Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: A delayed return

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We have a date – well, two of them. Justin Trudeau announced yesterday morning that Cabinet would be shuffled on October 26th, and that the House of Commons would return on November 22nd, which is ridiculous. After an election where Trudeau kept punctuating the “urgency” of a number of files, some of them COVID-related, and with a list of priorities to take care of in his first 100 days of the new parliament (apparently that clock doesn’t start ticking until Cabinet is sworn in), the decision to delay the return of Parliament for two months after the election is egregious – especially because this is a hung parliament where the confidence of the Chamber should be tested at its earliest opportunity, and two months later is not that.

I am generally pretty forgiving of the fact that it can take our government longer to get its act together post-election – as compared to the UK, where they have nearly twice as many MPs – but they can get a new government sworn in and a new Parliament started within three weeks of an election. But it should not have taken Trudeau this long to deal with this shuffle as it has, even if one or two Cabinet contenders had to deal with recounts. And yes, the government dispatched the Governor General on her first state visit abroad this week, but that again was his choice, and he could have either delayed that trip, or announced the Cabinet before she left the country.

More to the point, this reduces the fall sitting of the House of Commons to a maximum of four weeks, but you can bet that in practice, it’ll be less than three. Committees won’t really get up and running, and sure, he may introduce a number of priority bills, but they will see precious little debate in that time. What we will get are the Address in Reply to the Speech From the Throne, and probably the Fall Economic Update, plus a number of Estimates votes, which will be rushed through without any actual scrutiny (they may get some modicum of scrutiny on the Senate side), but I’m not sure we’ll even see the Budget Implementation Bill for said economic update making it past second reading unless it is bullied through at all stages under the threat that emergency rent and wage subsidies will expire without passage. It’s undermining democratic norms for the sake of expediency, and that is the last thing we want to be encouraging any government in engaging in, regardless of stripe.

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Roundup: Not pushing back on referendum disinfo

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Because this is occasionally a media criticism blog, I’m going to call out Power & Politics once again for completely dropping the ball, this time on the bullshit “referendum” happing in Alberta. They hosted Bill Bewick, who heads a group in favour of the referendum, and gave him a pretty uncritical interview, with only the barest hints of pushback. Because both-sidesing.

Host David Common pushed back on a mere couple of points – that the referendum won’t actually do anything because it doesn’t obligate the federal government to negotiate anything; and the fact that without equalisation, PEI would need a 30 percent HST to make up the same funding. He even went so far as to egg on Bewick about how much equalisation Ontario pays, as if it was relevant, because no province actually pays equalisation, which is a pretty big thing that Bewick and his bullshit ever got called on. Equalisation is simply federal taxes that come off everyone’s paycheque – that a fraction of those funds get redistributed to some provinces who need help in offering comparable levels of service when they don’t have adequate fiscal capacity. And the key thing to remember is that Alberta may pay more federal taxes because they have the highest salaries in the country – by far – even during the pandemic. Crying that the province has a deficit has nothing to do with equalisation and everything to do with the fact that the provincial government refuses to raise their own revenues by means of a modest sales tax like other provinces have, and the fact that they chose to rely on resource revenues instead. Their deficit is a choice.

I am forced to wonder whether Bewick didn’t get any pushback because the host and/or the producers simply don’t have a clue about the truth, or because they feel bound by the need to both-sides everything and plan to have someone credible on to refute the points in a separate interview later today – because heaven forbid that the host actually push back lest he or she be called out as being biased or partisan. But calling bullshit and pointing out fact shouldn’t be considered bias or partisanship – it should be simple fact-checking, which they can’t seem to be arsed to do at the best of times, let alone in a referendum that is fuelled by misinformation and disinformation coming from official sources trying to make a political wedge out of this. In a case like this, it’s especially incumbent upon the media to play their role in pushing back against a government that is lying to its citizens, but this timidity to do so is a very real problem for our media.

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Roundup: Singh has a list of demands

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In the wake of his party’s post-election first caucus meeting, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh held a press conference yesterday to do a bit of chest-thumping and pretend that he holds some kind of balance of power in the forthcoming parliament, or that he can play kingmaker. If anything, he undermined his own position with his list of demands, because he doesn’t have any real leverage. His party is substantially weakened after the election, particularly given that they spent all kinds of money and gained a single seat out of it, and they are likely in debt once again and in no shape to go to another campaign anytime soon – especially if they want to figure out what they did wrong and have time to course-correct.

