Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: Nova Scotia makes two for child care

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau and Iain Rankin, premier of Nova Scotia, announced yesterday that Nova Scotia was now the second province to sign a new childcare agreement with the federal government under the dollars allocated in Budget 2021, and that it would transition the province to halving current fees by next year, and reducing them to the goal of $10/day by 2026, with commitments along the way for those five years. And crucially, there are federal funds going toward training new early childhood educators, as well as to improve the post-secondary programming around ECE, which are important considerations for expanding the system, especially as one of the federal government’s criteria for that expansion is quality of care.

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This makes it two provinces down, both of them with non-conservative premiers, and it’s speculated that Newfoundland and Labrador will be next. Alberta claims to be “negotiating” around things like flexibility, but there is a bit of a red herring in there – nothing precludes the province from creating additional, more flexible spaces outside of the federal parameters if they feel they need it, but trying to insist this is about “choice” is a false dichotomy – there can be no actual choice if there is only constrained choice available. In other words, it’s not a real choice if there are no spaces available, and the federal government has long recognized that we have a supply-side problem, which is what they are trying to address. Opposing the federal plan because you claim it’s not flexible enough is, frankly, an abdication of responsibility.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, put out an extremely bizarre “backgrounder” yesterday to claim that the Liberals never meet their promises on childcare, and it was both strange and dishonest. Strange in that this is the kind of thing you’d expect to have an NDP header on it and not a Conservative one, but dishonest because they killed the gods damned system that was in place in 2006. Seriously – Paul Martin’s government had signed agreements with all of the provinces in 2006, and money for the first year was starting to flow when the NDP teamed up with the Conservatives and brought the government down, killing the childcare system that had just been established, because the Conservatives preferred to send $100/month to families instead – because “choice.” Oh, and they created tax credits for new childcare spaces, which created approximately zero of them. They vehemently opposed childcare, and still do, so for them to try and say the Liberals haven’t kept their promises when they actively worked against them and killed the programme that was created is just galling.

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Roundup: Speculating about normal activities

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As there are only three narratives available to mainstream journalists in this country, and the first of those is speculating about an early election, that’s what we got a lot of over the weekend. Yes, it is looking more likely these days, but eventually this starts looking like a self-fulfilling prophecy more than anything else.

To that end, we got an examination of the electoral considerations that each of the main party leaders is hoping to access in BC, and why they have focused so much attention there over the past week. We got an examination of how pre-writ advertising limitations don’t apply to early elections under the current legislation – though nobody is pulling the trigger on early ads just yet anyway (especially not when TikToks and social media shitposts are free). And there was a state of play when it comes to conservative premiers around the country and how much of a fight they’ll manage to put up against Trudeau if and when an election comes, considering how badly wounded most of them are at this point.

Now, as for the summer tours and announcements that the leaders have been on, apparently much of the media either has amnesia, or they’re being wilfully blind to history because they have a narrative to maintain. While some of these tour activities may be electioneering, but this is also typical after the Commons rises for the summer – leaders always head out across the country, and there is a pent-up desire to do so after some sixteen months of public health restrictions related to the pandemic. Not to mention, the budget has just passed, and the government wants to spread the good news and largesse, which happens every year, election or not. So while I can understand why my fellows in the media want to put everything in the election speculation box, these are also the same things that happen every other normal year, so maybe – just maybe – we should cool it a little until we get some actual signs that Trudeau is going to march over to Rideau Hall to demand a dissolution. And maybe we should ban the phrase “campaign-style” for the time being (maybe permanently), because it’s starting to look embarrassing.

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Roundup: The jobs numbers are in

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It was jobs day at Statistics Canada yesterday, and the June figures showed that there was a big recovery in part-time employment, largely in accommodation and food services, as well as retail trade – signs that the economy is starting to open back up across the country, and this was before we had any re-opening in Ontario, showing that there is still definitely room to grow. There were also more people looking for work, which meant the unemployment rate was a little higher than it might have been otherwise.

Of course, this was entirely being spun in entirely disingenuous ways by Pierre Poilievre, who has made an artform of lying with statistics. He called a press conference to decry that there was still a loss in full-time employment (never mind that full-time employment has held far steadier during the pandemic than part-time work, particularly because a lot of that part-time works is in the service industry that couldn’t operate during the mockdown/lockdowns). He decried the unemployment figure, but deliberately ignored that every country calculates their rate differently, and didn’t mention that if we calculated our rate the way the Americans do, there is a marginal difference between them.

