Tag Archives: Foreign Interference

Roundup: The threat of annexation is serious

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Well, things got real again today, as Justin Trudeau told the audience at his Canada-US Economic Summit that Trump isn’t joking around with his talk of annexation, and that part of the reason why is access to our critical minerals. Trudeau apparently also talked about the need to mend fences with Mexico as well, which was apparently an oblique shot at Doug Ford, who has been trying to throw them under the bus rather than working with them to counter Trump. (Ford, meanwhile, disparaged the whole summit while on the campaign trail, because apparently, it’s stealing his thunder). There was also talk at the summit about pipelines, nuclear energy (and conservative shills who claim Trudeau is anti-nuclear are straight-up lying), and removing some of the federal-situated trade barriers around financial services regulations and procurement.

As the day went on, more details came out about those two calls that Trudeau had with Trump on Monday about the tariffs and the “reprieve” that was granted. Comments included that Trump was musing about breaking a 1908 boundary treaty, was dismissive of our contributions to NORAD, and listed off a litany of complaints. (Because “it’s all about fentanyl,” right?) It was also on this call that Trudeau apparently deduced that Trump hadn’t been briefed on the $1.3 billion border plan, but maybe that’s what you get when Trump refuses your calls for weeks while he plays gangster. (And he was also refusing the Mexican president’s calls as well, so this was not a Trudeau-specific snub).

So this is where things are at—the stakes are higher than we may want to admit (and certainly the head of the Canadian American Business Council doesn’t want to admit it and still believes this is just an offensive joke), but maybe this existential threat will help shake off the normalcy bias that has perpetuated a certain status quo. Nevertheless, the political landscape is shifting drastically right now, and it’s going to make for a very different election campaign than what everyone was counting on.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian guided bomb attack on Sumy region in the northeast killed three. Russians claim to have taken the settlement of Toretsk, but the Ukrainian brigade in the outskirts says they haven’t moved. International nuclear monitors are concerned that the number of attacks on the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant have increased.

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Roundup: Carney’s boneheaded “green incentives”

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Liberal leadership hopeful Mark Carney revealed his plan to replace the consumer carbon levy yesterday, and it’s a handwavey bunch of “green incentives” for things like improving your home insulation, furnace, appliances, or buying an electric vehicle. This would be offset by maintaining or increasing the industrial carbon pricing system, along with carbon border adjustments. Carney claimed that the current system isn’t working, which is false, because emissions have been driven down, and then shrugs and says it’s “too divisive,” which is the Liberals’ own gods damned faults for being such incompetent communicators about how the levy works, the rebates (remember when they thought that calling them “climate action incentives” was a genius idea?), and how reducing one’s own carbon footprint maximises those rebates. The government was absolutely incapable of communicating any of it, and Pierre Poilievre swooped in and filled the space with lies and disinformation.

This is so unbelievably stupid. "Green incentives?" I live in an apartment. I can't change the insulation or heating system. Instead, with the rebate from the carbon levy, I get cash, which is a pretty nice incentive given that I don't have a car or do much that I need to pay the carbon levy for.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-01-31T15:13:28.930Z

This is just about as moronic as Erin O'Toole's "airmiles for carbon" plan, where you would get more rewards the more you pollute, and those of us who are already living low-carbon lifestyles get nothing. The carbon levy was fine if the Liberals could actually properly defend it.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-01-31T15:13:28.931Z

I find Carney’s plan absolutely infuriating for a number of reasons. One of them is that this imparts a false narrative that carbon emissions reductions can happen for free for consumers. Even if there is no consumer-facing price, industrial emitters will pass along costs, and people won’t get a rebate for those higher costs, which hurts lower-income households harder. Everyone fawning over Carney’s economic credentials should be smacking themselves upside the head because of this fiction he is trying to perpetrate and just how economically illiterate it actually is.

