Tag Archives: Euthanasia

Roundup: Taking a culture change seriously?

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So much of the discourse yesterday – aside from the AstraZeneca vaccine – was around Admiral Art McDonald stepping aside while he is the subject of an investigation into sexual misconduct dating back to 2010. In particular, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and defence minister Harjit Sajjan were asked repeatedly whether they knew anything about this investigation or the allegations behind it before they appointed McDonald to the post of Chief of Defence Staff. (For the record, both Trudeau and Sajjan say they weren’t aware until it was reported in the media).

Trudeau says that it’s a good sign that McDonald stepped aside because it shows how serious this is being taken, and wants those who have experienced said misconduct to know that they will be heard and listened to. Erin O’Toole says that there should be a freeze on all promotions and salary increases for senior leadership in the military until an independent investigation can look into how the Forces have handled the problem of sexual misconduct.

Of course, the bigger problem is likely military culture and the structure of leadership, and there are concerns that Operation Honour is failing because it hasn’t tried to understand why sexual misconduct happens in the first place, and that it’s the broader military culture that needs to be changed. There are also particular calls for a fully independent oversight body to deal with the culture – and one that has actual teeth to it – but even though this was a recommendation in the Deschamps Report, the government didn’t go ahead with it. It remains a question whether the government will get over itself and finally create that independent oversight to finally deal with the problem, but they’ve been dragging their heels on other long-overdue independent oversight, especially over bodies like the CBSA, which has no oversight at all. But the fact that two Chiefs of Defence Staff in a row are under investigation should be a wake-up call as to the broader problems with the Forces, and maybe this government should finally take it more seriously than the half-measures they have taken to date.

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Roundup: Pandora’s Box is open

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With the agreement of all House Leaders in the Commons, MPs have finally done it and wrenched open the lid of Pandora’s Box (which is actually a jar) and have let loose evil into the world. That evil is their remote voting app, and Parliament will forever suffer for it.

Am I being a drama queen about this? Hardly. Because we’re already seeing the demands to make these hybrid sittings permanent. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was asked to report on “savings” of this set-up, and in spite of the increased IT and staff costs (and almost no mention of the human costs of the interpreters burning out and suffering cognitive injuries at a horrific rate), he figured that it would save about $6.2 million a year, mostly in travel costs, as well as some 2,972 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions. And the senator who commissioned the PBO report was so enthralled with the result that she wants to make hybrid sittings permanent, with the “bonus” that parliamentarians can spend more time in their “ridings” (erm, except senators don’t have ridings because they represent the whole province, Quebec’s senatorial districts notwithstanding).

What I have been warning about this whole time is that MPs would use the pandemic to normalise hybrid sittings and remote voting, because some of them – the Liberals especially – have been pushing for this for years with little success, and with the pandemic, they are not letting a good crisis go to waste. They know that once it’s over, they will contrive excuses to keep these “temporary” measures permanent, starting with the excuse that it’ll be beneficial for MPs on parental leave, and then it’ll be for those with work-life balance issues, and finally it will because they just have so many things going on in their ridings that they couldn’t possibly be in Ottawa – and now they have the added justification of cost savings and reduced GHG from flights. Parliament is facing de-population, and it will become like a homeroom that everyone attends once or twice a year, and that’s it.

The problem is that Parliament is a face-to-face institution. Some of the most important work that happens is actually on the margins of committee rooms, in the lobbies behind the Chambers, or in the corridors. Ministers can be button-holed by MPs in the Chamber waiting for votes, which is incredibly valuable. Relationships are built with stakeholders and witnesses who appear at committee, and that happens face-to-face. And more importantly, MPs need to actually be in the same room for collegiality to happen. When MPs stopped having dinner together in the Parliamentary Restaurant three nights a week after they ended evening sittings, collegiality plummeted and has never recovered. If MPs aren’t even in Ottawa with one another, they will be fully ensconced in partisan bubbles that make it easy to treat one another as the enemy rather than as fellow MPs who can play outraged in the Chamber and go for a drink together afterward (which is becoming rare enough as it is). This is antithetical to what Parliament is. And not enough of them are getting it, so they’re allowing this to go ahead full-steam ahead, and boasting about “modernisation,” and so on. It will kill Parliament, and not enough people will actually care, which is the worst part.

