Tag Archives: François Legault

Roundup: A plan to tax the unvaxxed

Posted on by

By all accounts, it sounded like Quebec premier François Legault was spit-balling policy when, at the press conference to announce the province’s new chief public health officer, he proposed that the province impose additional costs on the unvaccinated in the form of some kind of surtax that would be “significant,” meaning more than $100. There were no details, which is kind of a big deal, but you immediately had other political leaders worried about “slippery slopes,” as though we don’t have other sin taxes on things like alcohol and cigarettes which impose their own significant public health burdens, as well as concerns that this will further disenfranchise those who are already marginalised. And fair enough.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1481062196314624000

The concerns about whether this somehow contravenes the Canada Health Act seem to be overblown, as it’s not charging for healthcare services, but other concerns about just how this might be implemented remain, as professors like Jennifer Robson articulate below.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Freeland has a KGB file

Posted on by

I think it goes a little unappreciated at times as to just what a force of nature Chrystia Freeland can be. This weekend, we learned about her KGB file – wherein she was code-named “Frida” – from the time she was a university student on an exchange programme in Soviet Ukraine. She was ostensibly there to learn the language, but she was already fluent (she spoke it at home growing up, and still speaks it at home with her children), and instead spent much of her time organising local dissidents, and acting as a fixer for foreign journalists (which set up her later career). And along the way, she knew how to evade Soviet surveillance and send letters through the Canadian embassy in Moscow where the diplomatic pouches couldn’t be searched. The KGB was apparently not only worried about her, but impressed by her talents and felt she could have made a great spy.

Having read this, I was reminded of a debate that took place in the House of Commons in the waning days of the Harper government, when then-parliamentary secretary James Bezan was trying to minimise Freeland’s connection with Ukraine, and tried to make it sound as though Freeland was inventing it. (Remember that the Conservatives very much try to play up their connections with the Ukrainian diaspora community across the prairies, because they have votes there). Never mind that Freeland’s mother helped write Ukraine’s first post-Soviet constitution, but we have learned more about Freeland’s own activities in organising movements that helped bring down the Soviet presence in that country.

The fact that our deputy prime minister has this history is pretty interesting stuff, and all the more interesting as she is very likely to be the next prime minister of this country. Add to that, the fact that she is currently a persona non grata in Russia and the subject of sanctions by that country makes it all the more fascinating that she could soon be in charge of this country.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Stripping the riding associations

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

Good reads:

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

Odds and ends:

Want more Routine Proceedings? Become a patron and get exclusive new content.

Roundup: A costing document with too-rosy projections

Posted on by

The NDP released their platform costing document at 4:30 PM on a Saturday – the second day of advanced polls – a time of day where most of the population will have tuned out already. This was a choice, much like the Conservatives releasing theirs right before the debates – so that attention would be elsewhere. Why? Because as much as they might dress it up, there’s not a lot in there that is credible.

There is some $215 billion in proposed new spending, some of which is difficult to see is feasible, such as their plans for a basic income for the disabled – they have no costing details for it from the PBO, and that is largely intersecting with provincial benefits programmes, and one economist who looked at the number said it’s way too low. Their revenue projections in particular are very, very rosy, and an expert I reached out to said it’s impossible to get that money, especially in the first two years, because of the amount of administration necessary to capture it. So that blows their projections out of the water. But wait, they will say – we got the PBO to cost it and got his stamp of approval! But he was working with their inputs and assumptions, and implementation matters (which is why he shouldn’t be costing platforms in the first place, because implementation involves political decisions). If they tell him that revenues can start in the next year, he has to operate on that assumption, even though it’s not possible, so they get figures that won’t bear out in reality, but they can wave them around and say they have a stamp of approval. It’s a problem, and it’s another example of how parties play games with promises that they don’t spell out how they’ll implement, which increasingly means that those promises are hollow (and yes, all parties are guilty of this).

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1436825763806957574

Meanwhile, on the subject of the Conservatives’ “carbon savings plan” and the points they claim you’ll accumulate in lieu of a tax rebate, here’s energy economist Andrew Leach on how impossible that will be to implement. It’s a long thread, but a worthwhile one, because once again, implementation matters. And this is clearly a plan that there is no intention to actually implement (especially considering that their costing document claimed its costs would be negligible – another fiction).

