Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: Waiting on the Industrial Relations Board’s decision

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As the Industrial Relations Board began its deliberations of the rail situation and the request of the minister, one of the two railways, CN Rail, opted to end their lockout and start the trains running again. But because the minister’s order included extending the previous collective agreement to now, it somehow reset things for the union, and they issued a seventy-two-hour strike notice, so…the trains may not run again? The whole while, the other rail company, CPKC, just stayed the course with their lockout in order to wait for what the Board had to say.

As for the Board, it needs to determine if binding arbitration is the only way to resolve the impasse in the labour dispute, and whether it can justify that the economic situation has a sufficient impact on the general public that arbitration is, again, the only way to resolve this, and the parties need to present evidence to this effect because this is a quasi-judicial body. The way this whole situation with the Board has been described by most media outlets has been outright wrong, and coupled with the fact that the business lobbies don’t seem to understand the limits of the minister’s powers, and it has led to nothing but confusion as to what is really going on.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives are keeping conspicuously silent about the whole thing, no doubt in a cynical attempt to continue to court the blue collar union vote (as though their history of attempted union-busting will just magically disappear). It is impressive, however, just how much message discipline they have had over this, with nary a stray tweet being sent out (probably because they know Jenni Byrne will scream at them if they do).

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia has suspended ferry service to occupied Crimea after the Ukrainian navy blew up one of those ferries that was hauling fuel and munitions to the occupied region. The Ukrainian forces say that they have used high-precision US-made glide bombs in parts of Kursk, and that they have also re-taken some land in Kharkiv.

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Roundup: No, that lurid tweet was not “inartfully worded”

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Conservative MP Michelle Ferreri deleted her Twitter post that claimed that the high cost of living was causing parents to traffic their children into sex work, and that “soft on crime policies” mean that survivors don’t come forward. She claims that this was simply a statement being “inartfully worded.” Bullshit. Don’t believe her. Ferreri has a record of saying things that defy credulity, such as that seniors in her riding are reduced to eating cat food because of Trudeau, or that the carbon levy has created a mental health crisis in teenagers. No, seriously. She has also been caught on several occasions embellishing her personal history, such as her “scholarship” to university (she got discounted tuition because one of her parents worked there), or her claim that she is the “single mother of six children” (she’s divorced with three children from her first marriage, and her current partner has three children from his previous marriage, and occasionally custody overlaps). This is a pattern.

All of this is deliberate. It is not her being clumsy or not articulating herself—it’s a deliberate tactic of using lurid images to make people irrationally angry at the government, because lies that trigger strong emotions work. That’s the sad truth of the matter, and this is 100 percent the tactic that the Conservatives are using to try and win the next election. Ferreri, granted, likes to gild the lily a little more when it comes to her tales of woe, and that’s what got her into trouble this time, but this isn’t accidental, or her not understanding the crime statistics she heard from her local organizations. This was absolutely about trying to come up with a new lie to make people angry at Trudeau, and she got caught. Not that there will be any consequences, because everything is both-sidesed in the media, so her defenders will rationalize her falsehoods, and nothing will change. They know how to game the system like this, and they will keep doing it because it works for them.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian forces say that they destroyed an S-300 anti-aircraft system in Rostov region overnight, citing that it was being used to attack civilian infrastructure. President Zelenskyy says that forces are shoring up defences in the east near Pokrovsk, as Russia tries to capture the city. There is some speculation that Putin’s slow response to the incursion in Kursk could cause him problems among his backers—or not, since he’s making them rich regardless.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1825896088315834440

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Roundup: Grossly distorting crime stats

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Pierre Poilievre has been putting out a series of charts lately to “prove” that the Justin Trudeau-led government has been an apocalyptic disaster for the country, and one of them has bene around violent crime statistics. But because this is Poilievre, he takes those statistics and distorts them to create a monstrous picture that doesn’t actually reflect reality, as Amarnath Amarasingam explains:

This is classic Poilievre, incidentally. He has made a career out of cherry-picking a single data point, then building a massive, misleading narrative around it and when you call him on the lie, he insists that that data came from Statistics Canada, or the PBO, or wherever. In other words, he tries to use their legitimacy to launder his disinformation, and provide him with intellectual cover when clearly he either did not understand what the data was, or he simply took the information and constructed a false narrative (and I have my particular suspicion about which one it is). What is even more dangerous about these kinds of distortions is that they are being mixed with a big dose of racism among Poilievre’s online base, who are blaming immigrants for this supposed “spike” in crime (which is not a spike), and this could lead to some very bad outcomes.

For another example, we have the real household income figures from 2022, which he has also utterly distorted because of course he has. And has any legacy media outlet called any of this out? Of course not. Meanwhile, this has never been about logic or facts, or reasoned arguments—it’s about lies that make people angry so that they vote emotionally, which he thinks will benefit him (and that those lies won’t blow up in his face when he can’t deliver on his false promises). Depending on lies is a very bad strategy in the medium-to-long term, but here we are, swimming in them.