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Roundup: More alike than unalike

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The NDP decided that the bilateral meeting between Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden was the perfect time to take to shitposting about it, in the form of a juvenile mock-up of the agenda items, and making their remarks on them. Because this is where we’re at in this country – our two main opposition parties have decided that the online tactics of shitposting are definitely the way to win the hearts and minds of Canadian voters.

In the NDP’s case, this is not only about trolling Trudeau, but also Biden, because they have made a concerted effort to appeal to the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Bernie Sanders fanbase – consistent with their lifting their policy ideas wholesale, no matter whether or not they have any relevance in the Canadian context. This tends to involve a certain amount of trying to “win the Internet,” whether it’s with Jagmeet Singh adopting TikTok memes, or the culmination of this attempt to co-opt American Democrat cred when Singh and Ocasio-Cortez played Among Us over Twitch as part of a fundraiser. As a more centrist, compromise candidate, Biden is seen as a betrayal of the progressive wing of the Democrats, and you can bet that the Canadian New Democrats trying to appeal to them is going to cash in on that as much as possible.

None of this should be too surprising, however – the NDP have long-since abandoned any real sense of ideology for the sake of being left-flavoured populists, running after flavours of the week and pursuing policies that don’t actually make sense for their own purported principles (like their demand to cut the HST off of home heating, which would only disproportionately reward the wealthy). In this way, they have been more like the Conservatives than unalike for a while now, but with this full-on embrace of shitposting (as opposed to simply the mendacious omission of jurisdictional boundaries in their demands) just drives that point home.

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Roundup: A lack of will is not an emergency

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With the spread of variants on the rise, and certain provinces still insistent on relaxing public health restrictions, we’re going to get another round of reporters demanding that the federal government invoke the Emergencies Act to force provinces to maintain lockdowns – which they can’t actually do. No, seriously – they can’t do it.

https://twitter.com/TurnbullWhitby/status/1363486802674352130

I cannot stress this enough – the federal government cannot just invoke the Act on a whim. It needs to meet the threshold – which I am hard-pressed to see how this situation does – and it needs provincial consent, and if it doesn’t it is essentially declaring war on the provinces, and is going to poison the well of federalism. And even more to the point, keeping the focus on the federal government continues to give premiers who aren’t doing their jobs a free pass when we should be holding them to account for their failures.

Speaking of which, the math on these variants is scary, and premiers need to so something about it rather than feigning helplessness, which is what they’re oh so good at. They have the power to do something about it, rather than shrugging and blaming the federal government for not making vaccines appear out of thin air. But that’s what they’re doing, and that’s what the vast majority of the media are letting them get away with. We shouldn’t let them.

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Roundup: Not calling out conspiracy theories

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Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant has been spreading conspiracy theories about the Liberals on her YouTube channel, and in conversations with campus conservative clubs, and how does The Canadian Press frame it? “Tory MP Cheryl Gallant accused of peddling ‘deranged conspiracy theories’ by Liberals.”

No.

Gallant outright peddled batshit lunacy, and CP went and both-sided the it rather than point out what Gallant was up to. “The Liberals say this. The Conservatives say this. Who’s right? You decide!” No, that’s not good enough. This is exactly the reason why political leaders realised that they could get away with outright lying to people – because they’re not being called out on it, since these outlets feel the need to be performatively “objective” and “fair,” and both-sides rather than be objective in pointing out that the kinds of things Gallant is saying are outrageous falsehoods in the headline and lead paragraphs. And speaking of leaders who lie, what was Erin O’Toole’s response when this was brought up? That this was just the Liberals trying to create a distraction. Seriously, that’s what he said. So, he’s tacitly endorsing that this is the kind of thing that’s okay in his party. Then again, he’s been fine with the outrageous lies being told by his MPs in Question Period and on social media, and has contributed more than a few of them himself, so I’m not sure why I’m surprised that he hasn’t drawn the line at behaviour like Gallant’s.

