Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: Extreme multiculturalism

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The fallout to Maxime Bernier’s latest Twitter missive on multiculturalism was more muted than one might have expected – no actual condemnation from Andrew Scheer, just a bland statement from his office that didn’t address Bernier’s words at all. And Erin O’Toole offered his own response which was basically just a reiteration that the various conservative parties in Canada’s history have had ethno-cultural firsts as a way of proving that they’re not all bigots or racists, but it missed the point that there was nevertheless a certain amount of tokenism in those firsts – that yes, they’ve got one of these different groups, but one is enough, thanks, and don’t talk to us about systemic barriers or discrimination. After all, these singular examples pulled up their bootstraps and made it – why can’t everyone else?

Bernier himself got huffy that he was described as saying he was against diversity – he insists he’s okay with some diversity, but not “extreme multiculturalism,” which is odd, because it’s like he missed the whole point of multiculturalism, which is about finding an effective way of integrating newcomers rather than alienating them further into ghettos. The fact that he doesn’t get that just adds fuel to the notion that this is all about winking to xenophobes and white nationalists, never mind the fact that it’s a nonsense proposition that there’s a Goldilocks zone of not too little, not too much, but just enough diversity that will magically keep Canada from disintegrating into some kind of ethnic hellhole. Never mind that the concern trolling about Liberal “identity politics” ignores the fact that in order to address systemic barriers facing women, sexual minorities, and people of colour, you actually to address what those barriers are, which is not about balkanizing – as Bernier seems to think.

Meanwhile, not every Conservative seems to be keen on Bernier’s pronouncements, but they seem concerned about how much influence he has among the base (somewhat mystifyingly). And with a convention coming up, we’ll see if these tensions spill out into the open.

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Roundup: Saudi spat

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So that diplomatic dispute with Saudi Arabia sure escalated quickly. To recap, Saudi Arabia took offence to Canada calling on the release of activists from their country, and expelled our ambassador, cancelled trade deals (which includes large exports of barley from Canada), and demanded that the 15,000 or so Saudi students in Canada return home within the next four weeks (which could have an impact on the Canadian economy). It remains to be seen if that LAV deal is still on the table, because that could also have a major impact on jobs in Southwestern Ontario. Both Chrysita Freeland and Bill Morneau are holding firm in their position, but what is potentially more worrying is the fact that the US and the UK aren’t taking sides. Peter MacKay thinks that the PM needs to get involved personally to clear this up, for whatever his opinion is worth.

Bessma Momani talks about what’s behind Saudi Arabia’s move in expelling Canada’s ambassador, and John Geddes interviews two other experts on the area. Kevin Carmichael looks at how political disputes are going to affect trade in the future, especially as authoritarian regimes dare Western countries to ignore rights.

Meanwhile, the dumbest take in all of this has to be the number of people who have started salivating about how this loss of Saudi oil imports on the East Coast means that we should resurrect Energy East. Not only does it not make economic sense, it doesn’t make practical sense since the refineries in Eastern Canada aren’t built to handle the heavy crude coming from Alberta, which puts a lie to the notion that Energy East would be used for domestic consumption rather than export. Even if it were economical to convert and extend the pipeline (and currently it’s not with both Trans Mountain being twinned and Keystone XL finally going ahead), you would need to retrofit or build new refineries in the East, at the cost of yet more billions of dollars, which doesn’t make any sense when we can find imports from countries other than Saudi Arabia that are still cheaper. (And for so-called fiscal conservatives to demand this pipeline happen in spite of economics for nationalist concerns makes their reasoning all the more suspicious).

