Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: Badmouthing the CBC for grift

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Because this is occasionally a media criticism blog, I will mention that piece circulating from former CBC producer Tara Henley, who made a splash by quitting her job and starting a Substack blog (with paid subscriptions!) by badmouthing the CBC on her way out the door. While I was initially planning on not mentioning this, because the complaints she makes in the piece merely reflect poorly on her rather than the CBC, but it attracted some bizarre traction yesterday, from the likes of Jody Wilson-Raybould, and Erin O’Toole, who invited her to call him about plans to reform the CBC (as he promised to slash its budget).

But the piece itself (which I’m not going to link to, but I did read when the National Post reprinted it) was not the stunning indictment she claimed it to be, or the usual cadre of CBC-haters have been touting it as. When you get through all of her prose, it seems that her biggest complaint is that the CBC asked her, as a producer, to ensure there were more diverse guests on panels or interview segments. In Henley’s recounting, this was the booming klaxon of “The Wokes are coming!” and how this is some kind of Ivy League American brain worm/neural parasite import that has destroyed the CBC’s reporting over the past 18 months. Reality is most likely that what she considered “compromising” to the reporting was being asked not to use the same six sources on all of the panels or packages she was responsible for—because that is a very real problem with a lot of Canadian news outlets, where they have a Rolodex of usual suspects who have a media profile because they answer phone calls and make themselves available. There are a number of people, whose credentials are actually terrible and who have zero actual credibility or legitimacy, but because they are easy gets for reporters or producers, and they say provocative things, they are go-to sources time and again. That the vast majority of them are heterosexual white men is problem when a news outlet has had it pointed out to them repeatedly that they need more diverse sources. Henley appears to have balked at that.

There are a lot of problems with CBC’s reporting these days—much of it is either reductive both-sidesing, or its credulous stenography that doesn’t challenge what is being said, even if what is being said is wrong or problematic but has a sympathetic person saying it. There are a lot of questionable editorial choices being made in terms of who they are granting anonymity to and who they are not, particularly if it counters the narrative they are trying to set with the particular story (and there was a lot of this in their reporting on the allegations around House of Commons Clerk Charles Robert). There are problems with its mandate creep around their web presence, and yes, they have made very questionable decisions around some of their editorial pieces—and attempts to alter them once published. None of its problems have to do with the fact that Henley was asked to get more diverse voices. But Henley also knew that there is an audience for her recitation of the “anti-woke” platitudes, and she has a book she wants to sell, and figured that a paid Substack was more lucrative than the Mother Corp. And the fact that O’Toole and others are reaching out seems to indicate that she gambled on media illiteracy for this particular grift, in the hopes it might pay off.

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Roundup: No, an electoral agreement won’t work

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Because Doug Ford and his merry band of incompetent murderclowns have decided to make Ontario miserable again with eleventh-hour changes and nonsensical measures (sorry, guys, but I am going to be insufferably bitter about the gyms being closed down again), there is once again talk about how the provincial Liberals and the NDP need to come to some kind of agreement in order to get Ford out. Which is insane.

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The Liberals and NDP, provincially and federally, are not the same party, don’t have the same positions, and even if they both err on the side of progressivity, and frankly, it’s a major betrayal of local democracy if you’re telling your riding associations not to run candidates because of some cockamamie plan that involves dubious polls or results from an election three-and-a-half years ago with other factors in play which are irrelevant to the current context. Sorry, but no. The opposition parties need to come up with a coherent message and plan to sell to the people of Ontario, and to be steadfast in holding Ford to account rather than letting him get away with his folksy aw-shucks routine. It means the parties need to organise their ground game. It means a proper electoral contest, not a theoretical exercise based on bullshit reasoning.

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Roundup: Rota says no problem here

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CBC checked in with House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota over the weekend, and well, it was about as trite and saccharine as one might expect from Rota, particularly given the current era of hybrid sittings. Everything’s under control. Situation normal. We’re all fine now here, thank you.

