Tag Archives: GLBT

Roundup: Giving up on 24 Sussex?

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The big news that everyone was talking about yesterday was that the National Capital Commission is considering an alternate site for the prime minister’s residence than 24 Sussex, in part because of security considerations at the existing site (because apparently, we now also need to worry about reinforcing the roof with steel in the event of a drone strike). One of those sites could be in nearby Rockliffe Park, near the RCMP’s national headquarters, where something would need to be built from scratch, including the security arrangements. And before anyone suggests it, no, the prime minister cannot take over Stornoway because it would be even more impossible to secure than the 24 Sussex site is, and the RCMP would never allow it.

And because this was the story of the day, someone asked Pierre Poilievre about it, and of course, he gave the populist answer about how that would be the last thing on his priority list because he’s too busy worrying about middle class people getting houses. Obviously, that’s a rehearsed and tested media line, because his plans won’t actually get any more houses built than the current government’s plans, but hey, he lies about it with confidence, so people obviously believe him. He then went on to say that he would want something that’s able to be secured, but just “basic,” with possibly a separate site for hosting dignitaries, but let’s be real—we don’t really do luxurious official residences in this country, and the notion that we would be building some kind of lavish mansion is already pushing it.

The more salient point is that Poilievre’s populist noise is why we can’t have nice things, and why 24 Sussex was allowed to fall to such disrepair as to reach the point of total failure. We keep dining out on cheap outrage and hairshirt parsimony, and we pander to the too-large portion of the commentariat who thinks that if Ritz crackers and ginger ale are good enough for a church social, they’re good enough for international diplomacy. We keep increasingly marginalising ourselves on the global stage with our rinky-dink backwater antics like this, and we’ve allowed the official residence of our head of government fall to pieces because everyone is too afraid of the headlines (while self-righteous media outlets see absolutely nothing wrong with what they’ve enabled). What an absolute embarrassment we’ve allowed ourselves to become.

Ukraine Dispatch:

At least four people died in the Kherson region in the south as a result of mines and other explosives left behind by Russians; the commander of the southern front also reported continued progress pushing southward. The Russians claim that they destroyed a Ukrainian drone over the Black Sea.

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Roundup: The torqued six attendees

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The National Post’s series on judicial appointments continued apace yesterday, with the torqued and misleading headline that “High-level judges may have paid to meet Trudeau before their appointments,” and members of the pundit class and commentariat swooned with disbelief, and social media was blanketed with caterwauling about “corruption” and “bribery” and so on. Some of the excitable far-right fanboys started ranting about the whole judiciary being corrupted and needing to be bulldozed (because how better to enable fascism?)

But if you read the piece, and put it into context with the previous work, it says that as many as six out of 1308 lawyers who later got judicial appointments may have attended Liberal fundraisers that the prime minister or other Cabinet ministers attended. Which is…nothing. And yet, the framing and the headline suggests that they paid for access and that said meeting resulted in their appointment to the bench, in absence of any evidence to the contrary—just innuendo and correlation that has no relation to causation. This kind of journalism tends to be bullshit.

I have made this case before, and I’ll re-up it again—we absolutely do not want or need purity tests to be applied to applicants to the bench, and we should not bar anyone who has ever donated to a party from receiving an appointment. Donation is a necessary form of civic engagement, and lawyers tend to be more engaged in their communities, and often have the means to donate. This is important—we need people engaged in the system, and if we bar them from promotion because they have donated at one point in time or another, we are losing talent from the judiciary. The process as it stands is working (albeit slow for other reasons), and we don’t need concern trolls dismantling it for the sake of purity tests.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Three Ukrainians were killed in an overnight Russian attack on Poltava, and two others were killed in shelling later in the day in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials have confirmed that they have liberated the strategic settlement of Robotyne in the country’s south, as they are pushing further in the area as part of the counteroffensive. Russians are claiming that they scrambled jets in response to two US drones flying near occupied Crimea.

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Roundup: The Capital Pride 2023 observations

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It was Capital Pride this weekend, and the government once again took the opportunity to pat themselves on the back for the first anniversary of their 2SLGBTQIA+ Action Plan™, and to offer some grants to local organisations from the Action Plan’s budget—so money is flowing, at least.