Continue reading →

Roundup: Let’s just ignore the toxic spring

Posted on by

We are coming out of the first week of the campaign, and we still see a bunch of pundits and talking heads questioning why the Liberals called it in the first place, and I have to wonder just how much they paid attention to what went on during the last session of Parliament. It was a toxic environment – the most toxic I have seen in over a decade. Non-money bills didn’t advance for months because of procedural warfare, and at least one pandemic support bill was months late in being able to deliver for people who needed it. Committees were holding witch-hunts and the civil service was busy sending millions of pages to committees on wild goose chases. But did anyone bother to explain this? Not really, because then it would become a “process story,” which we are supposed to be allergic to. Putting the events of the spring into context, along with some of the considerations about timing (there are municipal elections in Quebec and Alberta in October) should be part of the media’s job, so that we’re not just being stenographers to what the parties are telling us (so we can then both-sides it). But that might be too much effort.

Of course, this is Justin Trudeau, and while he was perfectly happy to point out the obstruction on the days leading up to dissolution, once the campaign started, he was all about his upbeat, positive narratives, and talking about people being given a say in the “most important election since 1945,” because that’s his campaign persona and style – upbeat, upbeat, upbeat. Happy-clappy at all times. That doesn’t mean that those of us who follow Parliament can’t look past it and point out what was going on.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Pledging more action on mass graves

Posted on by

In the wake of the discovery of the mass grave of Indigenous children at a former residential school in Kamloops, there was a lot of attention directed to the prime minister, particularly on the slow rate of progress on implementing the calls to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Trudeau, for his part, stated that sure, Cabinet could have swooped down and unilaterally taken actions, but that they would have been the wrong actions because they need to be done in consultation with Indigenous people, and consultation takes time. (Indeed, it seems that every time the government is ready to move forward on something, a number of Indigenous groups declare that it’s all wrong and demand that they start over again with grassroots consultation).

Another recurring narrative throughout the day was the demand for more funding to search other sites, and pointing out that the federal government denied the TRC the $1.5 million they were asking for to do that work in 2009 – but most people failed to follow up and see that the current government did fund that work for up to $10 million in 2016, on top of other ongoing funding for this kind of work to carry on. The minister, Carolyn Bennett, also noted that communities did not want the government to simply hire archaeological firms to do the work, but wanted to do it on their own, which is why the government is providing funds for those who want to do it (though there seems to be some contention about that in the Kamloops case when it comes to who was paying for the ground-penetrating radar).

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1399364989081767937

A couple of other observations – one is that I find the Conservatives’ sudden insistence that this government move expeditiously to implement all of the Calls to Action to be a bit precious given that they dragged their feet on taking this action when they were in government (including denying the funding to search for such grave sites), generally contenting themselves that they made the official apology and established the TRC. (Similarly, their demands that the MMIW National Action Plan be completed immediately also rings hollow considering they resisted calling such an inquiry). The other observation is that the Catholic Church has yet to acknowledge any culpability or apologise for what happened at residential schools, or to offer any compensation, remains a problem, but I’m not sure just how much pressure the federal government is able to put to bear on them for it. Of course, we have seen similar abuse scandals and mass graves in other countries, where race cannot also be considered a factor, and this will complicate the simplistic narratives being applied to this discovery. There is a lot for us as a society to come to terms with, and there shouldn’t be easy answers to be drawn from it.

https://twitter.com/Froggy7777777/status/1399578376516497413

Continue reading →

Roundup: Ford fails, flails, and falsifies

Posted on by

As the numbers of this second wave of the pandemic continue to climb, Ontario premier Doug Ford continues to flail and grasp for any bit of cover that he can. Yesterday, while warning that the next set of modelling data are truly terrifying – but not actually doing anything about it – he tried to once again shift blame. And the not doing anything – making vague promises that he’ll consider more actions for Monday or Tuesday, rather than immediately, despite the fact that the current mockdown isn’t working and ICU capacity is at the red line in most of the hot spots, means that Mr. “I won’t hesitate” is once again hesitating, and there will be more lives lost on his watch.

As for the blame-shifting, Ford (along with a couple of other premiers) are howling that they’re running out of vaccines, after the slow roll-out – so slow that Ontario is already starting to give people their second doses. But, running out of vaccines is a good thing, because it means they’re going into arms. And more to the point, he knows that there are thousands of more Pfizer doses coming next week, the week after, and then again, the week after that, plus another bulk shipment of Moderna vaccines – and deliveries are expected to scale up further in February. They know this. This has been communicated for a while now, but he’s trying to deflect the attention to Trudeau once again to divert away from his own incompetence. (And apparently there were some hurt feelings among the premiers during Thursday’s first ministers meeting because Trudeau dared to criticize the provinces for their role in the slow roll-out. The poor dears).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1347570045178818560

Meanwhile, here’s a roundup of vaccine plans and timelines being put out by the provinces and territories (assuming that they will actually meet them).