It’s not fine. They haven’t solved the problem where the interpreters are suffering extremely high rates of injuries (and I have spoken to one interpreter who says part of the problem is the House of Commons’ system itself, not just the Zoom platform), but they are extremely concerned about the possibility of permanent hearing loss from these injuries. I haven’t seen Rota or any of the House leaders aware or even speak to the problem. Meanwhile, Peter Julian thinks the solution is just to hire more interpreters—but there aren’t any more. This year’s class at the University of Ottawa will graduate four new interpreters, which isn’t even enough to replace those who are retiring. There is a looming crisis coming that will have a very detrimental effect on our Parliament, particularly if we want to continue operating in a bilingual capacity. Hybrid sittings are only making it worse because the existing interpreters are burning out at a rapid rate, they’re not adequately compensating the limited number of freelancers who are filling in, and if they decide that the possibility of permanent hearing loss from these injuries isn’t enough to bother continuing, well, Parliament is going to be screwed for a decade to come, because they were too self-absorbed to take the adequate precautions to meet in person, while patting themselves on the back for “setting a good example” of meeting remotely. Never mind the human cost of that “good example.”

I have said it before, and I will keep saying it—there is no moral justification for hybrid sittings given the human cost this is taking. And it would be great if the gods damned Speaker could actually speak up on behalf of the interpreters and make that case rather than simply grinning and gently chiding the MPs who keep making their lives difficult.

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QP: Deception about deflation

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For the final Question Period of 2021—which was still undetermined as things got underway, as the House Leaders were engaged in a game of chicken—neither the prime minister nor his deputy were present, but the latter would appear virtually. Erin O’Toole led off, script in front of him, and he immediately started off with a lie about deflation, which did happen, and he was presuming it to be a good thing because it would lower prices, when in fact it would have led to a spiral that turned into a depression as businesses couldn’t service their debts. Chrystia Freeland, by video, called this out as misinformation, and noted that Stephen Poloz cited that the government’s actions averted a second Great Depression. O’Toole railed about Freeland’s alleged misinformation during the election campaign and compared her to Donald Trump, and Freeland called O’Toole the leader of flip-flops, and noted that in the election the Conservatives promised even more spending while they were currently railing against it, and that a consistent position might be nice. O’Toole repeated his first question in French, and Freeland repeated the Poloz comments in French. John Barlow got up and railed about the export ban on PEI potatoes and wondered why the agriculture minister was not currently in Washington resolving the situation. Freeland assured him the federal government was working to resolve if and noted she was next to the prime minister when he raised it with Biden, while Conservatives advocate capitulation. Barlow insisted that this has basically destroyed PEI, and Freeland dismissed this as scaremongering, and reassured farmers they were working on it like they did with previous disputes they won on.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and blamed the Quebec teacher who was reassigned for wearing a hijab, railing that she knowingly broke the law and saying otherwise was Quebec bashing. Freeland calmly recited that they stand with Quebeckers who stand up for individual rights and freedoms. Therrien railed that mayors are funding court challenges, accusing them of not understanding secularism or democracy, and Freeland gave some fairly disarming reassurances that the federal government works well with Quebec and the Bloc shouldn’t pick fights.

Peter Julian rose for the Bloc, and in French, he worried that omicron could lead to lockdowns with no supports, to which Freeland made a pitch for MPs to pass Bill C-2 to provide necessary supports. Julian shouted the same question again in English, and Freeland repeated her response in the other official language. 

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Roundup: Freeland is setting her policy own agenda—oh noes!

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The Globe and Mail had a strange hit piece out yesterday that was largely targeted at Chrystia Freeland, but it was kind of all over the place and seemed to be missing the mark on a few different tangents. It was framed around Michael Sabia, the new-ish deputy minister of finance, and the fact that he hasn’t made any headway in reining in spending or coming out with a “growth agenda,” as though we aren’t still in a global pandemic that has required extraordinary government fiscal measures in order to keep the economy from spiralling into a depression, or the fact that the last budget was a growth agenda, but it was focused on inclusive growth rather than tax cuts, which a particular generation cannot wrap their heads around (and the fact that the piece singles out the childcare plan is evidence of this fact).

What was particularly troubling about the piece was the fact that it couldn’t quite decide how it was attacking Freeland. On the one hand, it worried that she was too hands-off in the department, leaving Sabia to manage it while she dealt with big policy items (for which she was attacked in absentia during Question Period yesterday), while at the same time, it is overly concerned that Department of Finance officials aren’t driving policy, but the government is. Which, erm, is kind of how things work in our system. The civil service is supposed to provide fearless advice but also do the work of implementing the policies and directives of their political bosses. That’s the whole point of a democracy—this is not a technocracy where the bureaucrats run the show, and if these sore Finance officials have a problem with that, perhaps they either need a refresher on how this works, or they need to find themselves out of the civil service.