Ukraine Dispatch

Even though Ukrainian forces shot down three missiles and 25 out of 26 drones, an energy facility in the Sumy region was hit, and fire broke out. A fourteen-year-old died when a Russian struck near a playground in Zaporizhzhia. Russia has been making an aggressive push in the east, claiming the towns of Zalizne and Niu-York. Ukraine is reported to have launched a drone attack on Moscow with at least ten drones, while a diesel depot on the Rostov region was set on firefrom a Ukrainian drone strike. Russian forces have confirmed that Ukrainian forces have damaged or destroyed all three bridges over the Seym River, which could trap Russian units caught between the river, the Ukrainian advance, and the Ukrainian border.

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Roundup: Qwhite the the stock footage mistake

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The Conservatives released a video over social media over the weekend, where they took what appears to be a canned speech that Pierre Poilievre gave during Calgary Stampede, and added a bunch of stock footage to it. But, well, when you’re talking about how much you love Canada in your speech, it’s probably best not to use stock footage from places like the US, Serbia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and even more importantly, when you’re praising the new fighter jets that Canadian pilots will be flying, it’s probably best not to use footage of Russian fighters.

https://twitter.com/disorderedyyc/status/1825265002674287077

The video was eventually deleted, but it was also observed that it’s funny that in this stock-footage ideal that Poilievre was using, just how very white the Canada he presented was. For a party that keeps trying to make inroads with particular ethno-cultural communities in the suburbs of major cities, that might be a problem. And while I’m sure it wasn’t a conscious decision on the part of whichever of their social media geniuses that edited the piece together, it does say volumes about the kinds of people they attract to the party, and what it says about the vision of Canada that they’re looking for from the Conservatives.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched its third ballistic missile attack against Kyiv this month, but it appears they were shot down on approach. While Ukraine shot down 14 Russian drones overnight Saturday, a missile attack on Sumy injured two people. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is back to saying that the Kursk operation is about creating a buffer zone (which is currently taking out bridges that will slow Russia’s ability to bring supplies to the region), and that all of the Russian soldiers being taken prisoner will be used to exchange for more Ukrainian POWs.

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Roundup: Coordinating a Venezuela response

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Friday evening, a statement went out from Canada and some twenty-one other allied governments about the situation in Venezuela. This after a couple of weeks of certain Conservative MPs and some of the Elder Pundits of this country having meltdowns that we haven’t issued immediate condemnations of the stolen election or demands that the opposition leader be recognized as the winner by Canada (and Conservatives currently feel motivated on this file because Pierre Poilievre’s wife is originally from Venezuela).

Lo and behold, Canada was working in concert with allies both in the region and abroad to ensure that there is a common voice when it comes to calling on support for democracy and human rights in Venezuela, particularly because Nicholas Maduro has been cracking down on protesters and arresting them, no doubt with the support of his Autocracy Inc. fellows, who have helped the country evade sanctions up to this point. Having coordinated responses with like-minded allies is a very important thing, and should not be underestimated.

And because this is currently an Anne Applebaum fan account, let me point to her most recent book, Autocracy Inc.,which includes a large section on Venezuela, how Chavez turned it into a kleptocracy under the guise of “Bolivarian socialism,” how other autocratic nations have allowed it to evade sanctions regimes (though it seems that China has been a bit burned by the very same kleptocrats that have bankrupted the country), and how the democratic opposition has been building support in that country in spite of the Maduro regime. It’s a great read, and I would highly encourage you to check it out (while we’ve still got some summer left).

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine’s air force downed five Russian drones overnight Thursday, while Ukrainian authorities are urging civilians to evacuate from Pokrovsk before Russians arrive in the area. Advances continue in the Kursk region, in the hopes of convincing Putin to start “fair” peace talks. Reporters who have visit the Kursk region under Ukraine’s control finds that there is a trial of destruction in their wake. Here’s a look at how vigilant Ukrainian society has become around allegations of corruption, in this case around reconstruction of the damaged children’s hospital.

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Roundup: Sophistry and the “Canadian Dream”

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A piece widely shared over the weekend in the Globe and Mail, titled “The Canadian dream is on life support,” was a curious bit of writing, as the Elder Pundits of this country treated it like a damning indictment of the current government. While Omer Aziz’s ultimate conclusions in the piece are correct—that the federal government needs to admit that things have gone wrong, throw out their old assumptions and pivot, and they need to throw away their talking points while they’re at it—his process of getting there was torturous, and full of outright sophistry.