This having been said, it was a pretty poor turnout from federal politicians for the parade itself. The PM was absent, but he had only just returned from touring wildfire sites and evacuation centres out west, and he did just visit Edmonton’s Pride on Saturday, so I will give him that. But the Liberal contingent was smaller than usual this year, and local MP Yasir Naqvi was absent (which is unusual for him), whether that was because he was on a provincial leadership tour somewhere, or for some other reason. Marci Ien was present, having just made the announcement hours before, and new minister Jenna Sudds was present, as were Mona Fortier, Greg Fergus, Marie-France Lalonde and Francis Drouin, but while I saw photos of many of them early on in the parade, I didn’t see most of them along the route.

https://twitter.com/JennaSudds/status/1695944518036509165

This having been said, I didn’t see a single NDP MP, though I think I spotted a couple of MPPs (and I didn’t see the one whose seat the riding is in), and the Conservatives didn’t march at all, federal or provincial PC party. Make of that what you will.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian authorities are investigating a mid-air collision between two training aircraft in the western part of the country, which killed there pilots. Russians have meanwhile been targeting the central and northern regions of the country with cruise missiles overnight. They have also been shelling the north-eastern city of Kupiansk, in what may be a push to recapture the area, after it was already liberated by Ukrainian forces. Ukrainian forces have broken through one of the most difficult lines in the south and appear to have momentum in the region. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is telling American critics that Ukraine could hold wartime elections next year, but they’ll need financial assistance from the US and Europe, particularly for reaching electors abroad, and to send election observers to the front lines.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1695803020947165468

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Roundup: $3 million in cheap outrage

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The National Post continues their cheap outrage series on the Governor General’s travel expenses, and are aghast that it totalled $3 million over the course of a full year, with the usual chiming in of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation that this was so awful because there are struggling people in this country. (Note that the CTF exists only to push this narrative in the media, and because they always answer the phone when reporters call them, they have become “reliable sources” for these kinds of shitty reactions, and it feeds this grubby little ecosystem).

Aside from this being some of the absolutely laziest reporting out there, the headline and the framing of the story obscures the fact that the Governor General travels where the government sends her, because that’s how Responsible Government works. She does what the government advises, because that’s the system. No, she does not represent the monarchy in Canada, she represents the Canadian monarchy both at home and abroad, because certain kinds of international diplomacy demand these kinds of visits. (It’s why the UK government is sending King Charles III to France in September—he doesn’t determine that, the government does). Blaming Mary May Simon for the travel the government sends her on is unfair, blaming her for the costs in unfair because she doesn’t make any of the decisions—the military does when it comes to the plane, the catering, and so on (and previous cheap outrage reporting is forcing them to scale back what few amenities there were, which were not out of line with any business class travel). But it’s her name on it and the insinuation that she is living it the high life on the taxpayer’s dime.

It’s also for this reason that I find it pretty rich that the reporter was getting huffy over Twitter that the spokesperson at Rideau Hall pushed back on him, saying that these stories disparage the GG and are harmful to her diplomatic efforts. We already have transparency around the spending—all of the reporting came from public documents. But the framing has fed into a lot of racist narratives about her (and believe me, I see a lot of it in my reply column on Twitter), and there seems little awareness of that, particularly because there is a self-righteousness around of shitty reporting. Diplomacy costs money. Democracy costs money. And doing away with the post of GG won’t save money—any replacement will cost us more, and risks doing away with a necessary constitutional fire extinguisher. But hey, hairshirt parsimony and outrage sells, never mind that it corrodes our democratic institutions.

