Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: A promise of extra-illegality

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On a day of more organized protests outside of hospitals around the country, prime minister Justin Trudeau has decided the way to deal with this is…more criminal sanctions. Which is ridiculous, because there are already criminal sanctions around nuisance, harassment, and intimidation, and creating a law specifically for healthcare workers is kind of ridiculous and merely clogs up the criminal code – and I don’t care that they think they’re sending some kind of message. There are existing laws and police should enforce them. Of course, the NDP are saying that this was their idea first, while in more technical terms, Singh says that the victims being healthcare workers should be considered an aggravating factor during sentencing, but the effect is largely the same – this is virtue signalling using the Criminal Code rather than a useful exercise in enforcing existing laws.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1437477651225133056

In Alberta, however, premier Jason Kenney has been warning that he can use the province’s recent law about critical infrastructure – designed to criminalise Indigenous protesters who blockade railways or pipelines – and how they can apply to this situation because the law is so broadly worded. That alone should be concerning about how this law was intended to be applied, but nevertheless, this does appear to be an unforeseen use for this particular piece of legislation.

https://twitter.com/EmmaLGraney/status/1437470976472666116

Meanwhile, Althia Raj worries about Trudeau inflaming “divisions” in the country as the PPC gains more followers among these protesters and the anti-vaxx crowd, but this is a  credulous take if I ever heard one. These are not rational actors we are dealing with. They are part of an embrace of conspiracy theory that is happening across the Western world, for whatever the reason, and this is a very big problem. I’m not sure I see the utility in appealing for Trudeau to be soft-peddling to these conspiracy theorists, but I will note that there has been one party who has been winking and nodding to these conspiracy theories, and even going to far as to promulgating them in the House of Commons, and that party is not the one that Trudeau leads. There are consequences for O’Toole and company for doing so, and we are reaping what they’ve sown. It’s too bad that people in the media are not calling it out.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1437467693934854149

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Roundup: Ill-equipped to combat weaponised cynicism

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I’ve been thinking about something Trudeau said during the “debate” on Thursday night about cynicism being the enemy of progressive politics, and in this piece by Aaron Wherry, he listed some of the attacks made against Trudeau in his discussion of said cynicism. It has not gone unnoticed that this has been a tactic that Jagmeet Singh has been cultivating for years – undermining any progress the government has made on tough files, and pretending that difficult things could be accomplished with just a little more willpower, or that things under provincial jurisdiction could just be done with more applications of that willpower. The truth is that it can’t be, and that hard things are hard – which is also why the “you had six years!” talking point is hard to take too seriously. It has a built-in assumption that a government has infinite capacity to do the work, that the House of Commons has infinite time on its calendar to pass all of its legislation, and it also assumes that premiers will sign onto anything the federal government waves in front of them. But that’s not how real life works (especially when your capacity is being sapped by needing to deal with Donald Trump for four years).

But complexity and nuance don’t belong in debates, which is what Singh, Annamie Paul, and even to an extent Erin O’Toole are counting on when they list Trudeau’s so-called “failures.” He didn’t meet the 2020 climate target? If he had started in the fall of 2015, moving to meet that target was pretty much impossible without cratering the economy, and Singh knows it. You can’t lower emissions on a dime, and even bending the curve – which Trudeau has done – takes enormous work, and it’s work he had to go to the Supreme Court of Canada to defend. Boil water advisories? There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and each community has a unique issue that requires a unique solution, which each community is taking the lead on, and the federal government pays the invoices. But again, these solutions take time, even with money being thrown at the problem, which Singh and others seem incapable of recognizing because it suits their narrative. “Taking Indigenous kids to court?” Again, it’s a more nuanced issue where the government has agreed to pay the compensation, and is in the process of negotiating how much in concert with two other class action lawsuits (which went directly to settlement – the government didn’t contest them at all) – but there are very real legal issues with the precedent that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal might set, because their award appears to contravene a previous Supreme Court of Canada decision. Again, Singh should know this because he’s a lawyer, but he has no interest in the truth because it allows him to score points (and frankly, the media has utterly dropped the ball on this file because they only talk to one party in the litigation and don’t find out just what “jurisdiction” issue the minister refers to). These are all things whose narratives have been torqued to drive a sense of cynicism in Trudeau’s government, which Trudeau is frankly ill-prepared to dispute because he keeps sticking to happy-clappy talking points rather than being frank about problems and solutions. When someone offers you platitudes and doesn’t explain their homework, it makes it all too easy to let cynicism fill in the cracks, and Trudeau really has only himself to blame here.

