Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: Long on speeches and imported culture wars

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The Conservative convention this weekend was long on speeches—Poilievre’s speech very much needing an editor as it went on for well over an hour—and was full of praise for the so-called convoy occupiers (from Poilievre’s wife as well as the wife of the “anti-woke general”). Said “anti-woke general” proved himself to be so fragile that he thinks that things like racial equality and gender equality are “destroying” Canada. There was also the Brexiteer from the House of Lords who also showered Poilievre with praise, so some real talent on display there.

Policy resolutions were not focused on things like housing or affordability, but instead prioritised things like vaccines, and culture war bullshit that extended to two separate resolutions attacking trans people (which the party could have used mechanisms to de-prioritise but didn’t, meaning they wanted them to come up for a vote). The Canadian Press has compiled five take-aways from the convention.

https://twitter.com/dalybeauty/status/1700974631468052754

In pundit reaction, Althia Raj looks at how the Conservatives used their convention to woo Quebeckers, and how they are going after the Bloc along the way. Aaron Wherry notes that claims of “common sense” are easier said than done, particularly as Poilievre painted an idyllic 1950s picture of the future he wants. Shannon Proudfoot hones in on the feeling of “enough” that permeated the convention, and the swinging of the pendulum, but also cautioned about who limiting that can be.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces staged early-morning drone attacks against Kyiv on Sunday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that the counter-offensive has made more advances along the southern front, as well as near Bakhmut in the east.

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Roundup: A foreign interference inquiry after all

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The announcement finally came down yesterday that the government will be launching a public inquiry into foreign interference, with terms of reference that include China, Russia, and any other state or non-state actors whom they see fit, and that this will be expected to have an interim report by the end of February next year, with a final report at the end of the year. Leading the inquiry will be Quebec Court of Appeal justice Marie-Josée Hogue, who has no national security experience, but says she is “honoured” to lead the exercise (though that is not what I would be feeling). The choice of judge and the terms of reference are apparently all unanimously agreed to by the government as well as the three main opposition parties, which is in part why it took so long, but there are still a few red flags, particularly around the timeline. It doesn’t seem either remotely possible or even plausible that the bulk of the work can be completed in five months (Hogue doesn’t start until the 18th), considering how much time it will take to stand up the inquiry’s infrastructure, and for her and her staff to be properly briefed on how to read top secret information and how to contextualise intelligence. This having been said, Dominic LeBlanc says the government will turn over any Cabinet documents she needs, and Justin Trudeau says he’ll willingly testify before said inquiry when asked to, so they’re certainly making a big show about cooperation.

As expected, the opposition parties fell all over themselves to take credit for this, and chided the government for why this took so long to get to this point, as though they weren’t a big part of the problem, most especially in trying to find someone to lead this process who was willing to do the job and subject themselves to the likelihood of daily character assassination in the process (because as much as they say they’re all in favour of this, the moment they think they can score points off of what is happening, they will have zero hesitation in being ruthless in doing so). Already Twitter was abuzz with her political donation history (Conservative), who appointed her to the bench (Peter MacKay), and her previous law firm (which has Liberal and China connections), so you can bet that there will be those who won’t hesitate to move into character assassination at a moment’s notice.

In related news, LeBlanc says he’ll be meeting with MP Han Dong in the near future to discuss his future and whether he’ll be able to re-join the party given the allegations against him, which David Johnston found to lack credibility in his report. It sounds like LeBlanc hasn’t had the time to deal with this with everything else going on over the summer, so we’ll see where that leads.

Programming note: It’s my birthday this weekend, so I’m going to make it a long-ish weekend on the blog. See you next week!