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None of this is particularly surprising, mind you—there are still too many pundits and journalists who still think it’s 1995 and will always be 1995, because that is the established media narrative by which they must always obey (and this hit piece also touches on the Cult of the Insider narrative as well with all of the anonymous inside sources). And the fact that Freeland is a woman holding the job, and is focusing on things like inclusive growth and not the usual “tax cuts=jobs” agenda frankly makes it too easy for the 1995 narrative to keep being circulated. But it’s not 1995, and perhaps it’s time that We The Media stop pretending otherwise, because this kind of hit piece was frankly something that should not have seen the light of day.

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Roundup: Theatre of the absurd, housing motion edition

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The closer the House of Commons gets to rising for the winter break, the more absurd theatre we see. Yesterday was case in point, with the Conservatives’ second and final Supply Day of the calendar year. The topic was housing, but their motion was a complete dog’s breakfast of nonsense, contradiction and outright unconstitutional demands. Because of course it was.

The point was made that the inclusion of the outright lie about capital gains taxes was a ploy for the Conservatives to say that the Liberals were not ruling it out when this motion as inevitably defeated (as indeed it was). But Liberal Mark Gerretsen though he was being crafty and tried to move a motion after QP to head off those talking points, trying to call for unanimous consent to reaffirm that they wouldn’t tax capital gains. But the motion didn’t pass, so Gerretsen tried to spin that too, and it’s just utterly stupid that I can’t even.

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Roundup: Rejecting the compromise for more theatre

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In spite of the Liberals proposing a compromise on the release of the Winnipeg Lab documents last week, the Conservatives have rejected the offer, citing that it was “months late,” and that the “will of parliament has not changed.” But this is wholly disingenuous—they did offer another compromise in June before Parliament rose for the summer, and Parliament dissolved before the challenge to the order could reach Federal Court, which may have settled the outstanding question of whether the Security of Information Act fettered parliamentary privilege or not.

This rejection makes it clear that this is not about the information—it’s about political theatre. If it was about the information, they would have let NSICOP review the documents and report back. But no—they first came up with the fiction that they didn’t trust security-trained public servants to properly redact the documents, and then they came up with the fiction that the prime minister redacts NSICOP reports, which he does not and never did, and handwaved about only trusting the Commons’ Law Clerk—who doesn’t have the training or context around national security to know what is a necessary redaction or not—to do redactions. (They also piled onto the same law clerk the redactions from pandemic documents for the health committee in the previous parliament, overloading his office and ensuring that they would never see all of the requested documents). The government provided avenues for the documents to be released, but the Conservatives have consistently decided that theatre was more important (particularly as they fed the “mystery” of these documents into conspiracy theories).

We’ll see how much patience the other parties have for this nonsense—and at this point, it is most definitely nonsense. They were happy enough to embarrass the government pre-election, so we’ll see if they still have the appetite to do so now. But at this point, this no longer has any bearing on accountability or being serious about national security. This is one hundred percent about political theatre, and it would be great if the pundit class of this country could call it out for what it is.

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Roundup: Swift passage, but not for the better

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In another surprising move, the Senate passed the bill to ban conversion therapy at all stages yesterday, with no committee study, meaning that it only needs royal assent now, which can happen at any time. But while this is a relief to many, it’s also a tad irresponsible.

The lack of study of the current bill in the House of Commons was a political gambit designed to keep the Conservatives from being trapped by their own social conservative members, and to avoid giving any more media clips about people supposedly overcoming “lesbian activity” and so on. The fact that this version of the bill is different from the one that passed the Commons in the previous parliament is relevant, and there are changes that deserved some actual scrutiny because there were live constitutional questions around them (and yes, I asked the minister about it during the press conference, and I asked other questions about the bill during the not-for-attribution technical briefing, but those are not on the parliamentary record). And yes, this matters because the Senate should have done the work that MPs opted not to do out of political expediency. That’s one of the reasons why the Senate is the chamber of “sober second though”—because they don’t have to deal with the political repercussions and ramifications when the politics wins out in the Commons.