Another case in point of how media is doing active harm has been the way the COVAX Facility has been framed, as every single outlet calls it a way to give vaccines to poor countries as though it’s some kind of charity. It’s not, and that framing is wrong, and actually undermines the programme. (Case in point here). The whole gods damned point of COVAX is for wealthy countries like Canada to sign up and get doses from them so that it encourages them to invest and use their capital to leverage vaccine manufacturers to scale up production, and gives heft to the bulk purchases so that low-income countries can get equitable access. Yes, it has a separate arm that is solely about donations, but the main programme relies on countries like Canada to buy doses from there, not just donate money. And yet you wouldn’t know it ready or listening to any media outlet in this country. (And seriously – the reason other G7 countries have not taken their doses is because the only vaccine available through COVAX at this point is the AstraZeneca vaccine, which those countries are apparently producing for themselves so they don’t need that vaccine.) But hey, there is an established narrative that the media consensus has decided to feed into rather than taking ten minutes to read the gods damned GAVI website to understand how it works so that they can describe it properly, and we must service the narrative, right?

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Roundup: A hollow gun control bill

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The much-ballyhooed gun control bill tabled this week is going over like a lead balloon on all sides – not only the predictable caterwauling from the gun lobby, but also gun control advocates who see the bill as largely an empty shell that doesn’t really do much at all. And then there are the provinces, many of whom are opposed to this kind of measure and who are accusing the federal government of doing an end-run around them, as cities are creatures of the province – which of course this bill is doing, because the federal government is trying to respond to demands while provinces (and most especially those run by conservatives) refuse to take action.

Matt Gurney lays out a lot of these contradictions in this piece, and concludes that this bill is more about political showmanship than it is about doing anything concrete – which is 100 percent correct. The Liberals are in something of a tight spot – their base is in large urban centres, where this is a pressing issue, and they are trying to look like they’re doing something when provinces aren’t, which means kludging what few levers they have available (in this case, using federal criminal law powers and tying them to municipal regulations). At the same time, they’re trying not to obliterate what little support they still have in rural seats, some of which they have fought to regain, tooth and nail, after the long-gun registry, which hobbled them for decades. I can see themselves thinking they’re clever enough to try and play both sides, but that rarely ends well.

Meanwhile, here’s Gurney with a lengthy thread with more on the deeper reading into the bullshit inherent in these measures, and you should click through and read the whole thing, because it put so many things into context. Suffice to say:

https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1362105848768712707

https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1362113777244770306

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Roundup: Aping the Americans for the sake of chaos

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I frequently chide NDP leader Jagmeet Singh for his propensity to create jurisdictional confusion with the intent of making promises he can’t keep, and trying to make the Liberal government look unwilling to help (when they simply don’t have levers at their disposal), and yet, he keeps it up, again and again, and refuses to be called out on this particular brand of bullshit. And yesterday was case in point, yet again, as he laid out how an NDP government (post-election) would handle the vaccine distribution – using the military, and setting up federal vaccination sites.

As you can expect, this particular pledge is just more bullshit masquerading as a solution to which problems don’t actually exist. Oh, and yet another example of Singh simply lifting what the American Democrats are doing and insisting that it’ll also work for Canada. Never mind that in the US, where they don’t have public health care, the need for military intervention in the problem is more acute, especially as the rollout is a complete gong show in many states. This is not really a problem here, even though certain provincial governments are less than competent – but it’s certainly not the problem that the Americans are facing, so we don’t need their solutions. This having been said, while Singh thinks that federal vaccination sites will speed up delivery, the problem is not human resources, for which provinces have plenty of trained people and access to Red Cross volunteers, but it’s largely logistics. The notion of setting up federal sites in parallel to existing provincial ones, where it’s unlikely that their IT will communicate well (seriously, every province has their own IT systems and health record formats), and they will only create back-end confusion that will simply cause chaos in trying to determine who has been vaccinated with which product, and whether they’ve had both doses, and how to contact people who need second dose appointments if you have two systems that don’t interface well. There is no world in which this ends well. He should know this and ensure that the federal role is to ensure provinces have all the support they need, but no, he needs to keep trying to inflate the federal role (probably so that he can look like the hero).