But more to the point, he has spent the past couple of months trying to build this narrative that a job recovery projection in the budget was a promise to have fully restored the million jobs lost from the start of the pandemic by this point. Never mind that we had a third wave that was far deeper and longer than could have been anticipated when those projections were made (and you can thank murderclown premiers for reopening too soon before the second wave had subsided, and then waited too long to impose new measures once again), or that projections are not really promises. Yes, there is still more work to do in order to recover the employment we had pre-pandemic and to do the work of removing barriers so that women and minorities can better participate. But there’s no need to lie with statistics to make a point or as a means of trying to hold the government to account for its actions (or inaction) during this pandemic.

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Roundup: Exit Jody Wilson-Raybould

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Jody Wilson-Raybould announced yesterday that she wasn’t going to be running again in the next election, but wasn’t leaving to “spend more time with family.” Rather, she planned to continue her work in other venues, but noticed that the House of Commons had become more toxic and ineffective, which is very true.

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While I don’t think that Wilson-Raybould was a particularly great minister (and she has yet to answer for her pushing blatantly unconstitutional legislation through), she nevertheless had a particularly valuable viewpoint that made the House of Commons better for having her in it. Her singularly pushing back against the Bloc’s attempts to play politics around Quebec’s Bill 96 and the proposed constitutional changes and nationhood declarations was something we could certainly have used more of, not less.

This having been said, I think Wilson-Raybould, like Jane Philpott, were somewhat naïve about the nature of federal politics, and were sold some particularly bad advice about life as an independent MP, and more broadly about hung parliaments in general. There is a particular romance around them, particularly from a segment of the political science crowd, which has rosy visions of the 1960s and inter-party cooperation to get things done, when hung parliaments in recent decades have simply been nasty and highly partisan, and that contributed a lot to the toxicity and ineffectiveness of this parliamentary session. On top of that, Wilson-Raybould had broken the trust of her fellow MPs, and that no doubt further isolated her in an already fractious situation in the Chamber. It’s too bad that she couldn’t have contributed more, but her no longer being there is a diminution to the kinds of voices that we should be hearing more of.

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Roundup: Trudeau’s feeling punchy in Calgary

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues his tour of the country as the pandemic wanes, and yesterday stopped in Calgary to meet with both Jason Kenney and Naheed Nenshi, and there were some particular notes that Trudeau’s tone had changed, and that he was more combative than he has been in the past – in particular, taking shots at Kenney’s government over their resistance to dealing with climate change and the economic opportunities that come with the green economy, and that Kenney had endorsed banning niqabs in the country as an example of how the previous government didn’t take systemic racism seriously. (And if anyone wants to point out that Kenney was the party’s “ethnic outreach” minister, remember that his particular focus was on communities where they felt they could target social conservative votes, citing their mutual dislike of the gays, marijuana, and so on).

There was in particular some politics being played about the announcement over funding for Calgary’s Green Line LRT project, where the province – which has been apparently slow-walking it for a year now – approved the funding in a press release shortly before Trudeau’s announcement, and weren’t at the announcement themselves, which sounds about typical.

Trudeau, meanwhile, pushed back against the notion that there is some kind of unfairness in equalisation, and that Alberta is being somehow disadvantaged. While he pointed out that the current formula was negotiated with Kenney at the Cabinet table, it bears repeating that equalisation is not the province writing cheques to one another – it comes out of general revenues from federal taxes, and Alberta pays the highest federal taxes because they have the highest incomes in the country by far – even during these tougher economic times for the province as a result of the downturn in the oil market. Not that Kenney is going to tell the truth of how it works when he’s trying to nurse a faux grievance in order to score political points (much as he’s doing with his bullshit “senate nominee elections”). Part of this newfound punchiness on Trudeau’s part has to do with the narrative of election speculation, but also that Kenney has been weakened, and the Conservatives nationally are losing ground, and Trudeau likely sees an opening. There is talk that they could take several seats in Edmonton and Calgary thanks to both softer Conservative numbers and the fact that they could lose ground on their right flank to the swivel-eyed loons in the “separatist” Maverick Party, which gives the Liberals more of an opening. Trudeau also made the point that they want Alberta to have representation in the government, and perhaps people learned their lesson after shutting them out in the province out of spite, only to realize they made a big mistake afterward. We’ll see where it goes, but the shift in tone is notable.