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Roundup: Neither a minor nor a major shuffle

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So there was a Cabinet shuffle, and while not major, it was a little bigger than some may have anticipated. Five new ministers have entered the fray, which expands things somewhat, but still isn’t into later Harper territory. Some of the changes are not unexpected – Joly being moved to tourism while still keeping official languages is a bit of a demotion from the Heritage file that she garnered so much criticism from, particularly in Quebec, on things like the Netflix file. Some of the changes are pretty political – moving Sohi from infrastructure to natural resources in order to have the Alberta minister on the pipeline file is pretty naked on its face. Bill Blair to border security (plus organized crime reduction) are two files that the government wants a stern face on to make it look like they’re taking action. Some of the additions, however, are a bit mystifying, like a minister for seniors? Really? Is this not just a pandering exercise to a voting demographic rather than a file with particular challenges that need addressing? And some of these questions won’t be answered right away, because the mandate letters won’t be available until later in the summer. Here is the updated Cabinet list including the existing ministers whose titles got modified, and here are profiles of the five new additions.

And then the reaction. Blair’s promotion may send the signal that they’re taking the border situation seriously, but it also can look like they’re a) caving to critics, b) admitting that this is a security and not a humanitarian situation, c) putting border security alongside fighting organized crime in the same portfolio risks conflating the two in the eyes of those who are convinced that these irregular migrants are really all criminals and terrorists. Trudeau apparently lured Blair into politics on the promise of fighting the number one enemy of public security – fear. I’m not sure that putting him in this new role fights fear or reinforces it.

In terms of analysis, Paul Wells notes both that putting Blair into Cabinet is a bit of a poke in the eye to Doug Ford, given that they were nemeses during the Fords’ years in Toronto City Hall, and that this new Cabinet is one built to survive the coming storms until the next election (along with the observation that Trudeau seems to have demoted himself by stripping away the intergovernmental affairs responsibility and giving it to Dominic LeBlanc). Kady O’Malley makes five observations about the shuffle, while Susan Delacourt looks at the shuffle from the perspective of reacting to the recent Ontario election.

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Roundup: Recalling the committee

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Yesterday was the day when the Commons immigration committee returned to town for an emergency meeting on the irregular border-crossing situation, and in the end, they agreed to hold two more meetings in the next few weeks to get a better sense of what is going on, and what the government’s plans are. There’s partisan gamesmanship happening on all sides of this, and each party wants a different outcome from these hearings, but they’re going to happen, and despite the fact that Michelle Rempel tries to spin the fact that she “forced” the Liberals to pay attention to this, she was apparently pushing on an open door as they were happy to do it, as their position is that this gives them an opportunity to correct the spin and misinformation that Rempel and her compatriots are putting out there.

Meanwhile, the government also made it clear that they were going to give funding directly to the City of Toronto to deal with their housing situation for migrants (only a few of which are actually irregular border crossers) because the provincial government has abdicated their responsibility to do something – while other communities outside of Toronto are willing and able to house and resettle more of them, and are actively seeking to do so. David Reevely gives more context here, and in particular notes that while the number of migrants is relatively small, the bigger problem is that they’re being put into a system that is already stressed.

But the rhetoric carries on, and Andrew Coyne takes it on in this piece – that, despite the claims, this isn’t actually a “crisis,” and treating it as such isn’t helpful, nor are the suggestions that the Conservatives are throwing out there. And worse, the Conservatives have put out a particularly problematic Twitter campaign that is being decried as racist, basing itself on a headline from a Diane Francis column in the Financial Post which is full of outright misinformation (particularly the notion that irregular border crossers aren’t screened – they absolutely are), torque, and reheated Conservative talking points. Coyne went further in a twitter thread, but regardless, the Conservatives continue to walk a fine line around pandering to xenophobic anger while still insisting that they support “orderly immigration,” as though we that were feasible 100 percent of the time. Real life doesn’t work like that, and Canada has been fortunate in that we’re protected by three oceans and American paranoia, but now we have to deal with a fraction of the migrants that other countries do. Maybe it behoves us to act like grown-ups about this.