Meanwhile, how much of an “incentive” can it really be for one-time purchases? You can only really re-insulate your house once, or buy a new furnace once every twenty years. There is no price disincentive to increased carbon use, and there is no ongoing reward for a low-carbon lifestyle, which the rebates provide. Again, very few people actually understand this because the government steadfastly refused to actually communicate how the levy and rebates actually work, how to maximise them, and how it rewards ongoing low-carbon behaviour. They hoped that legacy media and would communicate that (they absolutely will not), and it was basically up to five economists on Twitter, which is useless to ninety-five percent of the population. So now the people who have done the work to reduce their carbon footprint will now be punished, and people will take advantage of those one-time purchases for what? The pat on the back that they can give themselves? Everyone involved here needs to take a long, hard look at some of their life choices, but then again, if they had any modicum of self-reflection, they likely wouldn’t be in politics. What an absolute disaster.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian drones injured four in Odessa, damaging a hospital and grain warehouse, while a missile attack seriously damaged a historic centre in the same city. Russian forces are also tightening their approach to Pokrovsk, which is a key logistics hub in the region. Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian command post in the Kursk region, and are also reporting that they haven’t seen any North Korean troops in the area for three weeks. Ukrainian drones also damaged an oil refinery in Russia’s Volgograd region.

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Roundup: Freeland’s smaller Cabinet promise

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Chrystia Freeland released another policy statement/promise yesterday which says that she will cut the size of Cabinet and the PMO in half—both to make Cabinet more efficient, and to give ministers more control over their files, rather than PMO dictating everything for them. While on the one hand, every incoming prime minister has promised to cut the size of Cabinet and then it starts to grow over time, I also suspect this is a bit of a screw you to Katie Telford, who runs Trudeau’s PMO, and who selects the chief of staff for all ministers with her own loyalists, and who has been a bottleneck for so much of this government’s business as it flows through her office. Caucus has been calling on Trudeau to get rid of Telford for a while now, correctly identifying her as the source of some of their problems (including the fact that she is in the caucus room taking notes, which was never the case under previous leaders), and Freeland appears to be heeding those concerns as endorsements pile up (mostly for Carney).

I do think it’s a fairly bold plan, and it reminds me of Trudeau’s initial attempt to have a “government by Cabinet” in the early days, but all ministers are not created equal, and gradually PMO started to exert more control for many of those ministers who were having trouble managing their files. It also looks like Freeland would be reverting to an older model of having the hard cap of twenty ministers, while additional responsibilities would be filled by ministers of state, which is also essentially how the UK operates, where there is a hard cap on Cabinet, but there are numerous junior ministers. Trudeau did away with this and made everyone a full minister as part of the gender parity promise, given that it would be likely that there would be an imbalance between how many women were in senior versus junior portfolios, and by making everyone a full minister, they also got a full minister’s salary. It seems clear in Freeland’s promise that she feels this was bloating Cabinet, particularly as Trudeau made it the practice that all appointments and Orders in Council needed to be presented to the full Cabinet, which took up a lot of time and focus. Does that mean that a lot will change if junior positions are restored? I guess it will depend on her leadership style if she’s successful, but it is an interesting signal nevertheless.

I will also note that Freeland has been consistently putting out these kinds of statements, unlike Carney. Meanwhile, Ruby Dhalla is turning out to be a clown show of braggadocious claims that the online right is amplifying.

Ukraine Dispatch

The Russians claim to have taken control of Novoielyzavetivka in the Donetsk region, near Pokrovsk. An overnight Ukrainian drone attack hit an oil pumping station and a missile storage facility, while a drone attack has hit Russia’s fourth-largest oil refinery in Kstovo. Ukraine’s corruption watchdog has opened an investigation into the defence minister over a procurement dispute.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1884525942229364847

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Roundup: Foreign interference commission final report released

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Justice Marie-Josée Hogue released the final report of the Foreign Interference public inquiry yesterday, and there really weren’t too many surprises involved. While there have been attempts at foreign interference, it hasn’t affected the outcomes of any elections, and that our institutions have held up rather well—though not perfectly. Government has been too slow to respond in many cases, and we don’t have enough transparency around national security issues, nor is there a culture of national security in government to make these issues a priority. There has been progress, but we’re not there yet. In many respects, this report proves that David Johnston’s report was right, and we’ve spent a year-and-a-half duplicating efforts because opposition party leaders decided it was more fun to smear Johnston than take him seriously.