Meanwhile, here is the video the five leaders released encouraging people to get vaccinated.

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Roundup: The PBO’s dubious stamp of approval strikes again

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With less than two weeks to go in the campaign, the Parliamentary Budget Officer says he has returned 75 of 100 costing requests, but the Conservatives have not authorised release of any of theirs yet. The Liberals appear to have released most of theirs, and the NDP have only released two so far – but theirs are both fairly problematic.

Their first costing was for their pharmacare plan, basing it on Quebec’s 2016 formulary, and drawing their assumptions out from there for five years, and presumes that they could get a national plan up and running by next year using that formulary as an example. That’s a virtual impossibility, and a national formulary still needs to be negotiated (which the Canadian Drug Agency Transition Office is set up to coordinate once more provinces sign on), but hey, they got the PBO’s stamp of approval. Their costing for their wealth tax is also loaded with plenty of poor assumptions, has a huge uncertainty around a behavioural response – tax avoidance is a whack-a-mole problem – and most importantly, the base assumption is for a tax on “economic families,” when our tax system is built around individual filers. They would need to create a whole new tax system to capture this one percent of net wealth. And as Lindsay Tedds points out, there is no way this could be administered to get revenues for the current taxation year, but hey, the PBO put his stamp of approval on that one too.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1435346365228400643

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1435349658805624834

The notion that the PBO should do platform costing because he’s “neutral” is a poor move, because costing is an inherently political exercise. It requires implementation decisions that have huge effects on what is being projected, and those are decisions that he should be far away from.

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Roundup: Grading the parties’ sincerity on climate

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One of the great things about the policy landscape in Canada are the number of professors out there who are willing to devote their time and energy to providing advice to political parties, or who will be willing to evaluate their proposals. We had an example of this as professor Mark Jaccard at Simon Fraser University went and checked over the parties’ environmental platforms and did the modelling on them, and then graded them – and the Liberals came out ahead by quite a margin (and in the interest of trying to look “balanced,” the CBC declared that the Conservatives were “not far behind,” though it was literally the difference between an A- and a D).

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1433770709730344962

The full study not only evaluates the targets, but the policies and costs as well – because there are economic costs to some of these plans. Interestingly, he also tests the sincerity of those plans, which is not only a sense of how feasible they are, but also their history as a party of a willingness to do the heavy lifting, and that’s a pretty important measure. “Beware of politicians who promise big but have not subjected their promises and plans to assessment by independent climate policy modellers. In this regard, the NDP and Greens are suspect,” Jaccard writes, and it’s worth reading through why he gives them the scores he does. The economic damage that the NDP plan promises to do would never be agreed to by their union base, and the fact that it would require a police state for them to set the kinds of binding carbon budgets that they propose are demonstrations about how unserious the policies are.

What is disappointing in this is that the NDP in particular started making personal attacks against Jaccard, and trying to build lame conspiracy theories that he is somehow being paid off to pump up the Liberals and talk down the NDP, which is both ridiculous and is the kinds of sore loser tactics that we’ve come to expect. (Seriously, my reply column on a daily basis is full of Dippers with hurt feelings because I have the temerity to point out the reality of things like jurisdiction or the fact that you can’t willpower things into existence). Elizabeth May was among those who took swipes at Jaccard, for the temerity of being an economist and not a climate scientist – which is also ridiculous because economics is literally the science of allocating scare resources, and the fact that climate scientists are not offering policy solutions. Science is not policy, and that’s why it’s important to understand the difference between the two and how they complement one another – providing that you’re willing to listen and not get in a huff because someone pointed out that your implementation plans don’t belong in the real world.