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Roundup: Asylum claimant dust-up

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So there was a bit of a testy exchange yesterday as federal and provincial immigration ministers met in Winnipeg, and Ahmed Hussen got into a bit of a spat with Ontario’s new minister, Lisa MacLeod. Hussen objected to MacLeod (and Doug Ford) using the rhetoric of “illegal border crossers” and ginning up the same rhetoric of the Federal Conservatives that somehow refugee claimants take make it harder for legal immigrants (despite the fact that they’re separate processes and systems). This objection is not new either – Hussen has been saying this for weeks, so for MacLeod to get offended about it yesterday is being performative in the extreme – which is what she wants. With Kathleen Wynne no longer in the picture for her party to pit themselves against, they now need to make Trudeau their straw man. And when Hussen called the behaviour “un-Canadian,” MacLeod and her defenders accused Hussen of “bullying,” which is childish. But wait – it gets better. MacLeod loudly announced that the federal government should pay for these asylum claimants, while Hussen has been saying for weeks that they need Ontario to step up and find places elsewhere in the province than just Toronto to house them, and hey, they’re providing money to do just that. And then, because this wasn’t theatrical enough, Saskatchewan’s minister also refused to sign onto the communiqué from the meeting and demanded that the federal government not only pay for these asylum seekers (of which Saskatchewan has received zero), but that they should pay the full cost of all other government-sponsored refugees. Couple of things: 1) This is starting to get alarmingly close to the kinds of xenophobic populist rhetoric we’re seeing south of the border, and we should be very alarmed by that; and 2) Remember how the federal Conservatives just a few years ago cut refugee health benefits as a “deterrence” mechanism (which the courts later called “cruel and unusual”), which simply downloaded those costs onto the provinces? These are your political brethren.

Also released yesterday were the latest figures for the number of irregular border crossers, and it has plunged again. Because it’s a “crisis” that the government has “done nothing about.” Err, except they have been doing something about it, trying to stem the migrant flow at the source, and lo and behold, it seems to be working. For now, in any case. But the Conservatives continue to press for a meeting of the Commons’ immigration committee next week to rail about it.

Meanwhile, Martin Patriquin calls out the divisive and inflammatory language because it misses the actual issue at play, treating it as a permanent burden rather than a temporary state of affairs.

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Roundup: A “quiet” housekeeping bill

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Do bills get passed “quietly”? There was a bit of debate over the Twitter over this fact yesterday, where it was conceded that a bill was passed with little fanfare, but I wanted to dissect this a little bit. The bill in question was one that was a technical housekeeping bill that legislated that several Minister of State positions were bumped in status, salary and precedence to full ministers, and that they had line departments split out from the previous departments they existed under the envelope of. It had been on the Order Paper since 2016, and signalled that it was happening since the Cabinet was first unveiled in 2015, with Orders in Council doing effectively what the bill did on an interim basis. It garnered attention yesterday because amidst the Cabinet shuffle speculation, it was noted that the bill allows for a couple of more seats to be added to the Cabinet table under this new framework, so Trudeau could theoretically increase the size of his Cabinet (and he yet might). But regardless, because this was passed without fanfare, it was termed as being passed “quietly.”

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Part of why I have a problem with the use of “quietly” – not just in this circumstance but in others – is because it implies that that there was intent. A recent egregious example was the renewal of the equalization formula – something that was in the budget document, in the bill (clearly marked), and came up at committee, and on top of that, was the subject of discussions between the federal and provincial governments for months. But nobody batted an eyelash until the Globe and Mail said it was passed “quietly” (apparently because they didn’t report on it, which is like a tree falling in the forest). And like I said with that equalization issue, it’s not the media’s job to flag every little thing for MPs – they can do their own homework.