One of the most significant aspects was a repudiation of the NSICOP report that claimed there were parliamentarians that were somehow compromised, and Hogue went through how the intelligence didn’t actually say that, and how NSICOP’s characterisation torqued what had been alleged—and frankly, much of the news reporting torqued further because they didn’t bother to read the context in that report. Hogue also noted that much of the reporting that drove this moral panic and the subsequent inquiry was wrong, though she didn’t necessarily blame the journalists because they only had so much to go on. (Nevertheless, this should be a warning about just how absolutely credulous some of those reporters have been on this file since the beginning, and why they failed to adequately question the motives of those doing the leaking).

Two cents: The Chair of NSICOP should have been far more willing to explain what message the committee's report was meant to convey last summer.NSICOP reports have exaggerated things in the past. Hopefully, the next chair takes a more measured approach.

— Philippe Lagassé (@plagasse.bsky.social) 2025-01-28T17:55:57.033Z

Hogue's call for greater transparency in the national security space is key, too. That should be a key priority for whichever party is in government after the next election.

— Philippe Lagassé (@plagasse.bsky.social) 2025-01-28T18:02:26.554Z

Probably a good thing that the pressure to 'name names' wasn't followed through on, eh? We could have outright destroyed innocent people with potentially empty innuendo.

— Emmett Macfarlane (@emmettmacfarlane.com) 2025-01-28T17:38:06.873Z

A couple of other notables—Hogue noted that transnational repression is probably a bigger threat, but her mandate didn’t give her the latitude to explore that, so that remains a big flag for this or the next government to address. Even more to the point, she flagged disinformation as the most existential threat to our democracy, and called for a dedicated federal watchdog to monitor and intercept foreign meddling that uses social media platforms and “AI” tools like deep-fakes. She also recommended developing digital and media literacy among Canadians, which feels a bit like a “perfect world” wish, or at least something that we may be able to impart onto the next generation but I worry that the current one may be lost in that regard.

For more, here’s a thread from Stephanie Carvin who went through the report:

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here is the summary

— Stephanie Carvin (@stephaniecarvin.bsky.social) 2025-01-29T00:25:45.506Z

In the wake of this, Pierre Poilievre has let it be known that he’s not going to take that CSIS threat reduction briefing after all, because he can’t talk about what it says, so he is once again relying on the false notion that this, or any other security clearance, is somehow going to “gag” him. It won’t, but it would mean he has to be responsible with his commentary, which he does not want to do. He wants to be bombastic, and to lie at every opportunity, and so he will keep refusing a clearance or briefings, because he only cares about “owning the Libs,” not national security or the good of the country.

Because he's a self-interested venomous partisan who wants maximum freedom to be act like a weasel. I'm not sure why some Liberal partisans decided there was anything more nefarious than that at play.

— Emmett Macfarlane (@emmettmacfarlane.com) 2025-01-28T19:12:35.197Z

exactly so.Phil and I found in our work that the average MP would rather speak ignorantly than know more and then have to be somewhat responsible.PP is the extreme version of this–rather be a bomb thrower than have any responsibility.

— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman.bsky.social) 2025-01-28T19:23:04.269Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Overnight Russian air attacks wounded eight and damaged residential buildings around Ukraine on Monday night. Ukrainian drones are targeting power and oil facilities in the west and northwestern regions of Russia.

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Roundup: Such concern about drugs

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Another day, and other leak that claimed that Trump wasn’t really serious about the tariffs, but that this was just him trying to get an early start on New NAFTA re-negotiations rather than waiting for 2026, and trying to bring more auto manufacturing back to the US-side of the border. But when asked about this during his media availability, Trump insisted that no, he was very serious about the “millions” of people who had come illegally through Canada (it’s certainly not in the millions), and the scourge of fentanyl. He even went on this extended tirade about how mothers never recover when they lose their sons to drugs, and so on. But then he also issued a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, a crypto drug dealer. So yeah, he’s really concerned about the scourge.

