Tag Archives: Fisheries

Roundup: Self-harm by way of platitude

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I try not to make a habit of re-litigating my Twitter disputes in this space, but in this particular case, I find it’s a perfect illustration of how this government’s inability to communicate its way out of a wet paper bag, and why that harms them. To wit: A Global News piece declares that Trudeau won’t commit to ending boil-water advisories on First Nations by 2021 as is the current promise. It uses the recent evacuation at Neskatanga First Nation as an illustration of problems with boil-water advisories. It quotes Trudeau giving a bland talking point about “more work to do,” and way down at the bottom of the story is reference to the fact that in Neskatanga, not only has money been approved and delivered, but the new water treatment facility is nearly completed construction.

So why is this a problem for the government? Because if they had the slightest bit of candour, they could have explained that capital projects like these take time, particularly in the kinds of remote and fly-in communities like these particular First Nations. Twitter is filled with people who are seriously asking why the government hasn’t solved these issues if they’re showering money around, without having the slightest clue about what he actual problems with these boil water advisories are, and accustomed to situations where they can simply throw money at a problem and it will go away. That’s not the case, and not understanding the logistical and capacity issues at play means that we get this ongoing confusion. For example, many of these reserves are only accessible to bring equipment up with ice roads for a couple of months of the year, which slows the ability to make timely solutions. (This is also an issue with housing on many reserves – small windows by which to bring in building supplies, and those windows are getting ever shorter because of climate change). This has been made even worse in the pandemic, because many communities won’t let the people who are building these new facilities into the community in an attempt to keep COVID out (which Trudeau made vague reference to, but folded it into his platitude so it gets lost). In some communities, it’s not a question of the equipment but of maintenance – as soon as they find and train someone local to do the work, they get headhunted and given a better offer, and the community has to start over again, as the equipment once again breaks down. And it would be great if Trudeau or one of his ministers could actually articulate these challenges, but they won’t. Instead, they fall back on their platitudes about “doing better,” and not giving people a clue about what the actual challenges are.

The government also assumes that these reporters will do the work to find out what the challenges are, but they won’t. Pressed for time, and under the constant pressure to produce, most of them will only both-sides the quotes and move on (as happened in this particular case). Most don’t understand the background or the actual challenges, so it doesn’t get reported – only the platitudes in face of the complaints. Actual candour from Trudeau and the Cabinet would fix this – easily! But they won’t do it. It’s maddening, and they’re just shooting themselves in the foot, over, and over, and over again.

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Roundup: Confidence maintained, control wrested

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It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the government survived the confidence vote – it was very much an example of Wells’ First Rule – and the NDP and Greens voted to keep parliament going. Of course, the narrative that both the Conservatives and NDP adopted was that the Liberals were pushing for an election – the Conservatives (and Bloc) claiming it was because the Liberals really wanted to cover something up, and the NDP self-righteously declared that they weren’t going to give Trudeau the election that he wanted, but would keep parliament going to get things done for Canadians. Of course, if Trudeau really wanted an election (which he doesn’t), he could just head next door to Rideau Hall on any given morning and ask Julie Payette to dissolve Parliament, but he won’t, because that’s not what today was about.

Part of what has irked me in this is the way in which the Conservatives’ motion was being described, which is innocuously. One writer went so far as to call it a “pedestrian motion,” which it was anything but, and I highly suspect that nobody actually read through it except for the two other procedural wonks in the Gallery. Aside from the inflammatory title of “anti-corruption,” or the proposed alternative whose four-letter abbreviation would have been SCAM (both instances that demonstrate that it’s a group of juvenile shitposters running O’Toole’s office who are treating the Order Paper as a game of who can be the most outrageous), the proposed committee’s terms of reference would have put the government at a structural disadvantage with three fewer members (generally committees in the current parliamentary composition are split, and on committees where the government chairs it, the opposition has the votes to outweigh the government), but it would have given the committee first priority for all parliamentary resources, and compelled production of all documents they wanted and witnesses to appear, no matter who. This essentially means that both ministers and the civil service would be at the committee’s beck and call, and that they would have to drop everything to attend it – which is what Pablo Rodriguez meant by the committee being meant to “paralyze” government. They could go on unlimited fishing expeditions with little to no ability to push back, and given the fact that there aren’t any smoking guns here, it would be constant wild goose chases while Parliament was unable to get anything else accomplished. More than that, it would also have enshrined that the prime minister’s extended family – meaning his mother and brother – would be considered legitimate targets, and have their financial information put into the open for no good reason. And funnily enough, not one story from yesterday mentioned these facts – not the Star, not the National Post, not CBC, nor The Canadian Press. Yet this seems like some pretty vital context for why the government would so strenuously object to this “pedestrian” motion.