One of the things that really stood out for me in the piece was just how shallow the analysis really was, particularly in the fact that it served as something of an apologia for the premiers. You wouldn’t know it from reading the piece, but while he levels much of his scorn at the federal government, many of the problems he described are the fault of provincial governments, even where he asserts that they are solely federal such as with immigration. His attention to things like international students were the fault of provincial governments—most especially Ontario and BC—who let their post-secondary institutions treat these international students like cash cows (because they cut funding to those institutions), and allowed the public-private partnership colleges that were largely fraudulent to flourish, again because these provincial governments weren’t doing their jobs, while the federal government was told to just trust them (and I’m not sure how the federal immigration department was supposed to be auditing these institutions in the first place). Likewise, provincial governments scream for temporary foreign workers, and the federal government has to operate on a certain level of trust that these provincial governments know their labour markets best. With his condemnation of the supposed laxity of our criminal justice system again ignores that policing and the administration of justice are provincial matters, but that is never mentioned. He even sides with Facebook on their cutting off of Canadian news and says that the Canadian government wasn’t nice enough to them. Come on.

There are things going wrong in this country, but many of them are complex, and have roots in decades of policy choices by federal and provincial governments that have taken us to this point, and it’s hard for any one government to unwind these structural problems. This kind of essay does a disservice by trying to be simplistic about the problems and solutions to those problems.

Ukraine Dispatch

A father and son were killed in a Russian missile strike on the Kyiv region on Sunday, while three civilians were killed in attacks on Kharkiv and Donetsk on Saturday. In the Kursk incursion, Russians claim that they are increasing security in the area (as videos of their troops surrending en masse flood social media), while president Zelenskyy says that this move puts pressure on Russia as the aggressor. There was a fire reported on the grounds of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, but the structure itself appears to be intact.

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Roundup: Desperately latching onto a narrative

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It’s not unexpected, but over the past fifty-two hours or so, we are getting the attempts to wedge the Canada Angle™ onto the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris handoff, and trying to somehow it to Justin Trudeau. When it comes from ignorant Americans, it’s a bit creepy and you want to tell them to worry about their own messes. When it comes from Canadians, it’s cringey and a little bit desperate.

Even if Justin Trudeau were to somehow miraculously decide it was time for him to step aside, say after a long walk along the beach during his vacation right now, there will be no automatic handoff to Chrystia Freeland. Even if she were still interested in the leadership at this point (and it’s not clear if she were, because I suspect that even she realizes that no matter how competent of a minister she is, she’s something of a charisma black hole), there is no internal process for leadership selection, and the process the party designed to bring us Trudeau needs months of voter sign-ups in order to build to a coronation for a new personality cult hermit crab to inherit the empty shell of a party brand. It’s not a quick pivot, and Trudeau would likely still need to remain in a leadership capacity until a handoff, months later, which gives his successor little runway. (As I wrote in my column, if this were a healthy Westminster democracy with caucus selection of leadership, this could have been handled weeks or months ago).

Aside from that fact, there is no consensus candidate to be that replacement that would allow for a handoff like with Harris, where the Americans’ interminable election process means that they had little time to find a replacement before their convention, and all of the major players decided to line up behind Harris. That wouldn’t happen here because there is no one that the party is going to rally around as a whole. There are frankly too many personalities who want that leadership, even if it’s a poisoned chalice by now, and I’m not sure how the dynamics of trying to convert from one cult of personality to another plays on the fly rather than after a complete crash and rebuild. In any case, this isn’t the US, it’s not even remotely the same as Biden/Harris, and the pundit class needs to cool their jets.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian attack damaged a power facility in the Sumy region, resulting in more power cuts. Russians claim that a Ukrainian drone attack damaged a ferry and killed one person in port.

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Roundup: Lies about legalisation

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For months now, Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives have been claiming that the Liberals “legalised” hard drugs in BC, which is false, and have been trying to build up a particular lie that they are planning to do so across the country. Again, to repeat, this is a lie, and the limited decriminalisation that happened in BC was done reluctantly, but only after the province, the provincial police force, and municipal authorities all wanted to give it a go as a way of reducing mortality from the toxic drug crisis. They’ve had limited success, but have started rolling back some of those measures which had nothing to do with decriminalisation, mainly being open drug use, because it’s spooking voters. And I get that, but it has nothing to do with decriminalisation and everything to do with the toxic supply. Drug users have taken the notion that if they use openly, then someone may save them with Naloxone if they overdose in public. It’s not just happening in BC, but everywhere across the country now—I see it on the streets in Ottawa all the time, and there is no decriminalisation happening.

Nevertheless, this week Poilievre claims he has “proof” that there is a national decriminalisation plan—which he and his MPs use “legalise” with interchangeably, even though they are absolutely not the same thing. The problem? That the very text he’s highlighting doesn’t say that there is a national decriminalisation plan, only that the federal government is willing to work with willing jurisdictions using the tools at their disposal, that can include decriminalisation. It doesn’t matter that they apparently have no reading comprehension ability—they’ve just highlighted a couple of words and made a false declaration.