Really puts his overwrought speech about mothers who've never recovered after losing their sons to drugs into perspective.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-01-22T01:54:41.112Z

Meanwhile, Danielle Smith spent the day in full-on appeasement mode, insisting that we need to find a diplomatic solution rather than stand up to Trump’s bullying. Oh, and she also tried to blame this situation on Trudeau, because of course she did. What I find particularly irksome, however, are the whitebread pundits who also try to keep blaming Trudeau for Smith not falling into line, because he should somehow debase himself in order to get her on-side when it’s clear that she has no interest (and absolutely no incentive) to do so. Her political brand and that of her party right now is about hating Trudeau. Nothing he can or will do will get her on-side, particularly when her ideology is more in line with Trump’s than it is to stand up for Canada.

Back home, Pierre Poilievre is demanding Parliament be summoned because we’re in an “emergency,” erm, except there is nothing for Parliament to do. Cabinet has all of the powers they need in the current situation, and they continue to function. The only reason for the House of Commons to sit would be to have a take-note debate to read prepared speeches that would be used for clips. But more likely, Poilievre wants to try and force an election right now, because that suits his political interests rather than the country’s as a whole (because once there is dissolution, government goes into caretaker mode and really can’t respond to Trump). In fact, Trudeau has a lot more latitude right now because he’s on his way out and doesn’t need to worry about re-election. We’re not leaderless, there is no “vacuum,” and it would be great if the media stopped repeating this nonsense, just because Cabinet hasn’t been lighting their hair on fire on a daily basis.

I know most people actually think that Justin Trudeau being on his way out ties his hands, but IMO it arguably *frees him up to be more aggressive, not less*.

— Emmett Macfarlane (@emmettmacfarlane.com) 2025-01-21T14:41:45.522Z

The restraints on Canada's response are political, and Justin Trudeau no longer needs to worry about his electability. Fire on all cylinders at these assholes.

— Emmett Macfarlane (@emmettmacfarlane.com) 2025-01-21T14:42:25.284Z

Ukraine Dispatch

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Roundup: No, we don’t need a “unity government”

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The closer the Trump tariffs loom, the more insane the suggestions are being proffered. Case in point was in The Line yesterday, where former NDP MP and law professor Craig Scott said that the only way to save Canada is with a “unity government.” It was like he had decided to smoke meth before sitting down to write the op-ed because it was devoid of sense, or rationality.

Yes, Trump’s threats are serious, but what exactly is a “unity government” going to do? The government currently has all of the powers it needs for retaliatory tariffs and most other countermeasures. Creating a situation of an interim party leader (as prime minister) and building a Cabinet to include members of all other parties (and as he proposes, former Conservatives like James Moore, Rona Ambrose and Lisa Raitt if the current ones don’t play ball) would only be for the sake of optics, and would cause more problems than it solves. What portfolios do you distribute to members of opposition parties, for a few months? And if you’re brining in former Conservatives because the current ones don’t play ball, well, they’re all in the phase of their post-political careers where they are making money, and bringing them into Cabinet means a lot of headaches around disclosures and ethics obligations—again for the sake of a few months of optics. On top of that, the demand to bring Parliament back right away makes no sense either, because there is nothing for them to legislate around the Trump threats. As I have stated elsewhere, its only utility would be for dubious unanimous consent motions and vapid take-note debates.

You don’t need a “unity government” for MPs to play nice in the face of a grave threat. Insisting that you do is naïve and ahistorical, but fully in keeping with Scott, who was a blowhard when he was an MP, and this hasn’t changed in his time since apparently. Anyone who takes his op-ed seriously needs to rethink some of their life choices.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia claims Ukraine has hit them with a massive drone and missile attack overnight that hit two factories. Russian forces are bypassing the stronghold of Pokrovsk in order to try and cut off its supply lines instead. Production at the Pokrovsk coal mine (used for the steel-making industry) has been halted as Russians close in.

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Roundup: Turnabout is fair play in procedural warfare

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If you needed yet another example of how the state of the current parliament continues to degrade, yesterday was yet another example. It was the first of the allotted Supply Days (aka “opposition days”) that the Speaker had to intervene in order to schedule, and it barely happened at all. Why? The NDP used procedural shenanigans to delay the debate on the confidence motion that used Jagmeet Singh’s words as the fodder by calling for concurrence debate on a committee report that dealt with abortion access, and the Liberals played along, which meant that the Conservatives’ debate didn’t end up happening until after QP, meaning they only had a couple of hours’ worth of clip-gathering instead of a full day, and boy were they put out about it. But that’s the thing with procedural warfare—if you wage it against others, eventually they will wage it against you.