Continue reading →

Roundup: Cutting the expected doses in half

Posted on by

It was another big day for vaccine news, starting with a technical briefing by federal public health officials that gave a bit more clarity on what is happening. Health Canada says we could see approval of the Pfizer vaccine within seven to ten days, while we also got some more information about the roll-out plan, including how the Pfizer and Moderna roll-outs are different, that they have concluded tabletop exercises and found gaps to plug, and that a dry run is scheduled for December 14th, after which they say they will be ready to start receiving vaccines, depending of course on approvals and availability from the manufacturer. But then came the bombshell – raw materials shortages are going to mean that Pfizer has had to cut their expected 2020 production by nearly half, which will mean fewer early vaccine doses to get to healthcare workers and the most vulnerable.

And then there are the provinces. In Quebec, François Legault had to say that his attempted “moral contract” for Christmas was off the table because cases won’t go down, but he also insisted that he wouldn’t have meaningfully done anything different in handling the pandemic, which is bananas. The continued climb of cases in Ontario means that we are likely facing more lockdowns before too long. In Manitoba, Brian Pallister gave a tearful speech about needing to cancel Christmas – but then also stated that it was “unfair” that early doses were being reserved for First Nations (who are especially vulnerable), which is mind-boggling. As for Alberta, where new cases keep breaking records, we got more details on the planned field hospitals (which are not really going just “contingency planning”), and in spite of yesterday’s insistence to the contrary, they are looking at possible military assistance to staff these field hospitals.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1334611584824446978

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1334561390640701441

Continue reading →

Roundup: Giving Legault the farm

Posted on by

Erin O’Toole paid a visit to Quebec premier François Legault yesterday, and immediately promised to give away the farm to Legault if he were to become prime minister – capitulating on Bill 21 and letting Legault expand it (in spite of the Conservatives insisting that they are all about religious freedom), signing over the language rights of federal industries in the province, and promising more provincial transfers with no strings attached, all in the name of “provincial autonomy.” At the same time, O’Toole danced around the question of pipelines, which Legault opposes and O’Toole is in favour of shoving down the throat of a province in spite of his talk of “autonomy,” so his record of policy incoherence continues unabated. (As an aside, it seems to me that giving Quebec everything it demands wouldn’t actually win O’Toole Bloc votes, but rather empower the Bloc to say that they were so effective that they got everything the demanded).

This exchange with Legault made some waves in Alberta, where the visions of Energy East continue to evade reality. So while Rachel Notley tries to score points against O’Toole, and her UCP opponents try to score their own points, here’s energy economist Andrew Leach calling out both sides on how wrong they are.

On the subject of Alberta’s oil patch, here is Leach laying out why the province over its past six premiers have engaged in a $26.4 billion boondoggle around building a refinery in the province and assuming all of the risk from their private sector partner, and will almost certainly wind up losing a hell of a lot of taxpayers’ money in the process. For everyone who insists that the province doesn’t subsidize the oil and gas sector, this is proof enough that such a claim is false, and it should enrage everyone in the province that their trust has been betrayed in such a way.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Possibly a criminal leak

Posted on by

The day got off to a very brow-raising start when someone – meaning almost certainly a minister’s office – leaked StatsCan jobs data ahead of its official release to soften the narrative around it, given that the predicted number of job losses were twice as many as what wound up being reported. This is a big deal – it’s market-moving information that should have criminal consequences for leaking, and yet here we are. And what is particularly galling about this is that I have my suspicions about which minister’s office leaked the information, and it’s one that has been showing a particular pattern of impunity, which is a very bad sign for how this government works – and not to mention how it communicates. Because they can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, someone took it upon themselves to leak sacrosanct data (which, it needs to be reiterated, should not and cannot happen in a gods damned G7 country) in order to spin the narrative. Heads should roll for this.

And then prime minister Justin Trudeau had his daily presser, acknowledging the jobs numbers before he announced that the government would be extending the wage subsidy beyond June in order to keep the (eventual) economic recovery strong, while also announcing that Navdeep Bains would be leading a new industry strategy council. During the Q&A, Trudeau also had to face questions about why nobody can say “Taiwan” when it comes to thanking them for donations of personal protective equipment, so Trudeau did just that, so I guess certain MPs will need to find something else to have a meltdown over next week.

And for the 75th anniversary of VE Day yesterday, the Queen made a televised address in the footsteps of her father.

Continue reading →