Ukraine Dispatch:

It was Independence Day in Ukraine, the second since Russia’s invasion began, and full of poignant reminders of what the country is fighting for. Of course, Russia did attack, hitting Dnipro and Kherson. Ukrainian forces launched a “special operation” that landed troops in occupied Crimea, but did not state what the goals they achieved were. Russia claims they destroyed 42 drones launched over occupied Crimea. Meanwhile, Norway has opted to become the third NATO country to send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, while more Ukrainian pilots and technicians will under F-16 training in the US.

https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1694793748297711902

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1694650766286520442

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Roundup: Demands to recall Parliament to make more speeches

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The Cabinet retreat has wrapped, and there is no big announcement on housing policy other than to say that they know there’s not one silver bullet that will solve the housing challenges, so that means more work. Pierre Poilievre dutifully summoned reporters to the Foyer in the West Block to mock the lack of action and decry “What was the solution? More speeches, more photo ops…” And then he demanded that Parliament be recalled so that they can “take action” on housing, but without a legislative proposal, all this would mean is a take-note debate, which would be a bunch of twenty-minute speeches being read into the record. You know, exactly the thing that he was mocking Trudeau about. So that’s consistent.

Meanwhile, the debate about international students is picking up, with the government seems to want to deal with the problem of dubious private colleges at the same time, even though they don’t really make a dent in the housing crisis, and leads to problems of just how the federal government determines legitimacy (which is a provincial responsibility), and there a host of other problems with the programme that they may not have the capacity to deal with. Limiting international students could have other, longer-term repercussions, as they are quite easy to stream into permanent residency, and good for Canada in the long run—but again, there are problems in the system as it is.

With that in mind, Alex Usher’s thread has concerns about how the federal government could mess things up, while Mike Moffatt’s thread offers suggestions for things the federal government could do (or in several cases, undo) to relieve the pressure. This all having been said, a bit part of the problem here is that provinces have cut or frozen funding to these institutions, and limiting international students will be a huge financial blow to them, and that should be addressed somehow.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1694317541559066707

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians targeted Ukrainian grain facilities with drone attacks, destroying some 13,000 tons of grain at the Danube port of Izmail, while Ukrainians claim to have taken out a Russian air defence system in occupied Crimea with a drone attack of their own. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hosted an international meeting about liberating Crimea from Russian control. And how to go about doing so.

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Roundup: Cabinet retreat missives

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We are starting to see the parade of ministers being trotted out to the media from the Cabinet retreat in Charlottetown, PEI, and first up on everyone’s mind is housing and what the federal government should do about it. And they did hear from experts like Mike Moffatt yesterday, which is good, so we’ll see if anything comes of it. But of course, legacy media has glommed onto the issue of international students and whether they will cap them, without also exploring how that has become a necessary revenue stream for universities after provincial cutbacks and freezes, or the fact that there are a plethora of private colleges that the provinces are supposed to be regulating who have been abusing their ability to bring in international students basically to defraud them of hundreds of thousands of dollars while providing them a substandard education. That should be where more attention is being paid, but we all know that legacy media loves to blame the federal government instead of the provinces, so here we are.

We also heard from Dominic LeBlanc who again gave assurances that a public inquiry into foreign interference is in the works, but they are now trying to find a sitting judge who can lead it, because apparently all of the retired ones and other eminent Canadians who could do the job have all told them no—because who wants to subject themselves to partisan character assassination day-in-and-day-out? Of course, I half suspect that they’re going to get some pushback from the chief justices of the provinces about who could be made available considering that the federal government has been slow to make appointments and it’s contributing to delays and backlogs in the system as is, and taking someone out of circulation for another eighteen months doesn’t help the situation any.

Other ministerial soundbites include Chrystia Freeland insisting that they remain focused on the economy.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say they have retaken a strategic south-eastern village as part of the counteroffensive, which continues its southward push. In addition to advanced Western weapons, the Ukrainians have developed a “mini-Grad” rocket launcher made up of old Soviet parts. In Athens, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Balkan leaders, as well as European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen. Ukrainian media is reporting that a group of saboteurs coordinated with Ukrainian military intelligence services to carry out drone attacks on air bases deep inside Russia, destroying and damaging aircraft. In Denmark, eight Ukrainian pilots have begun their F-16 fighter training.

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Roundup: May sees some, but not all, of the documents

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Green Party leader Elizabeth May held a press conference yesterday to talk about the unredacted documents she saw related to foreign interference, and in particular what David Johnston had written during his brief tenure as Special Rapporteur. It wasn’t, however, quite what she had hoped and stated that she was disappointed that she could only read David Johnston’s unredacted report, rather than the documents that supported his conclusions, which were all footnoted, but not actually there to read.