There were other shenanigans that happened after QP—Liberal MP Jaime Battiste tried to move a unanimous consent motion to get the First Nations water bill out of committee and over to the Senate, but the Conservatives refused. As they did, Battiste took his water glass and started shouting at the Conservatives, and went into the aisle, apparently planning to throw the glass at them before he thought better of it. And then Andrew Scheer tried to move a motion that would have had the same effect, but with language that denigrated the government, and of course that too was shut down, and Scheer had the audacity to play the victim after that stunt.

It’s good that there’s only one sitting week left, because my tolerance for this kind of bullshit is at its end.

Ukraine Dispatch

The Americans have been pressuring Ukraine to lower the conscription age to 18 in order to bolster their fighting force, which is creating dilemmas for those teenaged boys.

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Roundup: Fiscal update when?

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This year’s Fall Economic Statement is very late—it’s extremely unusual for it to happen in December—but these are not normal times, and the ongoing privilege filibuster hasn’t helped matters any. The government’s attempts to get shame either the Bloc or the NDP into finally voting with the government to pull the plug on it have all been in vain, because they all want to do their part to embarrass the government as much as possible. This being said, I’m not sure what the holdup is with the Public Accounts either, though they have insisted that they’re with the Auditor General and will be released soon. In any case, the government has refused to explain exactly why these releases are so late, because we’re back to the tiresome “If you’re explaining, you’re losing” schtick, so as usual, this government never explains.

Pierre Poilievre decided that he would pretend to be magnanimous and “offer” the government two hours from the Conservatives’ allotted day on Monday to present the update, but Chrystia Freeland rejected it out of hand, calling the offer absurd, and saying “This proposal from the Conservatives is like an arsonist who set the fire in the first place, saying, ‘don’t worry about it, I’ll come with a fire truck for a couple of hours, but tomorrow I’ll be back again with matches’.” Procedurally, I don’t see how the Conservatives could offer up time to government business on an allotted day, but also procedurally, Freeland could use the daily Statements by Ministers slot during routine proceedings to deliver the update (though that may be somewhat more awkward for the associated media lockup because those statements tend to be earlier than budget or fiscal update speeches are traditionally delivered, in part because of any data from those lock-ups moving markets (which is why they are traditionally delivered after 4 PM). They could technically also deliver it outside of the Chamber (Paul Martin once read it at committee, and the Conservatives liked to deliver it off Parliament Hill entirely), but we don’t want to encourage a return to the practice of announcing things outside of Parliament (and the UK Speaker uses very strong language about this sort of thing).

If I had to guess, I would suspect that it’ll be delivered next Wednesday or Thursday, once the Supply votes are out of the way, which makes it extremely convenient for Freeland and every other minister to spread out across the country to deliver the “good news” about the programmes in the budget, whereas Poilievre would want to use the timing of the update to claim that he “forced” the government to “come clean about the numbers,” or some such bullshit like that. None of this is great, but we’re dealing with an exhausted government and a dysfunctional parliament, so nothing is as it should be right now.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine is giving soldiers who deserted or went AWOL a second chance, particularly given the shortages they’re facing on the Eastern front, and lo, some six thousand soldiers have rejoined. News leaking out of the Trump camp indicate that his plan to end the war involve major land concessions, NATO membership being off the table, and cutting military aid, unless Putin refuses, in which case they would provide more. (Land concessions are not really his goal, guys).

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Roundup: The Speaker imposes the last of the Supply Days

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Yesterday began with the government’s attempt to let the opposition parties have their remaining Supply Days (aka “opposition days”) that remain in the supply cycle before the Estimates votes next week, and even though the Conservatives had indicated they were going to move a confidence motion that would force Jagmeet Singh to eat his words about the Liberals, being one giant dare. But when the Government House Leader Karina Gould moved the motion that would let this happen, that would give them a chance to move this confidence motion, the Conservatives decided against it in order to continue the privilege filibuster.