There was another consideration, that former Paul Martin-era staffer Scott Reid expounded upon, which is control of the agenda. That’s a pretty important thing in a hung parliament, and under the current circumstances. Trudeau hasn’t been able to make much progress on any file (admittedly, much of this is his own fault for refusing to bring parliament back in a sensible way, followed by his decision to prorogue), but being hamstrung by that motion was going to make things moving forward near impossible. Now that he’s stared down O’Toole, I suspect he has some breathing room again.

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Roundup: Supply Day showdown

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There is going to be a looming showdown over the duelling motions on special committees, and it’s the Conservatives’ Supply Day today, and their demand for an “anti-corruption committee” is going to be the motion they put forward, barring any last-minute climbdowns, with Erin O’Toole planning a press conference early in the morning to justify the position. The Liberal House leader, Pablo Rodriguez, has been more than hinting that this could very well be considered a confidence motion, as he describes said committee as an attempt to “paralyze” the government. The Bloc are on-side with the Conservatives, but the NDP are undecided, though they had a bit of a climbdown of their own yesterday as Charlie Angus said that they would limit their demands for the records of the speaking fees of the prime minister and his family to just him and his wife – documents which the Liberals provided yesterday (despite the fact that they were already in the public domain). So we’ll see how much of a performance all of the parties put on regarding these competing motions later today.

Meanwhile, WE Charity turned over a bunch of new documents on the speaking fees of the Trudeaus, and well, they don’t all match what had been disclosed before. Here’s Janyce McGregor with more:

There were also a couple of new revelations about the trip with WE that Bill Morneau repaid, for what it’s worth.

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QP: Confusion over police powers

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The prime minister was around, but absent from the Chamber for QP, leaving his deputy in his place. Erin O’Toole led off, script and mini-lectern in front of him accusing the government of being absent on the issue of tensions around the Mi’kmaq fishery issue, to which Chrystia Freeland condemned the violence that took place, and said that federal and provincial governments were working together to recognise the Mi’kmaq rights under the Marshall Decision. O’Toole went again on the same question in French, got the same answer, then n French worried about threats that China was making, particularly around Canadians in Hong Kong. Freeland responded that the foreign minister had issued a clear statement, and that only Canada would make its own decisions on immigration. O’Toole asked again in English, and got much the same response, with slightly more specificity on the individual issues in China. O’Toole blustered more about Trudeau’s apparent “admiration for the basic dictatorship of China,” the Chinese ambassador’s comments and wondered when his credentials would be pulled. Freeland reminded him that she was well aware of what a totalitarian communist country is like, as she lived in one and reported from it, before repeating that they were standing up for human rights and the Canadian citizens in Hong Kong. Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, worrying that the government would rather go to an election than talk about the WE Imbroglio, to which Freeland said that the Government House Leader had made a sensible suggestion around a special committee on pandemic costing, which she hoped they would support. Therrien said that was well and good but still wanted a committee dedicated to the WE Imbroglio, to which Freeland reminded him of what has been released to date. Jagmeet Singh appeared by video to accuse the prime minister in French of standing by and not protecting the Mi’kmaq (never mind that policing is a provincial responsibility), to which Freeland said that they approved a request to give more resources to the RCMP on the ground. Singh switched to English to repeat the question, and got much the same response.