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians attacked the Danube port of Izmail for the fourth time in five days, damaging more grain silos and critical infrastructure. Ukrainian forces are gearing up air defences in preparation for another winter of attacks on their energy systems and power grid. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has tasked his new defence minister with rebuilding trust after a series of corruption allegations in the defence forces, particularly around procurement. Ukraine is also calling for more international pressure on Russia to return the children they have taken from Ukraine over the course of the invasion.

https://twitter.com/billblair/status/1699740567435915664

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Roundup: The torqued six attendees

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The National Post’s series on judicial appointments continued apace yesterday, with the torqued and misleading headline that “High-level judges may have paid to meet Trudeau before their appointments,” and members of the pundit class and commentariat swooned with disbelief, and social media was blanketed with caterwauling about “corruption” and “bribery” and so on. Some of the excitable far-right fanboys started ranting about the whole judiciary being corrupted and needing to be bulldozed (because how better to enable fascism?)

But if you read the piece, and put it into context with the previous work, it says that as many as six out of 1308 lawyers who later got judicial appointments may have attended Liberal fundraisers that the prime minister or other Cabinet ministers attended. Which is…nothing. And yet, the framing and the headline suggests that they paid for access and that said meeting resulted in their appointment to the bench, in absence of any evidence to the contrary—just innuendo and correlation that has no relation to causation. This kind of journalism tends to be bullshit.

I have made this case before, and I’ll re-up it again—we absolutely do not want or need purity tests to be applied to applicants to the bench, and we should not bar anyone who has ever donated to a party from receiving an appointment. Donation is a necessary form of civic engagement, and lawyers tend to be more engaged in their communities, and often have the means to donate. This is important—we need people engaged in the system, and if we bar them from promotion because they have donated at one point in time or another, we are losing talent from the judiciary. The process as it stands is working (albeit slow for other reasons), and we don’t need concern trolls dismantling it for the sake of purity tests.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Three Ukrainians were killed in an overnight Russian attack on Poltava, and two others were killed in shelling later in the day in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials have confirmed that they have liberated the strategic settlement of Robotyne in the country’s south, as they are pushing further in the area as part of the counteroffensive. Russians are claiming that they scrambled jets in response to two US drones flying near occupied Crimea.

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Roundup: The Capital Pride 2023 observations

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It was Capital Pride this weekend, and the government once again took the opportunity to pat themselves on the back for the first anniversary of their 2SLGBTQIA+ Action Plan™, and to offer some grants to local organisations from the Action Plan’s budget—so money is flowing, at least.

This having been said, it was a pretty poor turnout from federal politicians for the parade itself. The PM was absent, but he had only just returned from touring wildfire sites and evacuation centres out west, and he did just visit Edmonton’s Pride on Saturday, so I will give him that. But the Liberal contingent was smaller than usual this year, and local MP Yasir Naqvi was absent (which is unusual for him), whether that was because he was on a provincial leadership tour somewhere, or for some other reason. Marci Ien was present, having just made the announcement hours before, and new minister Jenna Sudds was present, as were Mona Fortier, Greg Fergus, Marie-France Lalonde and Francis Drouin, but while I saw photos of many of them early on in the parade, I didn’t see most of them along the route.

https://twitter.com/JennaSudds/status/1695944518036509165

This having been said, I didn’t see a single NDP MP, though I think I spotted a couple of MPPs (and I didn’t see the one whose seat the riding is in), and the Conservatives didn’t march at all, federal or provincial PC party. Make of that what you will.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian authorities are investigating a mid-air collision between two training aircraft in the western part of the country, which killed there pilots. Russians have meanwhile been targeting the central and northern regions of the country with cruise missiles overnight. They have also been shelling the north-eastern city of Kupiansk, in what may be a push to recapture the area, after it was already liberated by Ukrainian forces. Ukrainian forces have broken through one of the most difficult lines in the south and appear to have momentum in the region. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is telling American critics that Ukraine could hold wartime elections next year, but they’ll need financial assistance from the US and Europe, particularly for reaching electors abroad, and to send election observers to the front lines.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1695803020947165468

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Roundup: The sound and fury of a special committee

