Tag Archives: GLBT

Roundup: Unnecessary, lethal delays

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The pandemic continues to accelerate in certain parts of the country, because that’s what exponential growth is – exponential. To that end, Dr. Theresa Tam is calling for stricter lockdowns, because the longer you delay, the worse it gets. So what is Doug Ford doing? Delaying until Monday to decide on extending lockdown measures in some regions of the province, and signalling that tougher measures won’t go into effect until Boxing Day – you know, so that there can be more holiday super-spreader events and the situation will spiral out of control that much faster. Good job! And no, there haven’t been actual lockdowns, which is why the measures that have been put into place so far haven’t been effective (and there is talk emerging that some of the hot spots are in large industrial workplaces, that the government is insistent on remaining open).

There is some more promising vaccine news, in that it looks like there will be scheduled 125,000 doses of the Pfizer delivered per week in January, while more freezers are being delivered to provinces to store the doses. As well, the Moderna vaccine is nearly ready for approval (apparently Health Canada is waiting on some more manufacturing data), and new guidance is suggesting that it won’t need to be frozen as initially indicated, which makes it even more versatile for delivery in rural and remote communities.

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Roundup: Moving on child care (again)

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The fiscal update and its feminist lens, as well was talk of the “she-cession” has given some people to look a bit more closely at the national early learning and child care proposal that the government is putting forward. And immediately you get those on the left chirping that the Liberals have been promising this for decades but never delivering (which is false – Paul Martin did deliver it, and had agreements signed with every province and money flowing, which Stephen Harper immediately killed thanks to the NDP helping him to bring down Martin’s government), and the Conservatives have resumed their 2004-2006 mantra that taxpayer dollars to child care spaces somehow robs stay-at-home mothers of their choice (also a verifiably bogus argument). Oh, and the Conservatives are also talking about refundable tax credits, which didn’t build a single child care space the last time they tried tax credits, nor will it build any should they form government again. Why? Because there is a supply-side problem, which is going to require federal and provincial investment. The first step of this is in the fiscal update – the immediate creation of a federal secretariat, which will do the work of developing policies for a national universal programme, as well as assisting with the federal-provincial negotiations, because child care is provincial jurisdiction, and the federal government can’t create these spaces without the provinces.

With this in mind, here is Lindsay Tedds and Jennifer Robson about the what is needed to make this a reality.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1333814949617881088

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Roundup: The slow part of the economic recovery

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It was a big day for economic news – the Bank of Canada stating that they expect interest rates to continue to be at near-zero until 2023, as the economic recovery moves into a much slower phase as we wait for a vaccine for the pandemic. They also stated their plan to change how they buy bonds going forward. A few hours later, Chrystia Freeland gave a major speech wherein she stated that the government was going to keep spending until the pandemic was over, because they can at a time of such historically low interest rates, and because it provides businesses and households a necessary bridge through the economic turmoil until the pandemic is over. And for those of you in the back, it’s not 1995, and even with all of this added spending – which is time-limited – is not going to create a debt bomb. It’s just not.

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Of course, conservative pundits set about clutching their pearls that the government is taking on the debt instead of households, apparently not comprehending that they have more tools and levers at their disposal than households – but these are the same chuckleheads who equate government debt with credit card debt. The Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report noted that much of the recovery to date has been on the back of consumer spending, which is one more reason why allowing households to go insolvent and enforcing consumer austerity would only harm the economic recovery – we saw this in the Great Depression, where consumers who had money but didn’t spend it because of the social stigma prolonged the depression for years. And yet, we keep hearing “taxpayer dollars!” and “leaving debt to our children,” as though leaving them a weak economy is any better – particularly if that debt is affordable and is treated as an investment with programmes like childcare, that creates more economic returns. This should not be a difficult concept to grasp – and yet…

Meanwhile, here is Kevin Carmichael’s parsing of the Bank of Canada’s rate decision and Monetary Policy Report, while Heather Scoffield gives her own thoughts on Freeland’s speech.

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Roundup: Nail-biter by-elections

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The Liberals won the two Toronto-area by-elections last night, but with far less comfortable margins than before. While Marci Ien won Toronto Centre, Green Party leader Annamie Paul came in a not-too-distant second place, which was a surprise showing for her considering she was a far-distant fourth in the previous election. In York Centre, Liberal Ya’ara Saks pulled ahead at the very end, but it was a constant dance with the Conservatives most of the evening, and very close (and close enough there may yet be a recount). While it’s not good to read too much into by-elections, one supposes that this should be a bit of a warning to Justin Trudeau about going to a snap election, given how close it was. There should also be a warning for Trudeau in here about engaging his own party membership – one suspects that there are a lot of angry Liberals who are incredibly unhappy about the way that Trudeau short-circuited the nomination process and simply appointed candidates in both ridings, cutting out the grassroots membership to the detriment of democracy as a whole. Erin O’Toole will crow that he made progress in the GTA with nearly winning York Centre (though the Conservative candidate was almost a non-entity in Toronto Centre), though Maxime Bernier’s entry into the race in that riding ostensibly took enough votes away from O’Toole to lose the race. Hopefully O’Toole won’t take that as a cue to go even more extreme to try to attract those voters.