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Roundup: A spineless premier in the centre of a dispute

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The suspicious fire of a lobster pound used by the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia is the latest escalation in the fisheries dispute in that province, which prompted a number of calls over the weekend for the federal government to do something. But when you ask for specifics, people tend to come up with a bunch of hand-waving and not a lot of answers. As a reminder, policing is a provincial responsibility, and in Nova Scotia, the RCMP are contracted to the province. This means that it’s the province’s responsibility to ensure that the RCMP are doing their jobs and protecting the Mi’kmaq people from the mobs of angry commercial fishers that are threatening them, and not just standing there and watching it happen like they did during the swarming of a lobster pound last week.

Of course, the premier keeps trying to insist that he can’t solve the problem and demands that the federal government define what a “moderate livelihood” for the Mi’kmaq people is under their treaty rights (which, to be clear, the government has been at the negotiation table about for weeks now), which is a cynical exercise in buck-passing from a premier who make a big song and dance about admitting that the province was mired in systemic racism. Funny that when it’s in his face, he doesn’t want to do anything about it. On Saturday, the province’s attorney general finally requested additional support for the RCMP from the federal government, which Bill Blair immediately granted, days after he publicly stated that there were resources waiting to be deployed to the province upon request, which they had not done up until that point. A bunch of people (including Jagmeet Singh) also started chirping over Twitter that this attack was “terrorism,” except that it’s not – the Criminal Code has a very specific definition, and a mob is not it. One of the Indigenous chiefs at the centre of the dispute also mused over social media that the military should be called in, but again, this can’t be done without the request of the provincial government, and I cannot stress this enough, but you do not want the military to conduct law enforcement. It’s a VERY, VERY BAD THING.

Meanwhile, both the fisheries minister and the NDP are now calling for an emergency debate in Parliament over this, which seems to me to be the most useless thing imaginable, but what can you do? Erin O’Toole is also trying to pin the blame on the federal government, insisting that they should have had the negotiations over by now (how? By imposing a solution?) and blaming the federal government for not properly resourcing the RCMP in the province (who are under provincial contract and jurisdiction), but then again, truth hasn’t exactly been his strong suit of late. But this shouldn’t be an issue about the treaty – the government has signalled that they will protect those rights, and are just figuring out the details. Protection of the Mi’kmaq fishers and their property should be a police matter, which is provincial jurisdiction, but so long as the premier is too afraid of the white voters, I don’t see him exactly taking a strong stand on this issue anytime soon, and while all eyes turn back to Justin Trudeau to do something, anything, he doesn’t exactly have the levers at his disposal.

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Roundup: Special committee games

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The competing offers for special committees got even more crowded yesterday as the Liberals suggested their own possible special committee to examine pandemic spending, in a bid to jam both the Conservatives and NDP as they make their own offers. The Conservatives, you may recall, are employing a stunt to call for a special “anti-corruption committee,” as though the penny-ante bullshit that happens here were actual corruption that happens in other countries, and called explicitly for the purpose of decrying any lack of support for this committee idea as being in support of corruption. The NDP have their own proposal for a pandemic spending committee, but it was intended as a kind of super-committee to draw in not only the WE Imbroglio, but to revisit other non-scandals such as the Rob Silver affair (which the Ethics Commissioner declined to investigate), or the fact that one of the many pandemic procurement contracts went to a company whose owner is a former Liberal MP (whose departure was a bit huffy and drawn out at the time, one may recall).

The Liberal plan is to offer a “serious committee” to do “serious work,” which is a political gambit in and of itself – citing that if the other parties don’t agree to this particular committee (whose terms of reference one expects will be fairly narrowly circumscribed), then it proves that they are simply motivated by partisan gamesmanship rather than helping Canadians. And they’re not wrong – that’s exactly what both the Conservatives and NDP are looking for, at a point where they can only expect diminishing returns the longer that they drag on the WE Imbroglio (though, caveat, they do have a legitimate point in the Finance committee about producing the unredacted documents because that was the committee order that the government didn’t obey, and risks finding themselves in contempt of parliament over; the Ethics Committee demands are going outside of that committee’s mandate).