It is worth noting that May was quite generous and believes this to be something of a mistake on PCO’s part, and if not a mistake, it’s part of their usual pattern of being overly secretive and disclosing the bare minimum, even if May had been properly vetted and given clearance to read the documents. And she makes an extremely valid point that if the point is to be reassured in the quality of Johnston’s work, then you also need to see the documents that he was seeing in order to determine if he had arrived at the right conclusion or not. And I suspect that she will be able to see those documents before too long, because someone at PCO must know just how bad it will look if she can’t see the supporting evidence, and that it will look like they have something to hide, which is counter to the entire point of this whole exercise.

With this in mind, it bears mentioning that Jagmeet Singh is planning on seeing the documents as well as soon as he can schedule the time in Ottawa (as he’s busy on the summer barbecue circuit), while both Pierre Poilievre and Yves-François Blanchet have refused, insisting that this is some kind of “trap” where they wouldn’t be able to talk about what they’ve seen and be unable to criticise the government. That’s not true, and there is plenty they could say about the documents without revealing specifics, but they would rather play the game of insisting the government is hiding something nefarious when the truth is so much more mundane than that.

Ukraine Dispatch:

American sources are saying that the number of casualties in the war are reaching nearly 500,000, but that number needs to be taken with a shaker’s worth of salt because Russia routinely undercounts its killed and wounded, while Ukraine doesn’t publicly disclose their official casualty figures (though I do note that they do very much use tributes to dead soldiers for propagandistic purposes). Russians are claiming that a Ukrainian drone smashed into a downtown Moscow office building, while Ukraine denies it targeted a civilians or civilian infrastructure.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1692492507878224375

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Roundup: Promising a spending cut—for real this time!

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It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has paid attention, but word has come down that new Treasury Board president Anita Anand will be tasking other ministers to find $15.4 billion in spending cuts with a deadline of October 2nd, and they really mean it this time. For realsies. The Liberals have been promising programme spending reviews for years now, but haven’t seemed to show any progress on them, or at least not in any public or transparent way, and that’s generally a problem for any government, and particularly one who has been in power for as long as this one has. Anand’s expertise is in governance, so she might have a chance to pull this off, but the civil service has fought back against Treasury Board presidents trying to make reforms—Scott Brison tried to reform the Estimates process and bring it back into line with the budget cycle, and he lost that battle, and it doesn’t look like any of his successors have even tried since. The other thing here is that $15.2 billion is going to be hard to justify if the military is excluded, but can they actually make cuts (setting aside the lapsed funding they can’t spend because of capacity issues)?

The reaction has pretty much been predictable—public sector unions freaking out, Jagmeet Singh concern trolling that this means “essential services” will be cut, and Pierre Poilievre says the Liberals can’t be trusted to make cuts. (Erm, you remember the Chrétien-Martin era, right?) But for some more practical thinking, here’s Jennifer Robson, who teaches public administration:

https://twitter.com/JenniferRobson8/status/1691613225677144349

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian missiles have struck Lviv and other parts of western Ukraine, which is far from the fighting, including a factory in Lutsk. In the early hours of Wednesday, Russian drones have been spotted heading for the Izmail port on the Danube River, which threatens more grain shipments. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on the front lines in Zaporizhzhia to meet troops there. Meanwhile, farmers in Ukraine are facing the prospect of rock-bottom grain prices if they can’t ship it, which means it’s worth more to store than to sell.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1691510365304102915

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1691366868760829953

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Roundup: Plans to half-ass maternity leave

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A piece that caught my eye over the weekend was an interview with new Government House Leader Karina Gould about how she plans to deal with her maternity leave on the second time around, and how it’ll be different from the first time (when she was the first Cabinet minister to give birth while in office). Significantly, she doesn’t want to come back as quickly as she did the last time, where she only took ten weeks off, and then returned with her husband in tow to help with child care duties while she did her job.