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Roundup: Mary Simon en route to Rideau Hall

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At long last, prime minister Justin Trudeau announced his pick for the next Governor General – and that the Queen had approved of her appointment. The choice is Mary Simon, an Inuk woman from Nunavik in northern Quebec, who started off at CBC North, moved on to negotiating land claims and was part of the constitutional negotiationsin the early 1980s, and later served as Canadian ambassador to Denmark and to the Arctic Council, before becoming president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, serving two terms. The only real downside was that she doesn’t speak French, and she cited that it was because it was not offered during as a choice when she attended day schools in the 1950s, but was committed to learn it – though it does bear noting that Inuktitut is an official language in Nunavut, so that should count for something among critics.

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Speaking of critics, here is a rundown of praise and criticism for the choice, as well as some praise from some of the loudest Indigenous advocates in the country, as well as a few others. One of the recurring things that keeps coming up, however, is that Simon is taking on a role that is colonial, and while Simon herself doesn’t see a conflict (and I’m told that the Inuit view their relationship with Canada differently than the First Nations do). Something that I’ve also seen a lot of online have been variations of “If she doesn’t use the office to burn it to the ground, then what good is it?” or “I hope she’s the last Governor General,” and the usual republican nonsense that misidentifies exactly which queen she will be representing, but of course, the problem with these narratives are both that a) as Governor General, she it’s not her place to burn it all down – that’s why we elect governments; and b) abolishing the monarchy will only complete the colonial project, not advance reconciliation. There are too many facile narratives floating around that only serve to make things worse, not better.

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Meanwhile, Philippe Lagassé enumerates the additional burdens that Simon will have to take on – rehabilitating the office post-Julie Payette, dealing with military sexual misconduct as the commander-in-chief, and walking the line of being the representative of the Crown in a time of reconciliation. Susan Delacourt states that Simon should have been appointed in 2017, making the salient point that she is experience over novelty, and diplomacy over celebrity. Aaron Wherry argues that the appointment is not simply empty symbolism. Paul Wells emphasises the value of presence and being present in the role, which Simon will fulfil greatly.

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Roundup: A big reduction in GHGs from steel

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You can tell that the pandemic is subsiding because politicians are starting to travel again — and more to the point, the prime minister and Cabinet members are starting to spread out across the country in order to start making funding announcements. Naturally, this is immediately being billed as election speculation, never mind that this happens every year once the House of Commons rises, and that there is certainly a pent-up desire on the part of government to be back in the spotlight doing these kinds of announcements. (But seriously, let’s ban the phrase “campaign-style” from news copy).

The major announcement yesterday was announcing $420 million in fully repayable loans to Algoma Steel to move away from coal-fired production to electric-arc production, which aims to reduce as much as 300 million tonnes of GHGs from their process every year, which is huge. Steel and cement are some of the biggest producers and some of the toughest to achieve GHG reductions with, so this is a fairly substantial announcement that will have a meaningful impact when it comes to reducing Ontario’s emissions.

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Heather Scoffield, meanwhile, complains that while the announcement sounds good on its face, too many of the details are obscured and not made transparent, so we don’t know if it’s really a good deal for Canadians or not — though I will note that Power & Politics interviewed one of the Algoma executives who said that some the details around who much of the loan could be forgiven if carbon reduction targets were met are still being negotiated, so perhaps the rest of those details will be made public once they are finalised.

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Roundup: The bravery of a hollow stand

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Over the weekend, The Canadian Press had an interview with out gay Conservative MP Eric Duncan, talking about his fight against the blood donation deferral period for men who have sex with men, while at the same time members of his own party have been fighting the bill to ban conversion therapy. And while it’s great that the Conservatives finally have an out gay MP (previously, their only out member was Senator Nancy Ruth, though they had ministers like John Baird were out in their private lives, but simply refused to acknowledge it in the media), and that their new leader professes to want to be more inclusive (apparently in spite of his own members), there is nevertheless something a bit off with the way this has all played out.

The thing about Duncan’s apparent “bravery” with talking about the blood donor policy as a result of his own history with being rejected is that this is not something the government can actually do anything about because Canadian Blood Services and Héma Québec are arm’s length, and Health Canada’s regulatory role is outside of the minister’s purview. Yes, we can ask questions as to why the Liberals promised to end the ban if they couldn’t actually fulfil their promise, but for Duncan (and for that matter, the NDP) to try and hold the government to account for something that they can’t actually do is a problem. Likewise, they too would be making promises that either they can’t keep, or they are proposing a massive and troubling overreach where the government would wind up asserting jurisdiction, bigfooting those arm’s-length agencies, and setting precedents for bigfooting other arm’s-length bodies in the future, which is a very bad thing that we should be very concerned about.