Later in the day, Speaker Greg Fergus decided to step in, given that the ability for the parties to work this out for themselves had clearly failed. To that end, he has imposed that the Supply Days will run Thursday, Monday and Tuesday for the Conservatives, with the Friday for the NDP, and that because Tuesday is the last day of the Supply Cycle, the Estimates votes will happen then. This ensures that the parties get their allotted days (the Bloc already had theirs before the privilege filibuster began), and the Conservatives will have their chances to try and embarrass the other opposition parties into voting non-confidence, the NDP won’t oblige them, and the NDP’s motion will likely be something related to abortion in their own attempt to embarrass the Conservatives, because nobody can be mature about any of this.

I will say that I’m a little surprised that Fergus made this move, because he very well could have used this as something of a “learning opportunity” for the parties—that because they refused to come to a deal about these days that they would lose them because they didn’t use them. But that actually would have been the bigger surprise, because Fergus isn’t exactly a very strong-willed Speaker. As for the Conservatives, one suspects that they turned down the motion in order to push the envelope, so that they could cry foul and try and challenge Fergus if they did lose those days, and send out more fundraising emails that he’s being partisan (which is against the rules), and to try and play the victim. Andrew Scheer was already trying to denounce these moves, but nothing he says has any semblance of truth, so that’s no surprise. Nevertheless, there won’t be a crisis of Supply, government departments won’t shut down, and Canadian journalists won’t get the opportunity to excitedly write about a “U.S.-style government shutdown.”

Ukraine Dispatch

Another Russian drone attack on Trenopil has left it without electricity. And while president Zelenskyy is hoping for quick NATO membership as an avenue to ending the war, NATO members are unlikely to take him up on it.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1863186805463437571

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Roundup: The virtual meeting with the premiers over Trump

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau had his virtual meeting with the premiers yesterday evening, and it has been a really interesting divergence in reactions. Jagmeet Singh is panicking and demanding performative forcefulness, while Pierre Poilievre is trying to leverage the moment for his own political ends, claiming that the solution is to do everything he says (conveniently!). Premiers have been all over the map, going from caution to outright boot-licking (looking at you, Danielle Smith), and this was one of the messages that emerged from that meeting. I also find it particularly crass the number of premiers who set up American flags for their backdrops before their media availabilities before and after the meeting. Seriously, guys?

Chrystia Freeland met with reporters and spoke about the need for a united front and not to be seen to be squabbling with one another, but premiers with their own agendas haven’t really seemed to warm to that necessity, because they’d rather score points against the current government with boneheaded accusations that they were “blindsided” by the threats, and that they don’t have a plan. (They’ve had a plan for over a year, guys. You might want to actually pay attention). And after the meeting, most of the premiers made their own individual points about how they want so many more resources poured into their province (such as more RCMP members that don’t exist because they can’t recruit and train them fast enough, or retain them in the toxic culture of the Force), but Smith remains particularly stubborn in trying to leverage this into foregoing the emissions cap and trying to say that Trudeau shouldn’t be leading the effort to defend Canada (again, to her benefit).

Meanwhile, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, took a much more aggressive stance with threatened retaliation (which Trudeau has thus far not threatened, preferring a “methodical” approach). Sheinbaum had a call with Trump and basically pledged to keep doing what they were already doing, and Trump declared victory, so maybe Canada will do the same? Trudeau has talked about strengthening border measures, which has been an ongoing process, particularly since the amendment of the Safe Third Country Agreement, so maybe that too will be enough to get Trump to declare victory? I guess we shall see, but in the meantime, we’ll see how many premiers can keep their cool.

Ukraine Dispatch

Explosions were heard in Odesa, Kropyvnytskyi, Kharkiv, Rivne and Lutsk amid reports of a cruise missile attack last night. Three were wounded in a drone attack on Kyiv the night before. Russian forces claim to have taken the settlement of Nova Illinka in Donetsk region. Germany’s intelligence chief says that Russian sabotage in NATO countries could trigger Article 5.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1861772687229501452

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