https://twitter.com/MarkJaccard/status/1433891783524720641

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Roundup: Ford’s vaccine certification falsehoods

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Ontario’s science table released some dire modelling yesterday that showed that unless vaccination rates reach over 85 percent, we may need yet another lockdown to prevent the healthcare system from becoming overwhelmed – yet again. Thus far, only 76 percent of people over the age of 12 are fully vaccinated, so we have a way to go if we don’t want things to get dire, once more.

With this in mind, Doug Ford begrudgingly agreed to finally roll out vaccine certificates (not calling them “passports”) as of September 22, with the app coming a month later, but as with anything Ford and his band of incompetent murderclowns do, it’s half-assed and largely inadequate. In this case, they’ll require these certificates to enter non-essential businesses like indoor dining and theatres, but at the same time, they won’t require staff at these places to be fully vaccinated, because that makes so much sense. And most gallingly, Ford tried to claim that he has to do it because the federal government won’t – which is, frankly, bullshit because this is firmly within provincial jurisdiction, and after provinces grudgingly allowed the federal government access to their records for international travel purposes, many of them either refused to allow the same data to be used domestically (including Ford up until yesterday), or stated that they were moving ahead with their own certification so no need to bother with a federal one (thinking especially of Quebec).

Here’s Justin Ling with receipts about why this is bullshit, including when Ford’s flacks tried to “prove” that they wanted national vaccine certification, when it was in fact for international travel, and they’re content to lie to us to try and shift the blame when the anti-vaxxer crowd starts protesting (and yes, they did immediately after).

And because it was too spot-on, here’s Brittlestar’s take.

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Roundup: False narratives about the Q2 GDP

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The figures for second quarter GDP were released yesterday, and they weren’t as good as had been expected. There was a surprise contraction of 1.1% annualized, which caught economists off-guard (and perhaps Statistics Canada as well, as their flash estimate a month previous had still shown growth). The majority of these declines were in the months of April and May because of the third wave, as June had shown robust growth in nearly all sectors as economies around the country re-opened – and those declines were largely in the areas of home resales and exports. To an extent, the home resales was a bit of a correction – after giant increases in previous quarters, most especially Q3 of 2020, the market slowed down.

For Erin O’Toole and Pierre Poilievre, however, these figures were a cataclysmic sign that Trudeau can’t “manage” the economy, and that it’s deficits that are leading to inflation, which is insane. A lot of the weakness is attributable to the Third Wave and its associated lockdowns, and that is squarely the fault of premiers who opened up too soon, reduced restrictions too fast, and then were too slow to re-impose them (and we’re going to get more of that in the oncoming fourth wave). More than anything, it’s reflective that O’Toole and Poilievre aren’t even bothering to read the data beyond the headlines, and are slotting it into pre-arranged talking points which are so divorced from reality that it should be concerning to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. The fact that Poilievre is goading the Bank of Canada over Twitter is a Very Bad Thing. He’s continuing to politicise them, and feeding into a bunch of poisonous populist narratives, and O’Toole is joining him for the ride. This is a very bad thing for our economy, and it doesn’t matter that they’re doing it all for show and that they probably will keep things status quo should they form government – the fact that they are polarising the debate and riling up these same toxic mobs that have been following Trudeau’s campaign around is absolutely a problem. This kind of rhetoric should be disqualifying for anyone who seeks higher office in this country.

Meanwhile, as you may have heard, Erin O’Toole reiterated his promise to balance the budget without making any cuts (in spite of promising earlier to cut things like the CBC) because he’s going to grow the economy enough. Why does that sound familiar?