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NDP MP Niki Ashton sent out a press release yesterday calling on the minister of national revenue to create a special committee to crack down on tax avoidance by billionaires. I have my doubts about just what a parliamentary committee could do on its own. Asking them to recommend solutions seems like a fairly inefficient way to go about it because there are changes put forward every year to close loopholes, and the tax avoidance experts find new ones. 🎶It’s the circle of life! 🎶

My deeper suspicion is that this is mostly just about performing for the cameras, which MPs are increasingly using committees to do rather than doing serious work, and Jagmeet Singh was trying to get in on that in a big way over the past few months, such as his little dog and pony show with the stack of papers that were supposedly all questions he was going to ask Galen Weston, and then promptly did not. Additionally, however, parliamentary resources are constrained because of hybrid sittings, and the injury and burnout rate for interpretation staff, and in the most bitter of ironies, Ashton is one of the worst offenders for abusing hybrid rules, and has pretty much opted to almost never show up in Ottawa. (She may deign to visit once every six to eight weeks, and only if she is required for some kind of media event).

Because economist Lindsay Tedds is one of the foremost tax policy experts in the country, I pointed this out to her, and well, she had thoughts.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1695109929902993636

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1695104974353842372

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian officials say that Russian forces are regrouping in occupied territories in the country’s east, and will likely try another offensive push. Ukraine is also saying they hit a Russian military base deep in occupied Crimea as part of their operation earlier in the week. The Ukrainian government has also dismissed the head of its State Emergency Service after an inspection, but haven’t said what the reason was.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1695094695855116732

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Roundup: Cabinet retreat missives

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We are starting to see the parade of ministers being trotted out to the media from the Cabinet retreat in Charlottetown, PEI, and first up on everyone’s mind is housing and what the federal government should do about it. And they did hear from experts like Mike Moffatt yesterday, which is good, so we’ll see if anything comes of it. But of course, legacy media has glommed onto the issue of international students and whether they will cap them, without also exploring how that has become a necessary revenue stream for universities after provincial cutbacks and freezes, or the fact that there are a plethora of private colleges that the provinces are supposed to be regulating who have been abusing their ability to bring in international students basically to defraud them of hundreds of thousands of dollars while providing them a substandard education. That should be where more attention is being paid, but we all know that legacy media loves to blame the federal government instead of the provinces, so here we are.

We also heard from Dominic LeBlanc who again gave assurances that a public inquiry into foreign interference is in the works, but they are now trying to find a sitting judge who can lead it, because apparently all of the retired ones and other eminent Canadians who could do the job have all told them no—because who wants to subject themselves to partisan character assassination day-in-and-day-out? Of course, I half suspect that they’re going to get some pushback from the chief justices of the provinces about who could be made available considering that the federal government has been slow to make appointments and it’s contributing to delays and backlogs in the system as is, and taking someone out of circulation for another eighteen months doesn’t help the situation any.

Other ministerial soundbites include Chrystia Freeland insisting that they remain focused on the economy.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say they have retaken a strategic south-eastern village as part of the counteroffensive, which continues its southward push. In addition to advanced Western weapons, the Ukrainians have developed a “mini-Grad” rocket launcher made up of old Soviet parts. In Athens, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Balkan leaders, as well as European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen. Ukrainian media is reporting that a group of saboteurs coordinated with Ukrainian military intelligence services to carry out drone attacks on air bases deep inside Russia, destroying and damaging aircraft. In Denmark, eight Ukrainian pilots have begun their F-16 fighter training.

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Roundup: Trying to use guilt on Meta

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As the wildfire situation intensifies, and more states of emergency are declared, Canadian heritage minister Pascale St-Onge has decided to try doubling down on using guilt to try and get Meta/Facebook back to the table to talk about the Online News Act, insisting that blocking news links puts lives in danger. I’m not sure I buy that—you can still directly access news sites, and they are easy to find, particularly the CBC and its local affiliates.