As for his list of demands, we are back to a lot of the usual nonsense where Singh doesn’t seem to grasp implementation – or jurisdiction. To wit:

  • Paid sick leave – that is being expanded to ten days for federally-regulated workers, but that’s only six percent of the workforce. The rest is provincial.
  • Halting clawbacks from GIS for seniors who accessed CERB – the GIS is means-tested and meant for the poorest of seniors, so it’s not surprising that CERB or other benefits could impact the means test.
  • Clean drinking water in Indigenous communities – this is in progress. Willpower won’t make it go faster.
  • A federal vaccine document for internal travel – this cannot happen unless provinces sign on, and until a couple of weeks ago, there were provinces still hostile to the very notion. The federal government cannot unilaterally create such a document because the provinces control vaccination data.
  • Dropping the appeal of the Human Rights Tribunal decision in the First Nations Child and Family Services case – this may yet happen given how completely the Federal Court decision against them last week was, but there were legitimate issues being litigated regardless that compensation is already being negotiated, irrespective of a further appeal.
  • Demanding higher health transfers – the federal government fully plans to negotiate those, but it won’t be without strings, especially as certain provinces sat on the pandemic-related transfers and put them towards their bottom lines rather than spending them on the pandemic.

As for Singh’s threat to “withhold votes” if he doesn’t get his way, it’s a bit curious what he means. Does he mean he would vote against bills including the budget implementation bill for the fall economic update, which would have plenty of additional pandemic supports or items he supports? Or does he mean he’d simply not vote, which would mean the Liberals wouldn’t need to get Bloc support to pass their measures (which they would likely get as the Bloc also are in no position to go to another election). Because if it’s the latter, then he’s basically made himself irrelevant for the foreseeable future.

Programming note: I am taking the full long weekend off from blogging. See you next week!

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Roundup: Self-awareness and civilian control

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When it comes to the issue of sexual misconduct in the Canadian Forces, there seems to be an epidemic of a lack of self-awareness. This is demonstrated time and again within the ranks as officers are given inappropriate promotions (remember the head of personnel who had known sexual misconduct allegations), are protected by the top brass (General Jonathan Vance, the infamous golf game earlier in the year), and the issue with Major-General Peter Dawe being given the role of sorting through the various reports on reforming military culture after he was suspended for writing the glowing letter for someone under his command who had been convicted of sexual assault. Every time, this has to be pointed out to them and how inappropriate their actions continue to be.

But it’s not just the ranks that lack self-awareness – it’s also their political masters. During a media availability yesterday, both prime minister Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland also had harsh words for the military’s inability to exercise self-awareness on the sexual misconduct file – but they have a role to play there as well, because in a democracy like ours, the military answers to civilian control. In our particular system, that should be going through the Chief of Defence Staff to the Minister of National Defence – but the current minister, Harjit Sajjan, has made it clear that he is not exercising his responsibility for civilian control, and is not properly overseeing the CDS, or his top decisions. Part of this may be because he is former military (he was actually active when he was elected and needed to go through the discharge process so that the CDS could no longer outrank him), and is steeped in the culture and cannot adequately see the reality of what is going on, or why he needs to exercise civilian control. And no, I’m not sure it was any better under the previous government either, who also appointed a former general to Minister of Defence (Gordon O’Connor), and generally let the military run their own show – especially with procurement, which is why there were so many botched files, from the F-35 to joint supply ships.

We need to re-assert civilian control by means of a competent minister who doesn’t have a military background, and someone who can actually perform some managerial competence and keep the CDS on a tight leash. But that may depend on Trudeau having enough self-awareness of his own recognise that this is what needs to happen as he decides on how to shuffle his Cabinet, and I’m losing confidence that this could actually happen.

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Roundup: Green insiders spill the tea

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This apparently was the weekend for the tea to start being spilled about what was really going on inside the Green Party, and we got a lot of details. The primary one is this lengthy read that details the struggles inside the party, and there is plenty of blame to go around, but what is on offer here really shows that Annamie Paul was a key author in her own misfortune. To add to that, Elizabeth May also writes in her own words an account of why she stayed silent on Paul’s orders, how she tried to support Paul in any way possible including offering to resign and let Paul run in her riding, which is the first time I’ve heard that such an offer had been made. More to the point, it is a fairly detailed accounting of how Paul misunderstood how Greens view their own leadership, and tried to impose a very top-down view of it, including demanding that her MPs didn’t speak to the media, and how even now, Paul announced her intentions to resign but hasn’t formally done so, which is why the party is in a weird state of limbo.

While once again I have no doubt that racism, misogyny and antisemitism all played a role in Paul’s departure, her own actions were certainly part of what happened, from her salary demands (she wanted the party to pay a salary equivalent as though she were a sitting MP), to her control over the party that was unlike the party’s constitution, which the national council largely did accede to. This being said, everything that has come out this weekend really makes me think that the glass cliff narrative is less likely a driving force in what happened, and a more complicated series of events took place. It is too bad, given how Paul did acquit herself on the national debate stage for the most part (until you realised her answer for everything was “we have to work together”) and it’s a shame that it all came to this.