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1432799152266694657

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Roundup: Handwaving about tax loopholes

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The narratives about “closing tax loopholes” never really die, and lo, they have come back yet again on the campaign, as Jagmeet Singh hopes to use this as a campaign plank, and to basically start extracting a dollar figure from them. The problem? Well, that’s basically misunderstanding the problem with these “loopholes” – they’re a game of whack-a-mole. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t tackle them, because you should, and successive governments have been doing that for decades, but as soon as you close one, the well-funded tax preparation industry finds another that they can exploit, and all of that money that a government may have been hoping to recoup doesn’t appear.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1432361687361933312

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1432362354314993667

Additionally, Singh alleged that Justin Trudeau was somehow directing the CRA to not go after large corporations, and that he isn’t charging the “super rich” tax evaders. But again, this distorts reality – the CRA is an arm’s length agency from government, and free from political direction, and don’t direct audits or collection activities. Yes, the current government has provided more funds for CRA to undertake those activities, but they can’t tell them who to audit. Additionally, when CRA finds a file that they deem suspicious, they forward it to the RCMP, and if they feel that there is criminality, they forward it to the Public Prosecution Service – which, again, is arm’s length and not subject to political direction – and they decide whether or not to lay charges. Thus far, they have not with some of the high profile investigations into the Panama Papers, or other such leaks, likely because they know their chances of a successful prosecution are slim because these particular practices wind up being legal in the long run, no matter how often governments try to crack down on them. Regardless, Singh trying to portray this as either cronyism or a lack of political will is not reflective of reality.

Also not reflective of reality – some of the hand-waving he’s been doing in other interviews, such as this one where he says he’ll “get it done” on ending the deferral period for blood donations for men who have sex with men – never mind that Canadian Blood Services is arm’s length from government and not subject to their orders. You can’t Green Lantern your way through government. Implementation of your ideas matters – a lot.

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Roundup: A lack of self-awareness in the face of a violent mob

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The cancellation of Justin Trudeau’s planned rally on Friday evening because of the growing number of angry protesters has given some pause to members of the media about how things got so bad, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of self-reflection on too many people out there. While both Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh have denounced the violent protesters, and O’Toole and local candidate Kyle Seeback kicking their volunteers who were part of the mob off of their campaigns, there remains a complete lack of self-awareness on their part. O’Toole not only endorses the kinds of shitposters that fuel this toxic outrage, but he has gone so far as to hire them, both for his leadership and for the campaign. The actively contributes to this discourse through winking and nodding to them, repeating their conspiracy theories in the House of Commons either directly or indirectly, and he directly contributes to this kind of poisoned discourse. Likewise, Conservative Michelle Rempel Garner is speaking out about being accosted and harassed on her campaign, but there is nary a word of acknowledgement about how she has fed this crowd, or the fact that she sends her own army of trolls and flying monkeys against those she disagrees with (and I know people who have been on the receiving end of this).

Most galling, however, are the media figures like John Ivison, who have essentially blamed Trudeau himself for this state of affairs.

There are others who have been bringing up the testimony of former Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, during the hearings into the Double-Hyphen Affair, when he sounded the alarm about the rising incitements to violence that were happening on social media – statements that were roundly ridiculed by members of the media. I’d say that perhaps we should be looking for some self-awareness out of this, but I have serious doubts that it’s even possible among the majority of them. But maybe I’m just getting cynical.

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Roundup: Cynicism and paid sick days

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a couple of election promises yesterday that felt a bit cynical, and one of them is federally problematic. The first promise was to implement ten employer-paid sick days in federally-regulated workplaces. This was something that he should have done some 18 months ago, but given that they had mandated three employer-paid sick days previously – the highest in the country – they felt they were in good standing, and tried to persuade provinces to do the same. They did not.