This, of course, led to yet another vapid re-litigation of the Act, and repeating many of the dumb arguments that don’t actually hit on the heart of the matter. There was the hand-wringing about “we trained people to go to Facebook for news,” which makes me wonder why we just don’t then retrain people to go directly to news sites or apps, while the discussion in the piece returns to the red herring about compensating for links. It’s not about compensating for links. It’s about compensating for Google and Facebook monopolizing the ad tech space and siphoning revenues from all links along the chain, and the Act providing transparency and fairness to the deals and negotiations that were already taking place. Which is also why stories about local media demanding the government capitulate to Meta’s bullying are particularly troublesome, because not only are they getting the narrative wrong (and the government needs to take a LOT of the blame for that one), but they’re saying that we should let web giants threaten sovereign governments if they don’t like what they’re seeing, and that’s especially troubling because these companies operate monopolistically and with impunity.

In the meantime, mendacious narratives about the legislation are also growing and becoming utterly grotesque, but between Poilievre and his Conservatives outright lying about the law, referring to it as government censorship and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the government’s own false narratives about the bill and the supposed theft of content (not true), we’re sinking into a morass that is seeing disinformation players taking the already distorted narratives and turning it into a funhouse mirror. This is all very, very bad, but none of the players in this want to describe things with a modicum of accuracy and reality, and that’s a very big problem.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Russian missile struck Chernihiv in the north on Saturday, killing seven and wounding at least 129 people. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went to the Netherlands for talks, and for confirmation that the Netherlands and Denmark would be turning over F-16 fighters to Ukraine at the appropriate time. Zelenskyy has also been talking to Sweden about acquiring Gripen jets as well.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1693253258200981998

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Roundup: May sees some, but not all, of the documents

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Green Party leader Elizabeth May held a press conference yesterday to talk about the unredacted documents she saw related to foreign interference, and in particular what David Johnston had written during his brief tenure as Special Rapporteur. It wasn’t, however, quite what she had hoped and stated that she was disappointed that she could only read David Johnston’s unredacted report, rather than the documents that supported his conclusions, which were all footnoted, but not actually there to read.

It is worth noting that May was quite generous and believes this to be something of a mistake on PCO’s part, and if not a mistake, it’s part of their usual pattern of being overly secretive and disclosing the bare minimum, even if May had been properly vetted and given clearance to read the documents. And she makes an extremely valid point that if the point is to be reassured in the quality of Johnston’s work, then you also need to see the documents that he was seeing in order to determine if he had arrived at the right conclusion or not. And I suspect that she will be able to see those documents before too long, because someone at PCO must know just how bad it will look if she can’t see the supporting evidence, and that it will look like they have something to hide, which is counter to the entire point of this whole exercise.

With this in mind, it bears mentioning that Jagmeet Singh is planning on seeing the documents as well as soon as he can schedule the time in Ottawa (as he’s busy on the summer barbecue circuit), while both Pierre Poilievre and Yves-François Blanchet have refused, insisting that this is some kind of “trap” where they wouldn’t be able to talk about what they’ve seen and be unable to criticise the government. That’s not true, and there is plenty they could say about the documents without revealing specifics, but they would rather play the game of insisting the government is hiding something nefarious when the truth is so much more mundane than that.

Ukraine Dispatch:

American sources are saying that the number of casualties in the war are reaching nearly 500,000, but that number needs to be taken with a shaker’s worth of salt because Russia routinely undercounts its killed and wounded, while Ukraine doesn’t publicly disclose their official casualty figures (though I do note that they do very much use tributes to dead soldiers for propagandistic purposes). Russians are claiming that a Ukrainian drone smashed into a downtown Moscow office building, while Ukraine denies it targeted a civilians or civilian infrastructure.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1692492507878224375

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Roundup: The ugly discourse that won’t be disavowed

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As the housing debate rages on, there is a particularly ugly strain of the discourse that is revealing itself throughout, which has to do with the rapid immigration increases in relation to the housing crunch/crisis, and that there is no real way for there to keep pace. This has led to some people lamenting that it’s too bad that the decades long, multi-party consensus on immigration is unravelling because governments haven’t been serious about housing. I’m not really buying it, though. My sense is that a lot of this is just dog-whistling and concern trolling—that these are largely the people who opposed immigration to begin with and who are taking the opportunity of the housing crisis to have a “legitimate” reason to blame immigrants for something.