To add to the possible drama, the Liberals are also contemplating making the Conservatives’ upcoming Supply Day motion on their committee demand a confidence vote, which will wind up forcing the hands of one of the opposition parties into voting against it because nobody wants an election (and that could mean a number of Conservative MPs suddenly having “connectivity issues” and being unable to vote on the motion to ensure its demise). Of course, there is always the possibility of an accident – that seat counts weren’t done properly and the government could defeat itself, though that’s highly unlikely in the current circumstances. Nevertheless, this game-playing is where we’re at, seven months into the pandemic.

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Roundup: O’Toole’s “cancel culture” performance

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Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is making obligatory right-flavoured populist noises, decrying “cancel culture” because Queen’s University’s board voted to consider changing the name of their John A. Macdonald building, as is much the flavour of the day. It’s this juvenile, performative noise, but this is the kind of thing that O’Toole built his leadership around, without any critical thinking whatsoever, so here’s @moebius_strip to point out the sheer absurdity of it all.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1316454539596234753

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1316465701100552192

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1316465838468198401

Meanwhile, there is consternation because the Library and Archives websites haven’t yet updated their biographies of prime ministers like Macdonald and Laurier to adequately convey that they had racist policies, and lo, cookie-cutter journalism gets the same four voices to decry this that appear in every other story. Never mind that Library and Archives says that they are doing consultations in order to do the work of reconciliation, and that there will be updated versions coming – it’s not good enough because this all needed to be done yesterday.

Part of the problem here, however, is that it will take time to get a properly nuanced version of history that both acknowledges their contributions to building the country while also acknowledging the racism of the era – particularly because it’s not simply black-and-white, and anyone who has read Macdonald’s biography will find it hard to simply pigeon-hole him as some kind of cartoon racist, which is certainly what some of the online dialogue would have us do. Yes, he’s a complex and problematic figure, but he was also a moderating influence, and his racist policies were actually the less-bad ones that were being demanded by a lot of voices of the era, which I doubt is going to be acknowledged to the satisfaction of his modern-day critics. It’s not a simple conversation, but that seems to be what is being demanded.

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QP: The Bloc let their motives be known

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While he had initially stated that he would not be in QP today, things changed and prime minister Justin Trudeau did show up after all. Erin O’Toole led off in French with a script in front of him, accusing the prime minister letting the pandemic alert system get sidelined because he preferred Chinese data, to which Trudeau disputed it, saying that the funding was stable and they we investigating to know what happened with the system. O’Toole doubled down and accused the prime minister of ideologically preferring information out of China, and Trudeau disputed this more vigorously. O’Toole switched to English to accuse the government of ignoring warnings about Huawei, to which Trudeau insisted that they were aware of the reports and were working to keep Canadians safe. O’Toole tried again, for which Trudeau reiterated his response. O’Toole then moved onto a potential refinery closure in Newfoundland, accusing the government of doing nothing about it, to which Trudeau declared that they were engaged and listed consultations they have undertaken. Alain Therrien led off for the Bloc, and he returned to the accusations of the government consorting with an alleged Chinese gangster, to which Trudeau offered a curt no in response. Therrien listed more apparent meetings that the government had with this alleged gangster, and Trudeau reminded him that the Liberals’ fundraising activities were the most transparent of any party. Jagmeet Singh was up to lead for the NDP, and in French, he demanded a tax on “excessive profits” companies made in the pandemic, to which Trudeau recited his worn talking point that they raised the taxes on the one percent when they formed government and the NDP voted against it. Singh changed to English to name poor workers to put faces on the same question, and Trudeau responded that they recognised front-line workers and that was why they stepped up to supports for businesses, before repeating his line about raising taxes.

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Roundup: Learned helplessness sets into the Senate

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News that the Senate has been suspended until the end of the month, and that they have only met fourteen times since March, is deeply irritating to me on numerous levels. My primary irritation is that the Senate has work it can do, but hasn’t been doing it both because they’ve been unable to get their committees up and running, and because there have been virtually no government bills that were not COVID-related or Estimates that have headed their way. On the committee front, it would seem that much of the drama that happened in the early part of the year in the Selection committee has largely resolved itself because the Progressive Senators Group has been revitalized and is now a viable caucus again, meaning that Senator Yuen Pau Woo’s attempt to exclude them from committee seats has been for naught, and they should be able to come to an agreement about equitable distribution of seats now that he’s not able to screw them over. As for government bills, this has largely been a question of timing – bills in process did not advance very far before the pandemic hit – but the government has a very full agenda and should introduce one or two of its bills in the Senate as they are capable of doing, in order to get the ball rolling on them. There is no excuse for them not to.