My other issue with this is that not every bill is going to get fanfare – a lot of it is technical and relatively uncontroversial, there are a number of bills that are financial measures that are eye-glazing that most MPs don’t pay attention to (though they should) and simply pass of to the PBO to do their homework for them on. This particular bill was, as I said, on the Order Paper since 2016. There was nothing really controversial about it because it purported to fix inequities that would otherwise have ensured that a number of the women in the gender-equal cabinet were not equal in status or pay because they were in portfolios that had previously been relegated to “junior” positions, and a few reporters tried to make hay out of that fact when the Cabinet was first announced in 2015. This is not a bill that deserved fanfare. Expecting it is unrealistic and frankly comes off as a bit whiney when reporters can track these things on LegisInfo like everyone else. It didn’t pass “quietly” – it was a technical bill that passed like all technical bills do. And it’s time we struck “quietly” from the political lexicon.

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Roundup: Explaining the system to Ford

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had his first meeting with Ontario premier Doug Ford yesterday, and it went about as well as could be expected. While the expected topic was going to be carbon pricing, Ford’s people pre-emptively put out a release saying that they were going to wash their hands of the whole irregular border crossers issue, citing that it was the problem the federal government created and they would have to pay for it going forward. Which is a pretty interesting interpretation of areas of provincial responsibility. Trudeau took this in stride, apparently, and in the press conference after, said that he took the time to explain some of the confusion that the premier seemed to have around the issue and things like the difference between immigration and asylum, and Canada’s international obligations when it comes to refugees and asylum seekers. For what it’s worth.

Of course, Ford’s provincial immigration minister lashed out after this happened, but what I find particularly telling about all of this is how much it relies on the kinds of partisan talking points that the federal Conservatives have been putting out around how this is entirely the fault of Trudeau’s #WelcomeToCanada tweet (which would be predicated on ignoring the political situation in the United States), and that it misrepresents the number of migrants who have been since shuttled to Ontario as a result. Now, the federal government is not blameless, as they have been slow to ramp up the resources needed to process claims and were a bit slow off the mark to look at ways to communicate with the communities on the ground in the US – a tactic that ultimately has proved to be successful, but not before a wave of arrivals had already crossed the border. The other thing that is notable is that the predominantly American framing of “illegals” has been cropping up here too, which should be a warning sign about the kinds of populist rhetoric that is being repurposed for domestic effect.

The other thing that this highlights is the fact that we have a provincial government that got to where it is on the basis of simple slogans and unrealistic promises (no, you’re not going to get cheaper gasoline or buck-a-beer), so it should be no surprise when they start making noises that don’t reflect their obligations, both nationally and internationally. Yes, they can try to get more money out of the federal government – which they are providing – but trying to wash their hands of the issue (while subtly playing into the kinds of xenophobic populism that they have largely eschewed to date) is not going to fly.

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Roundup: Oh noes! Girls in STEM!

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Yesterday’s online sniping between MPs had to do with a profile of Conservative MP Rachael Harder in the Globe and Mail. In it, Harder (again) bemoaned that she feels the Liberals are trying to push their own version of feminism and added in some garden-variety whinging that the government apparently has it in for Christians (despite the fact that the PM himself has said that he’s a practicing Catholic). But Harder’s “proof” of how the government is pushing their own version of feminism is – wait for it – the fact that they’re spending money to encourage more girls to get interested in STEM careers. Wow. Such ideology!

I will add that part of the Twitter sniping had to do with the fact that the Liberals blocked the attempt to have Harder installed as chair of the Status of Women committee, and once again, nobody has bothered to point out the fact that as critic, it would not only have been inappropriate for her to be Chair, but it would have made zero sense given that committee chairs are supposed to act in a neutral capacity and not vote unless it’s to break a (rare) tie – something that is antithetical to the role of critic that Harder held. And the fact that Andrew Scheer tried to manoeuvre her into the position was a cynical ploy to make the Liberals look like intolerant bigots (and they took the bait), but nobody dares to call that fact out. Instead, we get Harder and her supporters whinging about how mean the Liberals are to her, while Harder herself seems mystified that a party that prides itself on defending the Charter rights of Canadians would have a problem with an adherent to an ideology that would deny LGBT people full equality and which tells women that they shouldn’t have control over their bodies when it comes to reproduction. You can disagree with it, but don’t act like it’s a surprise that they draw a line there.