Mark Miller is pushing back on this narrative, at least somewhat, pointing out that demographically and economically we can’t really cut back on immigration levels, adding that “The wave of populist, opportunist sentiment that does at times want to put all of society’s woes on the backs of immigrants—I think we need to call that out when we see it.” And he’s right. But he also needs to be far more vocal on the kick in the ass to provinces and municipalities about building more housing (which is their jurisdiction), because they also need these immigrants and have the responsibility of ensuring they have places to live.

What I think has been particularly telling is that Pierre Poilievre has been hinting at this, saying that the immigration system is “broken,” but he also won’t say what he would do differently, or what he would adjust the levels to. It’s the same kind of stupid game he’s trying to play on all of his files—saying just enough about a particular issue that the loudmouths and far-right extremists can read into it the awful things they think, and Poilievre will do almost nothing to dissuade them, so as to get them to think he’s on their side (even though, deep down, he’s not really, and some of them have already figured that out) and to hopefully cash in on their votes. And when you try to corner him on these issues, he will fight straw men or make the attacks personal instead of answering. It’s some of the most cynical of ploys, it’s absolutely corrosive to democracy, but he seems to think the ends justify the means, so he’s going to go for it, consequences be damned.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian drones have pounded grain storage and facilities at the Danube river ports in western Ukraine, which puts further grain shipments in jeopardy. Ukrainian forces say that they have reclaimed the village of Urozhaine in the southeast, but are admitting that the front in the north eastern region near Kupiansk is becoming more difficult.

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Roundup: No sympathy over late night sittings

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In today’s edition of my ongoing exasperation with MPs, I present to you NDP mental health critic Gord Johns, who wants changes made to the parliamentary calendar in order to ensure that there aren’t midnight sittings toward the end of the fall and spring sittings, and he cited Elizabeth May’s hospitalisation as proof about how these twelve-hour days are bad. But there are a few things the matter with his concerns, not the least of which was that May wasn’t hospitalised for exhaustion but rather that she had a stroke, which was caught in time.

First of all, no MP is sitting in the Chamber for twelve hours a day. Even with committee commitments, MPs are only “on duty” for a few of those hours, and they have plenty of opportunity to take shifts during these late-night sittings. And thanks to remote voting (which is an abomination in our system), they don’t have to rush to the Chamber if there are late-night votes for whatever reason, so that’s not even an excuse. Elizabeth May does like to spend as much time in the Chamber as she can, but that is also a choice.

The bigger issue here, however, is that the biggest reason there are late nights late in each sitting is because there is work to get done, and it didn’t get done earlier because of procedural games or dilatory motions, or bullshit filibusters, or what have you. The parliamentary calendar is pretty finite, and there isn’t much wiggle room in there, so if you start playing games (and over the past few years now, this kind of procedural warfare has been fairly constant because they simply oppose the government as opposed to pulling out the big guns for major points of principle), then you have to make up that time somewhere, and that tends to mean late nights late in each sitting. I would have to say that there were actually fewer of them this spring than usual, possibly because the NDP agreed to play ball with more instances of time allocation to head off the procedural games, but it wasn’t that long ago that they were gleeful participants in said procedural warfare, and this is the result. Nevertheless, I’m not terribly sympathetic here, and this is firmly within the fuck around/find out principle, where the fucking around is the procedural warfare, and the finding out is the late nights in June and December.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Another overnight Russian air attack, this time hitting the port city of Mykolaiv, while defences around Odessa have been engaged. Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal, which could impact world grain prices and cause more problems for the food insecure regions that rely on Ukrainian grain, though Ukraine and Turkey say they will try to keep shipments flowing in spite of Russia. There are more details about the blast on the bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea, where two people were killed, while damage to the bridge could cut off supply lines to Russian troops in occupied regions.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1680983350692007937

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