As for the lack of sitting days, this is largely the prerogative of the Leader of the Government in the Senate, and in the current pandemic state, I find that a kind of learned helplessness has been setting in, in both chambers. The Senate, disadvantaged on the part of resources, particularly when it comes to thinks like IT and video capacity, has taken a back-seat while the Commons has been gobbling up those resources to get its own operations going remotely, and yet the Senate could very well have come up with ways to meet in-person safely. The concerns about travel could be mitigated by just having senators stay put, but they have thus far refused to make allowances in their Internal Economy committee to let them do so that won’t cost them out-of-pocket if they don’t already have an apartment or condo in town. The current demands for “hybrid” sittings, in spite of the problems that have developed with them in the Commons, seems to be barrelling ahead in spite of the objections of the Conservatives, and despite the fact that simply creating a parliamentary bubble is the cheaper, easier, and better option.

The bitter irony in all of this is that for all of Justin Trudeau’s talk about a more “independent” Senate, the last eight months have turned the Chamber into one big rubber stamp, as process gets abused time and again in the name of emergency legislation because they refuse to create a parliamentary bubble. People should be angry about this, but most everyone is just shrugging and playing into the learned helplessness that has set it, making me all the more irritated by it all.

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Roundup: O’Toole and his conditional support

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As part of their need to get bills that died during prorogation back on the Order Paper, the Liberals yesterday reintroduced the bill that would ban “conversion therapy” as a criminal offence. Erin O’Toole insists that he’s against this pseudo-science – really! – but in the same breath claims that this bill is terribly flawed and that the Liberals are just introducing it to set a trap for him. His claim that the bill is problematic is dubious, because he claims that it would criminalise conversations about sexuality or gender identity between a minor and their parents or faith leader, when that’s clearly not the case. This, however, is a pervasive bogeyman that the social conservatives in the Conservative caucus want to put forward, and we’ve seen versions of it for years. Remember how they were so opposed to the government’s legislation allowing for same-sex civil marriages, and how they were rending their garments and howling that this was going to mean that their pastors and preachers were going to be forced to perform these marriages, or that their sermons would be denounced as hate speech? Did any of that happen? Nope. But there is a constant need to beat the drum that their religious freedoms are being trampled by the LGBT community because said community simply wishes to exist unmolested.

To an extent, though, this is the Liberals throwing the cat among the pigeons, because it’s going to be O’Toole’s first big test as leader when it comes to whether or not he’ll appease the social conservatives to whom he owes a debt for their support of his leadership, or whether he’ll keep trying to project the image that his is a big, welcoming party that wants to draw in members of this community. From previous conversations with insiders when previous private members’ bills on banning conversion therapy were introduced, that this sends the Conservative caucus into a panic because they know it’s going to sow divisions in their ranks, and these usual fears about religious freedoms rear their heads. And it’s not like the Liberals came up with this specifically to cause O’Toole headaches – it was introduced in the previous session, and got derailed by the pandemic.

I also feel the need to point out that during the leadership, there were a lot of profiles in the mainstream media that kept repeating that O’Toole had pledged to march in Pride parades without mentioning that he made that pledge conditional on uniformed police also marching, which eliminates all of the major Pride parades in this country owing to the current climate and conversation about policing. It also shows that his support is transactional, much like his insistence that he’s pro-choice but voted for a bill that would open a backdoor to criminalising abortion was shrugged off in the mainstream media rather than called out for the bullshit weaselling that it was. O’Toole is going to try to play both sides on this bill, and I suspect that he’s going to concern troll his way out of it – that his “concerns” about this “criminalization” will carry the day and he’ll insist that he’s being principled and weasel out of standing up to the social conservatives that he is beholden to.

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