Meanwhile, May also stated over the weekend that she won’t take the interim leader position, and says she wants Paul Manly, who lost his seat, to do the job until they can run another leadership contest. Of course, it may be too late for the party by this point, but we’ll see if they can salvage what remains, but it’s not looking promising.

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Roundup: Yet another in a string of unforced errors

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It is easy to imagine the thought process that Justin Trudeau engaged in about Truth and Reconciliation Day – that he didn’t want it to be about him. That he wanted it to be a day for Indigenous people to speak their truths, and for Canadians to listen. That he didn’t need to be front-and-centre, being the emoter-in-chief as he so often is. So best to attend the ceremony on the night before, and then get out of the way.

And yet, somehow, he managed to make it all about him once more, thanks to yet another unforced error, compounding his record of unforced errors. And while he said that he spent the day on the phone listening to survivors, he also got on a plane to Tofino, BC, to spend time with family post-election. And that dominated the news, and the political talk shows, because he couldn’t have waited one more day so it wouldn’t look like crass opportunism and like he was taking the day as a holiday as people were insisting that we not do. It should have been blindingly obvious, but this is a prime minister who has so many blind spots that begin and end with him thinking that so long as his intentions are good that it won’t matter in the end. And once again, because of this blind spot, he has made it all about him, and took the focus away from the importance of the day (though one could also note that reporters and TV hosts making the huge deal about it, and harping on it rather than noting it and moving on should also have known better).

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Roundup: Calling for a return to in-person sittings

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Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet held a press conference yesterday, where he called for Parliament to be recalled as quickly as possible, and for it to resume in-person with vaccinated MPs, ending the “hybrid” sittings that we were saddled with in the previous session. For once, I actually agree with Blanchet – we are at the point with vaccinations and public health measures that there really is not any excuse for MPs not to be attending in person (wearing masks indoors as often as possible), because we cannot continue as we were before dissolution.

For those of you who weren’t following along, the hybrid sittings were direct contributors to the toxicity of the previous session, as MPs didn’t have to look one another in the eye while they behaved in the ways that they did or levelled the accusations at one another that they did, and the limitations of those sittings, particularly at committee, exacerbated the procedural warfare and filibusters that parties engaged in. Additionally, there can be no moral justification for continuing the hybrid sittings given the human toll it takes on the interpreters, who were suffering acoustic injuries at an increased rate because MPs refused to use their equipment properly, or behave reasonably online in ways that wouldn’t disrupt or injure those interpreters. Some parties – particularly the NDP, but you can bet that the Liberals will chine in as well – will want to keep some aspects of hybrid sittings around, but I want to caution that this should be resisted as much as possible – we don’t want to incentivise these to continue, because it will erode parliament the longer it carries on.

Meanwhile, I do fear that there will be Conservative MPs who continue to refuse either vaccination or to disclose their vaccination status (as a craven way of keeping their own anti-vaxx voters on-side) who will complain that they should be allowed to either attend the House of Commons without proof of vaccination, or to be allowed to carry on in a hybrid means without it. Even more to the point, I fear that at least one of them will turn this into a point of personal privilege, that their rights to speak in the Chamber are being infringed upon, and this will become a privilege fight (which would be doomed as the vaccinated majority eventually votes them down). Nevertheless, a return to in-person sittings needs to happen as soon as possible, and if some MPs refuse then so be it – and they can lose their salaries for absenteeism while they’re at it.

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Roundup: Return of the two Michaels

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Friday was very much an exercise in life coming at one fast, as Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with American authorities, and hours later, the extradition order she was under was dropped and she was free to return to China. A few hours after that, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were on their way back to Canada, the fig leaf that their arrests were not hostage diplomacy in retaliation for Meng’s arrest completely gone, and they arrived on Canadian soil in the early hours of Saturday morning, with prime minister Justin Trudeau and foreign affairs minister Marc Garneau greeting them on the tarmac in Calgary. Spavor debarked there, Kovrig then continued onto Toronto, where he was met by his estranged wife and his sister.

With all of this in mind, there are questions as to where our relationship with China goes next. Garneau says that they are “eyes wide open,” and that they are now following a four-fold approach to China: “coexist,” “compete,” “co-operate,” and “challenge” – which seems to be a more articulate policy direction than the “tough but smart” that Garneau’s predecessor, François-Philippe Champagne stated several months ago. This certainly came up during the election, but the Liberals didn’t articulate much of a foreign policy in their platform, and we got very little in the way of debate on the subject. It is not insignificant, however, that Canada did lead a group of Western allies in a pact against the use of hostage diplomacy, whether practice by China or others (and there are others), so it’s not like the government sat on their hands the whole time either. It will also be exceedingly difficult to disentangle our trade from China – particularly in our agricultural sector – so it will be very interesting to see what this process looks like going forward over the next couple of years.