And now Poilievre and his MPs are blanketing their social channels with this blatant lie, because they want to make people angry and afraid. The truth doesn’t matter. It never did. They’re going to keep lying, because it works, and because nobody, least of all legacy media, is going to call them on it.

Ukraine Dispatch

While both sides have traded drone assaults, the Russians claim to have taken over two villages—one in Kharkiv region, the other in Luhansk. Russians are moving in on the town of Pokrovsk in the east, which serves as a logistics hub for Ukraine. The Czech Republic says that artillery deliveries to Ukraine are going to accelerate. And Ukraine is closing in on a deal to restructure $20 billion of its debt.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1815394403675988039

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Roundup: Straying far out of their lane

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After their big song and dance about wanting the federal government to stay in their own lane, the premiers decided to start weighing in on defence spending—an explicitly federal jurisdiction—yesterday, trying to insist that Canada should meet its NATO spending target sooner than the outlined plan. I’m really not sure how this is exactly the premiers staying in their own lane if they expect the prime minister to stay in his, but they certainly made no shortage of ridiculous excuses for their demands, such as this being about trade with the Americans and so on, but come on. Justin Trudeau did write a letter in response to Tim Houston and Doug Ford, saying the federal government is only trying to help the provinces improve the lives of Canadians, and that maybe they should sign on rather than be obstructionist.

Also from the meeting, Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador expressed an interest in resettling some the asylum seekers who landed in Quebec, but that hasn’t stopped Doug Ford from demanding more money for resettlement, nor has it stopped David Eby and Danielle Smith from demanding money for “newcomers,” when the specific issue is just what obligation the federal government has for asylum seekers before their refugee claim is approved, at which point they genuinely become a federal responsibility. This isn’t about helping to settle economic migrants or other mainstream immigrants, which aren’t the federal government’s sole responsibility, but they want to pretend that it is because they want to whinge for more money when what they’re trying to conflate has nothing to do with the actual obligations of the federal government. Again, it’s not really that tough to understand, but these premiers are going to be obtuse and engage in sophistry along the way.

Meanwhile, because several of the premiers are talking equalisation again, I cannot stress enough how badly the CBC described the programme in their article today. Provinces do not write cheques for equalisation. Not province transfers money to another province. It is paid for out of the federal treasury from the income taxes collected from all Canadians, and distributed to those provinces who fall below the threshold of fiscal capacity to have equal programming. Even more to the point, while not raised in the CBC piece, fiscal capacity has nothing to do with whether or not a province is running a deficit, because that would be absolutely absurd and no province would run a surplus if they thought they could get equalisation dollars if they didn’t. Regardless, this was extremely sloppy journalism from the CBC and reads to me like the reporter just relayed how one of the premiers described how the programme works rather than actually looking it up or asking someone who has a clue (and that’s not any of the premiers). Hermes wept…

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia and Ukraine exchanged 95 prisoners of war each yesterday.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1813524697964823028

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Roundup: A predictable lack of self-awareness of her rhetoric

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As day follows night, it was not only predictable but absolutely inevitable that Danielle Smith would immediately start parroting Republican talking points to condemn the rhetoric of her political rivals for the increase in political violence in the wake of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. And because this is Danielle Smith, there is absolutely zero self-awareness of her own history of violent political rhetoric and encouraging it among the more swivel-eyed elements of her political base in reference to her rivals.

In fact, here are some examples of how Smith’s past rhetoric has put lives in danger, which, again, she refuses to take absolutely any responsibility for. No, it’s the “progressive left” with their “cancel culture” that is creating this violent rhetoric.

Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre says he worries about the safety of his family, but rejects any notion that he has to tone down his own political rhetoric, where he accuses the prime minister of selling out the country to foreign powers, or offering succour to the “convoy” crowd and their flags denoting their desire to have sex with the prime minister, while refusing to condemn their violent rhetoric (such as images or actual nooses that they carry as part of their grievance cosplay). It should be little wonder then why Canadian intelligence services worry that threats to politicians are increasing because those people see that there’s no consequences for them doing so. Indeed, this comes at the same time as the former Army reservist who crashed into the gates of Rideau Hall with a truck full of guns got out on statutory release. It was a short sentence (he was sentenced to less than half of the maximum), and seems to be no worse for wear from it. It certainly gives all of the impression that we’re not taking it seriously.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine’s navy says that the last Russian patrol ship has left Russian-occupied Crimea to be re-based elsewhere, thanks to Ukraine’s campaign of naval drones causing significant damage to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that Ukraine still needs another 25 Patriot missile defence systems, and more F-16s in order to protect the country from further Russian strikes.

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