What Gould says she wants to do differently this time is to not travel to Ottawa, but attend virtually from her constituency office, while the government whip assumers her duties during her absence. But this gets back to what I have been repeatedly warning about when it comes to remote and hybrid sittings, which is that this is going to create an expectation of presenteeism that is unrealistic, particularly for new parents. And while they absolutely should take the time they need off, it should actually be time off in a proper leave of absence, rather than constantly hovering by their computers to follow proceedings along over Zoom, and being ready to vote using their remote app at a moment’s notice. That, frankly, not only doesn’t help anyone, but creates even more stress on the MP or minister while they’re on leave.

More to the point, it will be exceedingly difficult to do House Leader duties remotely, because part of the job is stage-managing answers in Question Period, and directing who should be responding (though not always effectively as we have seen). That can’t be done remotely, and indeed, Mark Holland got into trouble a couple of times for trying to do it over hybrid format at the height of the pandemic, because he was trying to do so with a phone, and that was forbidden. The best thing is for her to simply take the time she needs, and resume her duties from Ottawa when she’s ready, because she won’t be doing anyone any favours trying to half-ass it from her constituency office when she should be spending time with her newborn.

In case you missed them:

  • My column on the Conservatives preparing a “stolen election” narrative by deliberately confusing basic Westminster parliamentary dynamics
  • My Xtra column on why conservatives posing with “Straight Pride” and “Leave Our Kids Alone” t-shirts are no accident—and a sign of their moral cowardice.
  • My column on the signal that Chrystia Freeland has sent to premiers and mayors when it comes to their plans to beg Ottawa to bail them out.
  • My piece for National Magazine about how competition law has failed the media sector in Canada, and why Bill C-18 was a flawed attempt to deal with it.
  • My column on why a public inquiry into Canada’s COVID response may actually prove impossible, because federalism.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian missiles slammed into an apartment complex and a university building in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, killing six and wounding 75. Russian drones also hit Kharkiv, partially destroying a college dormitory. Ukrainian forces say they have reclaimed 15 square kilometres of occupied territory in the past week, while describing that the fight has been tougher than expected because the Russians have fortified themselves. Meanwhile, a drone struck an office building in Moscow’s financial centre, which Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for, and Russians claim that they destroyed three Ukrainian drones headed for their ships in the Black Sea.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1685580157254307840

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Roundup: The problem with feel-good legislation

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There was a story out over the weekend about a recently-passed private member’s bill about cancers being faced by firefighters, but how it’s, well, a little bit useless. As well-meaning as the bill is, and there are a lot of well-meaning private members’ bills, it’s also one of those terrible “national strategy” bills that plague our Parliament year-in and year-out.

The thing about “national strategy” bills are that they’re trying to legislate in areas of provincial jurisdiction, largely around healthcare, but sometimes around certain environmental concerns, and so on. Because MPs know that people are about these issues that aren’t in their areas of jurisdiction, they instead come up with these feel-good bills that call on the federal government to coordinate with provinces to create a “national strategy” about whatever the issue is, in the hopes that they’ll come to some common ground, or the like. But also remember that these bills are not only about an area of provincial jurisdiction, but they also can’t spend any money, so they don’t create any incentives that the federal government can use to bring provinces on-side. So about the most that these bills tend to do is raise some awareness about the issue in question in the media (as is demonstrated by the CBC piece over the weekend that I’m referencing here), but aside from that, it’s a lot of thoughts and prayers.

My point here is largely that we see these bills time and again, which largely raise a lot of false hopes, and which can be a bit of a waste of peoples’ time. MPs get one shot a private member’s bill in any given parliament, and a lot of them don’t even get that because of the fact that it’s a lottery system that determines the order in which they appear, and for them to waste that shot on a feel-good bill that doesn’t actually do anything just gets tiresome after a while, and it can be really hard on the people whose hopes have been raised for nothing to happen, because it’s just a feel-good bill.

Ukraine Dispatch:

One civilian was killed by Russian shelling on Kharkiv, and seven wounded in a Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia. Elsewhere, there appears to have been a blast on the Russian bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1680272192993472513

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1680525991418929156

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