After Trudeau made the announcement, Jagmeet Singh went on a tear about how “disgusted” he was that Trudeau had made this promise when he’d been calling for it for over a year. But there are differences here, and yes, they matter. Some of you may recall that Singh wanted the federal government to give paid sick leave to everyone in the country, but the federal government can’t do that. They can only mandate employer-paid sick leave – which is the best kind because it means that there are no interruptions on pay cheques and job security is maintained – in federally-regulated workplaces, which account for six percent of jobs in the country. That’s it. The provinces have to amend their own labour codes to cover the remaining workplaces, and Singh consistently refused to acknowledge that reality. Meanwhile, the government recognized that there were people who didn’t have access to employer-paid leave because they’re self-employed or part-time, so they created the Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit, which was a kludge – you had to apply for it, and only after you missed half of the week, and it took more time for the money to arrive. Singh demanded that the federal government “fix” that programme, but there wasn’t much more they could do to it – there are limits to the federal back-end IT infrastructure used to administer the programme, so it couldn’t be seamless like employer-paid sick leave. And the premiers, for whom the other 94 percent of workplaces are under their jurisdiction? They balked, especially because business lobbies like the CFIB lobbied heavily against mandating more sick days, so they forced people to rely on the CRSB, or created their own temporary kludges to mimic the CRSB. For Singh to now claim that Trudeau is doing what he demanded is not true – yes, Trudeau should have mandated more employer-paid sick days federally, but this is not the same as CRSB, and the two should not be equated like he’s doing here (and yes, it is cynical politics for him to claim otherwise in order to drive disillusionment).

As for the promise around school ventilation, it’s too late for this school year, and at first blush it looks like a federal overreach into provincial jurisdiction. The backgrounder states that this is just extending the Safe Return to Class Fund from August 2020, and they’re basically giving money to provinces with the slenderest of strings attached, which I’m not really a fan of. Because we’re in an election, we’re back to the constant state of promises – from all parties – that rely on provincial cooperation, and there are a lot of loaded assumptions that they’ll play ball, which seems to be fairly rare (and before you raise child care, the success there is in part because there was too much money on the table for provinces to ignore, which is not how it has played out with pharmacare). The Liberals are mostly more careful in their language, citing things like “While a Liberal government will always respect provincial-territorial jurisdiction…” unlike the other two platforms, but this certainly isn’t being picked up on nearly enough by the reporting, and it creates expectations that perhaps it perhaps shouldn’t.

https://twitter.com/JenniferRobson8/status/1428860564676222981

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Roundup: Paul’s disqualifying blunder

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It was not a good day for civic literacy or basic constitutional knowledge on the campaign trail, as Green Party leader Annamie Paul suggested that the Governor General “reinvoke” Parliament to hold an emergency debate on the situation in Afghanistan, and worse, cited a section out of the Emergencies Act to make it happen, and my head nearly exploded from the sheer stupidity of it all.

First of all, and this is crucial – the Governor General does not have that power. She has already dissolved Parliament. She can’t un-dissolve it with the stroke of a pen, and there is no mechanism to “reinvoke” Parliament, not even under the Emergencies Act. Parliament has been dissolved. There is nothing to recall in order to hold a debate, which again, is a useless gesture in the current situation. The most that would happen is that MPs would read speeches into the record for about five hours, and that’s it. Paul is perfectly welcome to read a twenty-minute speech to the media if she so chooses, and it would have exactly the same effect as an “emergency debate” would in the House of Commons (and I do use the term loosely). More to the fact, this is not a situation for which the Emergencies Act could be invoked, because it is not a national emergency in any shape or form. Additionally, the section she cites says that Parliament needs to be recalled at its earliest opportunity, even if it’s been dissolved – in which case it means as soon as there’s a new parliament that can be convened.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1427347519751720965

The fact that we have another party leader who is just pulling this out of her ass is bad enough, but she’s also a lawyer and should know better (and this goes doubly for Jagmeet Singh, as he too is a lawyer, and has been inventing powers for the Governor General). The fact that you can’t recall a dissolved Parliament is basic civics – and the fact that she doesn’t know this and is trying to issue demands to the Governor General should be disqualifying. It’s a complete embarrassment – but you wouldn’t know it if you watched the CBC, who glossed over the whole incident and didn’t mention it during their roundup of the day’s speeches. (We had other reporters covering themselves in glory today by asking the prime minister who was in charge during the election. No, seriously). An utter farce all around. This is why we can’t have nice things.

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