As for the conversion therapy bill, there were no “common sense amendments” that would make it acceptable to the Conservatives without gutting the bill. The bill would not criminalize conversations between parents and children, or with pastors, and this constant fear that social conservatives have had for decades as LGBT+ rights have progressed has never come true, and yet they will keep banging on that drum. As for the refrain that certain senators are pushing that “the government had six years to do this” is disingenuous. There is only so much time in parliament and only so much capacity in government to get everything accomplished, and it’s not like we didn’t have anything else happening over these past six years (such as a crash in oil prices, the Donald Trump years, getting climate legislation passed, advancing the cause of Indigenous reconciliation, of when it comes to LGBT+ issues, getting trans rights enshrined in law – again to these same social conservative fears of criminalization). Governments can’t do everything at once, and these people know that. Don’t fall for the rhetoric.

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Roundup: Where is the civilian control?

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Something rather unusual happened yesterday in that both prime minister Justin Trudeau, and his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, publicly panned the decision by the Chief of Defence Staff to keep the head of the navy on the job after he went on that golf game with the former CDS, General Jonathan Vance, while Vance is under active investigation for past sexual misconduct. But it’s pretty crazy that this happened given how things work under our system.

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This boils down to Harijit Sajjan and the fact that he’s not doing his job as minister. He is supposed to be the person in Cabinet who does the civilian control, who manages the CDS, and who ensures that the CDS is doing his job properly, but Sajjan hasn’t been doing that job. If he were, then he wouldn’t have been so incurious as to why the investigation into Vance never took off when the former military ombudsman brought forward the allegations, and he would have taken the opportunity to cycle Vance out of the job and put in someone new rather than renew Vance for another term. These are all things were things Sajjan should have done and didn’t do.

Trudeau, however, keeps insisting that Sajjan is the right person for the job, that he’s not part of the old boys’ club, but that’s part of the problem – Sajjan was an active member of the military when he got elected and had to process his resignation papers while he was named to Cabinet, because technically at that point, the CDS outranked him, which is not good when Sajjan is supposed to be exercising civilian control. That’s why we shouldn’t put former military people into the role – they are not civilian control. This can’t be stressed enough. Sajjan shouldn’t have been put in the role, and hasn’t properly done his job since he’s been in it. It’s time for a new minister, and the sooner the better.

Programming note: I am making a long weekend for myself, so no post tomorrow or Saturday. See you next week!

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Roundup: A dubious plan for the next pandemic

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Erin O’Toole unveiled his party’s pandemic preparedness plan yesterday, and it was very curious indeed. His framing was a lot of revisionist history about border closures, and some outright fabrications about supposed contracts that went to people with close connections to the Liberals, which has not been shown anywhere other than the fevered imaginations of what happened around the WE contract, and the bullshit story they concocted around Baylis Medical. More than this, however, a number of things that O’Toole was critical of were things that dated back to the Conservatives’ watch – including changes to the management structure of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The fact that O’Toole is saying he would essentially undo changes the government he was a part of made – without acknowledging that they made the detrimental changes in the first place – is quite something. The fact that they’re going on about the pandemic stockpile without acknowledging that its management failed under their watch, going back to at least 2010 – and we have an Auditor General’s Report that confirms this – is not unsurprising. Other aspects seem to be dubious at best, such as doing something about pharmaceutical patents and doing away with PMPRB (Patented Medicines Price Review Board) regulations in order to appease these companies in the hopes that they will do more research and manufacturing here seems both unwise at best, and will mean higher drug prices for Canadians going forward.

There were some other things buried in there, not the least of which were contradictions around raising tariffs on PPE in order to ensure they are manufactured domestically, while also trying to “secure the North American supply chain” to reduce reliance on imports – but imports from the US and Mexico are still imports. There were also a number of jabs at China in the document, some of which will limit our ability to have international cooperation around research of emerging viruses, and he managed to wedge in the current drama around the National Microbiology Lab firings into his piece as well. The problem of course is that a lot of this sounds like it makes sense on the surface, but the moment you start reading their backgrounder (which doesn’t appear to be online – just emailed to reporters) and scratching beneath the surface, the more apparent it is that a lot of this is hot-air, blame-shifting, and disingenuous rhetoric masquerading as a plan.

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