His particular demands for publicly-owned vaccine and PPE manufacturing is also problematic in a number of ways. We can all see the need for some domestic manufacturing capability of PPE, it would seem to me that public ownership is a solution in search of a problem, particularly given that federal management of emergency stockpiles was not exactly stellar. As for publicly owned vaccine manufacturing, which particular platform would this entail? It’s highly unlikely that a publicly-owned vaccine manufacturer would have invested in mRNA technology while it was still unproven for wide-scale vaccinations, which wouldn’t do us any good in the current environment. I get that they have an ideological bent to public ownership, but articulate the problems you’re trying to solve – something that they refuse to do when called out.

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Roundup: An oncoming vaccine delivery crunch

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It looks like the vaccine delays are at an end, with ramped up deliveries planned through to the end of March, and Pfizer’s Canadian president insisting that they fully plan to meet their contracted deadlines. Add to that, there is more talk of AstraZeneca vaccines on the way (which could be from India as well as the US), but as has been pointed out in this breakdown of vaccine delivery math, this is going to put more pressure on provinces to get those doses into arms.

Why is that concerning? Well, provincial government competence is a very live concern. Ontario, for example, still hasn’t set up a web portal or call centre to book appointments for vaccinations, when they’ve been caterwauling that they need more doses – only, whoops, it turns out that they can’t even bloody count the doses they’ve delivered and they only delivered half as many as they thought they had. That’s not exactly encouraging (particularly because the government is being run by a gang of incompetent murderclowns).

Add to that, Ontario’s ethical framework for vaccine priorities is far more confused than it should be. Would that this government could get its act together, but no. This is only making a bad situation worse, but remember, everyone has to keep praising Ford for how he really exceeded his (low) expectations, rather than holding him to account for the thousands of unnecessary deaths that have occurred on his watch.

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Roundup: CSIS has a warning and a request

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The head of CSIS gave a rare speech yesterday, in which he did two things – called for more modernisations to the CSIS Act in order to let the organisation collect more digital information, and to warn about state actors who are targeting the country’s economic secrets, often though partnerships that they then take advantage of (pointing the finger on this one specifically at China).

Meanwhile, here’s former CSIS analyst Jessica Davis’ assessment of what she heard in the speech, which has a few interesting insights.

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1359213965851697154

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Roundup: O’Toole’s risky, ideological experiment

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Erin O’Toole met with the Toronto Star’s editorial board yesterday, and indicated that any election won’t be his doing, which would indicate that he’s in no rush to call non-confidence with this government – and why would he? Should he topple the government (in a pandemic), he would not only have to wear that decision, but also try to explain how he would do things differently around things like vaccine procurement – something which he won’t actually do because he knows that we don’t have the domestic capacity to produce them, and that the current delays are outside of this government’s control. He won’t say those things out loud, because he needs to create a narrative about this government “failing,” even though he couldn’t do any better, but the truth has apparently never been a barrier for O’Toole (nor his predecessor).

What O’Toole is trying to do is set up a competing narrative for the post-pandemic recovery, where he gets to frame the Liberals’ plans of “build back better” – focused on green and inclusive growth – as being some kind of risky, ideologically-driven “experimentation.” The problem with this, of course, is that his plans for getting the economy back to status quo is that the old normal led us to this point – including the thousands of deaths that happened as a result of this pandemic. It would seem to me that trying to get to the old normal is risky and ideological, because they have proven to have failed, and were stifling growth – remember that calls for inclusive growth predate the pandemic and were highlighted by those radical ideologues at the Bank of Canada as a necessary pathway if the Canadian economy was to continue growing at a point where we had reached “full employment” and future growth was going to be constrained. Nevertheless, O’Toole is pandering to a voter base (and, frankly, a pundit class) that fails to see that the future economic drivers are going to be the green economy and ensuring that we get more women and minorities into the workforce. For a party that likes to fancy itself as “good economic managers,” they seem to be completely blinkered on where the market is heading, and are trying to chart a path that everyone else is rapidly abandoning.

Meanwhile, O’Toole’s finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, has been putting on a big dog and pony show about our unemployment rate over the past few days, and thinks he has a winning line in talking about “paycheques versus credit card debt,” but he’s basing it on a false premise that unemployment figures are directly comparable – they’re not, and as a former employment minister, he knows that and is lying to you. (He also knows that places like the US have their economies opened with massive death tolls as a result, but those are just details, right?)

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