Unfortunately, politics also won out in the Senate (which should be an indictment of its supposed more “independent” existence these days). Acting Conservative leader in the Senate, Senator Leo Housakos, in his speech to give the bill swift passage, said that this issue shouldn’t be made into a political wedge like the Liberals were doing. Which is ironic because it wasn’t the Liberals who were holding up the bill previously by slow-walking it, refusing to let debate collapse, and by putting up speaker after speaker to offer the same concern trolling. That wasn’t the Liberals being political—it was 100 percent on the Conservatives for that, and now they’re trying to shift that blame. Yes, passing this bill at all stages was the expedient thing to do, but from a process and a parliamentary perspective, it was not the right thing to do, and it’s going to make the courts’ jobs that much harder when this inevitably gets challenged and they have little on the record to go by.

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Roundup: A century of women in the House

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The CBC has a look back at 100 years since the first woman was elected to Parliament, and as with the present-day discourse, it’s largely about how other women’s voice were excluded, be they Indigenous, racialized, or otherwise. Yes, early feminists and women who were elected to public office were problematic—the Famous Five were very racist and proponents of eugenics. (So was the founder of the NDP, Tommy Douglas, for that matter, but he is rarely called out as being problematic as early white women in officer were, but that’s a whole other topic altogether).

So while we have a lot more diverse women in Parliament these days, we absolutely do need to do better, and much of that relies on the parties themselves. I would normally say that the grassroots riding associations should have a big role to play in recruiting more diverse women to run for them, but my enthusiasm for grassroots politics is currently being held in check by the fact that overly powerful leaders’ offices have been essentially bigfooting those processes, and so many nominations are being run centrally, if not using outright appointments over the past few cycles, after there was a big push toward “open nominations” for one or two election cycles. And the worst part is that some of this is explicitly about nominating more women to run for office, but in an effort to say that they have more women running, most of the parties will simply run them in unwinnable ridings so that they can say they had them running, but not jeopardise their chances in that riding by running someone who doesn’t fit the popular conception, which perpetuates the problem. And before you say “But the NDP!” I have watched them time and again monkey with their own rules around nominations to run a straight white male in ridings with hugely diverse populations if they think they can win. (Think Robert Chisholm or Joe Cressy). The parties have a big role to play in getting more diverse women to run, and the Liberals were really good about this for an election cycle or two with a sound recruitment strategy, but I’m not sure it’s carried forward as well in the last election cycle.

Meanwhile, I also find myself frustrated by the notion that hybrid sittings are some kind of panacea to women running for office, because it’s based on a few bad assumptions. One of those is the fact that hybrid sittings are demonstrably bad – they are more toxic, and they have a human cost on the interpreters, and using the excuse that this allows more women to run for office should not be contingent upon interpreters needing to injure themselves in order to make it happen. The other is that it simply perpetuates the notion that women must be the primary childcare providers. There are a lot of accommodations for MPs who have small children, and they can develop more as time goes by (and seriously, they need to get over this notion that they can’t hire nannies), but some accommodations—like hybrid sittings—exact a cost that is too high for the benefit. There have to be better ways.

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QP: What is your inflation position today?

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Even though the prime minister was in town, he was not in Question Period, but his deputy was, so that was something. Erin O’Toole led off, script on his mini-lectern, and he worried about the news that the coming fiscal update would only have “limited information,” and worrying about them covering up spending. Chrystia Freeland stood up and recited O’Toole’s floundering position on whether inflation is a global problem or not. O’Toole retorted that she was the only politician to have been flagged on Twitter for misleading information, and demanded that she tell the Bank of Canada to get inflation under control. Freeland chided O’Toole for not realising that monetary policy is the role of the Bank, which is arm’s length from government. O’Toole started sputtering about small businesses suffering from inflation, and Freeland reminded him that their campaign documents promised even more government spending in the current fiscal year, and wondered what their position was today. O’Toole demanded to know then a budget would be balanced, and Freeland recited the Economist’s top-ten list of most expensive cities to live in, and noted that none were in Canada. O’Toole then switched to French to say that Quebeckers were tired of living paycheque to paycheque. Freeland repeated the same Economist list in response.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and he worried that the prime minister didn’t raise softwood tariff while in Washington, and Freeland stated that while she could not match Therrien’s ability to play on words, but the file was important and they were continuing to defend the sector’s interest like they did for aluminium. Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay demanded that the government insist on separate treatment for Quebec because their forestry rules are different, while Freeland assured him that they were defending sector.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and he worried that the COVID rules were too confusing for travellers. Freeland said that they agreed that the fight against COVID was the most important issue for the country and vaccination was the way out, but noted that the current rules are a circuit-breaker to buy them time. Singh repeated the question in French, and repeated her response.

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