got underway, a moment of silence was called for the victims of the pandemic. Erin O’Toole led off, script on mini-lectern, and he said that PCO told the PMO that the military ombudsman was not in a position to investigate sexual misconduct — which isn’t what anyone was asking, but may instead have been based on a poor interpretation of something the minister had said — and accused the government of a follow-up. Justin Trudeau reminded him that they take allegations seriously, and that politicians cannot do the investing, but appropriate independent authorities must do it. O’Toole tried again twice more with increasing sanctimony, and Trudeau repeated his same answer. O’Toole then pivoted to the 40-day delay between vaccine doses and if the off-label use would have an impact on the contract with Pfizer, and Trudeau reminded him that politicians don’t give guidance around vaccines, but experts to. O’Toole repeated the question in French, and got the same response. 

Yves-François Blanchet rose for the Bloc, and in light of the day, wanted them to put partisanship aside…and accede to the provinces’ demand for $28 billion without strings. Trudeau reminded him of the increased transfers they already gave for during the pandemic and an assurance that they would negotiate increases after it was over. Blanchet tried to then affect some gravitas in demanding that all seniors be given additional supports and not just those over 75. Trudeau explained that older seniors have greater needs than younger ones, which is why the government was giving them additional supports.

Alexandre Boulerice led for the NDP by video, and he returned to the allegations around General Vance, for which Trudeau gave a paean about working harder to giving support to victims and in transforming in institutions like the armed forces and the RCMP. Lindsay Mathyssen repeated the question in English, with an added demand for an apology, and Trudeau repeated his same paean, but he disputed the assertion that the government did nothing, and he listed some of those actions.

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Roundup: Support on a closure motion

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There appears to be some marginal progress with the government attempting to move legislation in the House of Commons, now that the NDP and the Bloc are starting to realise that something needs to be done. To that end, the Bloc have agreed to support a motion on closure for Bill C-7 on assisted dying – as there is a court deadline and only eight more sitting days between now and then – with tentative NDP support. And the NDP are also starting to realise that the current impasse could give the government ammunition to call an election (even though the only people who want said election are bored pundits), and want other bills to move.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, did pass a motion yesterday to fast-track debate on the Canada-UK trade agreement implementation legislation and MPs sat until midnight as a result, but there will be a battle over the assisted dying bill. From there, it becomes a contest of wills as to which bills are getting prioritised. The government has been trying to pass Bill C-14, which implements measures from the fiscal update back in December, before the budget is brought down (likely next month). And there is another bill to close loopholes in pandemic supports, which the Conservatives have refused to fast-track, while complaining about said loopholes. But the NDP want other bills fast-tracked instead – the creation of a Day of Reconciliation with Indigenous people, the UNDRIP bill, and finally passing the conversion therapy ban bill, which is at third reading whenever it can be brought forward. The government is also trying to get some bills past second reading so that they can get them off to committee, which you’d think opposition parties would relish.

I do find the Conservatives’ complaint that the government keeps introducing bills to be somewhat ludicrous, as though the government doesn’t have a legislative agenda that they laid out, and that they can’t try and walk and chew gum at the same time. The parliamentary calendar is finite, and there are a lot of things that this government needs to be able to do, and the Conservatives have been putting a damper on much of that for weeks now. Now that the Bloc and NDP are looking more willing to play ball with the government, one presumes that we’ll see some time allocation motions upcoming to prioritise more bills, and get them through the process, rather than give the government “more ammunition” for the election nobody actually wants.

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QP: Weaponizing International Women’s Day

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For International Women’s Day, it was mostly women in the Chamber, except for the Liberals, though Catherine McKenna was present as a designated front-bench babysitter. Candice Bergen led off for the Conservatives by video, and she accused the government of covering up when they knew about the General Vance allegations, to which Harjit Sajjan stated that he disagreed with the statement, and he looks forward to setting the record straight when he has the right opportunity. Bergen stated that if Sajjan wasn’t part of the investigation, he was part of the cover-up, to which Sajjan repeated that he directed the allegations to the Privy Council Office, and they followed up. Bergen tried to make this an International Women’s Day issue, to which Sajjan started that no politician should be part of the investigation process but that they should be done independently. Gérard Deltell took over in French and asked the same thing, and Sajjan repeated that politicians should not be part of investigations and he looked forward to setting the record straight at committee. Deltell accused the government of lacking courage, for which Sajjan hit back by saying he wouldn’t take lessons from the Conservatives on gender rights.

Christine Normdin led off for the Bloc, and demanded increased health transfers for the provinces, to which Patty Hajdu reminded her of all the money that the government already transferred to the provinces for the pandemic. Normandin the claimed the government was abandoning the women in the healthcare system by not increasing transfers — another ham-fisted way of trying to wedge into International Women’s Day — and Hajdu countered with actions the government took including topping up the wages of essential workers, most of whom are women.

For the NDP, Jagmeet Singh led off by video, and in French, he demanded a plan to protect women in the Canadian Forces, for which Sajjan reminded him of the actions they have taken to reform the military justice system and victims rights. Singh repeated the question in English, and Sajjan reiterated that there should be an independent investigation process to ensure it has credibility.

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