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Roundup: Stripping the riding associations

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In the wake of the election, we are starting to see a few post-mortem thoughts bubbling up, and this one caught my eye over the Twitter Machine on what went on in the NDP campaign:

https://twitter.com/JessaMcLeanNDP/status/1440360899949182976

https://twitter.com/JessaMcLeanNDP/status/1440366348341694465

This is troubling in several respects – it gives some context as to why the NDP couldn’t get the ground game in ridings where they thought they had a chance to pick up seats, and it explains why their campaign spent as much as it did. This shouldn’t be a surprise for the party however – they are a very centralised organisation, and 2011 was ample demonstration that they have very few grassroots organisations in whole swaths of the county. That’s why when the “Orange Wave” happened, you had a tonne of candidates who had never even visited their ridings – the riding organisations were pretty much just on paper, much like the candidates. A proper riding organisation would have held a nomination race for someone from the area, not a McGill student who signed up on a form and spent the race working Mulcair’s riding in Montreal. They didn’t nurture those grassroots, as shallow as they were, and lo, they lost most of their Quebec seats in 2015, and all but one of them in 2019, nor did they regain any in this election.

Ground game matters, especially in an election where getting out the vote is crucial. Grassroots organisations matter. They may have them in a few of their stronghold ridings, but it really doesn’t look like they have it very well developed in large parts of the country, especially in places where they think they have a chance at winning. But if they’re simply stripping their riding associations of resources – and from the sounds of it, carrying on with the centralised nominations – then that’s a sign of an unhealthy political culture, and not a surprise that they aren’t getting the traction that they’re hoping for.

Good reads:

  • Several of the tight races may not have definitive conclusions until the end of the week. In one of them, ousted Liberal candidate Kevin Vuong remains in the lead.
  • The defeat of fisheries minister Bernadette Jordan has both sides of the Indigenous fishing dispute saying that this points to the need for a resolution to the situation.
  • The Star profiles ten of the new MPs that won races on Monday.
  • Here are a few thoughts from Liberals and academics as to where Trudeau goes now that he’s returned another hung parliament.
  • George Chahal has won a riding in Calgary, which essentially makes him a shoo-in for a Cabinet position.
  • It sounds like Erin O’Toole will encourage caucus to vote for the (garbage) Reform Act provisions that allow a leadership review to be triggered.
  • O’Toole has also triggered a campaign review to see where they went wrong.
  • Jagmeet Singh thinks his leadership is secure, and wants to press Trudeau on wealth taxes in exchange for his support.
  • François Legault doesn’t regret his endorsements in the federal election, even though they amounted to little change.
  • Kevin Carmichaels gets some economic reaction to the election results, and posits that there is now more political certainty for the markets to react to.
  • Chantal Hébert makes her observations about the election results, including that Trudeau will start entering the “legacy phase” of his time in office.
  • Robert Hiltz remains unimpressed by what was on offer in the election, and in the results.
  • My column looks at why the election was not an unnecessary effort, and what some of the underlying narratives that didn’t get explored were.

Odds and ends:

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Roundup: The ugliness is home-grown

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There was a fairly terrifying incident over the past couple of days where Liberal incumbent Marc Serré was assaulted in his campaign headquarters by a woman, who was later charged, but this seems to be yet another escalation of the kinds of ugliness we’ve seen in this campaign, whether it’s with the rise in graffiti, to the mob protests with signs advocating lynching, to the gravel being thrown.

Amidst this, we get John Ibbitson at the Globe and Mail actually advocating that the People’s Party “deserves” representation in Parliament, for some unfathomable reason. I mean seriously – this is a party that fight-right and white nationalist groups are advocating people join, and Ibbitson thinks that they deserve seats?

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1437866596987514885

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1437873572706492422

https://twitter.com/kateheartfield/status/1437882514350252043

https://twitter.com/kateheartfield/status/1437883654169051141

With this in mind, Supriya Dwivedi cautions against saying that this is all just imported American divisiveness and rhetoric, pointing out that this is as home-grown as it gets. I largely agree, but we can’t ignore that the purveyors of this rhetoric in Canada have been inspired by the right-wing populist ecosystem in the US and have imported parts of it here, thinking that they can control the beast. They can’t. And while they may have found the inspiration, it found fertile soil here, and now we’re paying the price.

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