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Roundup: Barriers and non-solutions

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As part of a discussion on Power & Politicsyesterday on barriers women face in politics, there were a few well-worn tropes thrown out there, but I wanted to poke into a couple of the items discussed (much of which I’ve already written about in my book, but a refresher course never hurts):

  1. This needs to be an issue addressed by the parties at the grassroots level and shouldn’t be legislated top-down. Parties are already too centrally controlled, and if you want empowered MPs that are women and those who are from diverse communities, they need to participate from the ground-up rather than be appointed top-down.
  2. The side-effect of quotas, be they de facto or de jure, tends to be that women and minorities are nominated in “no-hope” ridings. We’ve seen this time and again, even from the NDP, who have their “no nomination can be run unless the riding association has exhausted the possibility for an equity-seeking candidate” rule. That rule is often conveniently broken if they think they have a winnable straight, white male candidate, and 2011 is a perfect example of how they loaded a lot of women and racialized candidates in “no hope” Quebec ridings that got swept up in the “orange wave.” Most were not good MPs, and some had never been to their ridings before winning, which is the opposite of how nominations should be run.
  3. The voting system is not the problem – it’s entrenched barriers in the nomination system where not enough encouragement is given to women to run (i.e. until this last electoral cycle, they didn’t recognize that women need to be asked several times before they will consider running, and they may have things like childcare issues that need to be sorted when running). A PR system usually creates some manner of list MPs, where your women and minority MPs come from lists rather than having had to run and win ridings, which creates two-tiers of MPs. This also manifests itself in countries with quotas, and women MPs in places like Rwanda have seats but little power as a result.
  4. We can’t do much more to make our parliament more “family friendly” without hollowing it out even more than it has been. While there are issues with childcare, MPs are not without resources to address it (like hiring nannies) rather than forcing the institution to hire precariously-employed childcare workers for part of the year with no sense of numbers on a daily basis. While 60-day parental leave is not objectionable, remote voting and Skyping into committee meetings is very much a problem that we should not encourage in any way.

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Roundup: Duffy’s poor arguments

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Day two of Duffy’s bid to sue the Senate, and his lawyer came up with some…novel arguments. And it sounds like the judge wasn’t buying many of them. For example, they tried to argue that because PMO was exerting influence on the Senate’s leadership that it should nullify privilege. That’s…creative, and utterly ridiculous. When he tried to argue that the suspension should be invalid because it was done for political purposes, the judge wondered aloud if that meant she would have to call every member of the Internal Economy Committee to testify as to their motives – and no, that wasn’t going to happen she quickly decided. They also tried to argue that because the suspension wasn’t related to legislation that privilege doesn’t apply. But that’s also ridiculous because the ability to discipline its members is among the privileges outlined in Section 18 of the Constitution Act, 1867. So good luck with that.  Oh, and the “indefinite suspension” argument is also void because it wasn’t indefinite – it was until the end of the parliamentary session, and there was a fixed election date, so it would expire at that point regardless. (Also, the Senate’s privileges allow it to expel a member, so arguing that indefinite suspension is tantamount to expulsion is also not a solid argument).

The final argument was a plea to put the Charter ahead of privilege, which would go against previous Supreme Court of Canada rulings that stated just the opposite – that the Charter doesn’t trump privilege, because that would open up a floodgate to litigation against the parliamentary process. There’s a thing called stare decisis, the doctrine of precedent that binds our common law system, and while there are rare cases where it can be challenges, this isn’t one of them. It’s actually quite audacious that his lawyer would make the case, and I’m not seeing any particular argument about how the judge should invalidate a Supreme Court of Canada ruling. So yeah. Good luck to this case, because I really don’t see it going anywhere fast.

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