Fiscal anchor

At a talk for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, prime minister Justin Trudeau said that the government wouldn’t be setting a new fiscal anchor while the pandemic was still ongoing – but that there would soon be a “robust” fiscal update presented. This immediately gave the whole it’s-1995-and-will-always-be-1995 crowd the vapours, but there is credible economic thought that this isn’t the time for a fiscal anchor because it would simply be a signal to cut spending at a time when that spending is building resilience into the economy and is giving us a leg-up on recovery over other countries. Erin O’Toole followed up and handwaved that if his party was in charge, they would have done everything better, offering no evidence to that end.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1320794340747194369

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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: 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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Roundup: Trudeau steps on yet another rake

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The prime minister’s problems with the now-cancelled WE Charity contract blew up yesterday, as it was revealed that Justin Trudeau’s mother and brother have been paid by WE to speak at events, that his wife had once been paid by them in 2012, all of which contradicts their previous statements that they don’t pay speakers. (Trudeau maintains that he has never been paid). Suddenly this makes the fact that Trudeau didn’t recuse himself from any decisions around that contract at the Cabinet table look very bad, because his family does benefit from the organization, and they’re not just donating their time and profile as had been previously stated. And for WE’s part, they have done themselves no favours by saying that it was their social enterprise arm, ME to WE, which paid them, except for the times when there was a billing error and WE Charity paid them instead. This as more parliamentary committees are (finally) doing their jobs in calling ministers and bureaucrats before them to explain their decisions. And to cap it off, Yves-François Blanchet is now demanding that Trudeau step aside and let Chrystia Freeland run things until everything is cleared up. So that’s something.

It’s hard not to see that the Liberals’ capacity for self-harm knows no bounds, between these self-inflicted wounds and their inability to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag/manage an issue, means that they inevitably make it worse for themselves – which they did yet again today by essentially saying that the only thing that matters is that Trudeau was really concerned about the youth. Seriously? It is not only obvious that Trudeau seems to lack any sense of self-awareness, in part because he has grown up as a kind of celebrity, but it’s also combined by the fact that there clearly isn’t anyone in his office who will stand up to him and say that no, this maybe isn’t a good idea, and no, it’s going to come across well no matter how well-meaning it all is. I mean, the first couple of years in office, Trudeau dismantled any way for the party mechanism to push back against the leader and his office, and that was a fair bit more autonomous than what goes on in PMO. This being said, I will add that our ethics and conflict of interest regime in this country is ludicrous, and subject to the whims of successive Ethics Commissioners, who either read their mandates so narrowly that nothing was ever her problem, except when she took it upon herself to decide who is and is not a family friend of the Aga Khan (that being Mary Dawson), or her replacement, who has invented new statutory interpretation out of whole cloth on numerous occasions to baffling results. None of this excuses Trudeau’s constantly stepping on rakes – he should absolutely know better, but seems incapable of figuring that out.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt remarks on how repetitive Trudeau’s ethical lapses are getting, and how every time he promises that he’s learned his lesson – until he does makes yet another blunder. Matt Gurney is baffled at PMO’s tone-deafness on this whole affair. Chris Selley, while boggled at Trudeau’s constant blunders, is even more incredulous at how Andrew Scheer keeps being so bad at responding while creating his own distractions.

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Roundup: Yet more questions about the WE contract

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The whole situation with the sole-source contract for WE Charities continues to spiral, as one of the co-founders was found to have claimed that PMO reached out to them shortly after the April announcement on the creation of the student grant programme – only for him to have since retracted and said that he was over-enthusiastic, and it was really a senior bureaucrat from Employment and Skills Development Canada. PMO has also since denied making contact, and senior bureaucrats have stepped up to say it was them, but while that may in fact be the case, it’s still the minister who is responsible for the decision, and I don’t see any minister stepping forward on this. It just goes back to this government’s complete inability to manage their own crisis communications without stepping on six more rakes along the way. It’s complete amateur hour.

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On top of this, it sounds like part of the way in which WE is managing this programme is to offer $12,000 payments to teachers who can recruit 75 to 100 students, and to be their mentors and managers along the way, which is unusual. It also raises the question of how this was what was so imperative about how this organization was the “only one” capable of administering the grant programme if this is how they’re running it. All the more reason for MPs to call an emergency committee meeting and haul the responsible minister and deputy minister before them to answer questions and provide documentation that proves that WE was the only outfit that could meet their criteria – you know, like it’s their job to.

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Roundup: Developing an app

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The day’s presser began with prime minister Justin Trudeau congratulating the winners of the UN Security Council seats, and gave an articulation of why it was important to Canada to try, and a promise that he would keep working to these laudable foreign development goals, even if we weren’t at the table. From there, he announced that the Canadian Digital Service, in cooperation with BlackBerry and Shopify, had been creating a mobile app to assist with contact tracing that was soon to be tested in Ontario, and this was a system that would collect no personal or location data – that it had a database of anonymized identifier numbers that could be triggered if someone tests positive – and that unlike other contact tracing apps, this one simply needed to be installed on the phone and it would run in the background, and not need to be open, which would drain the battery. (And Trudeau got really into it, because he is a geek about these kinds of things). Closing off, he spoke about new applications for the cultural industry and funds for national museums.

During the Q&A, Trudeau said that the late start to the Security Council race hurt us (and he’s not wrong there – many countries need the full eight to ten years to make a successful bid), for what it’s worth. He also made some fairly vague promises around trying to rein in the RCMP when it comes to their use of force, particularly against Black and Indigenous people. He also refused to condemn Jagmeet Singh’s outburst on Wednesday, saying it wasn’t for him to judge how a racialised leader perceived what happened.

On a completely different note, I was pleased to hear that the MPs in charge of the Centre Block renovations have decided to keep the existing footprint of the original Commons chamber, and didn’t take up the options to either expand into the lobbies behind or completely move the West wall and expand outward from there. They also say that the renovated Chamber could accommodate up to 420 MPs, but it also sounds like they may be leaning toward using benches, which would be terrific because desks are an Americanism, and simply encourage MPs to be doing work other than paying attention to the debates (and we’ve all seen the piles of Xmas cards that start showing up in the fall). I am less keen on the talk about physical distancing as part of the renovations, because they won’t be done for a decade, and we are likely to be over this pandemic by then, and we can work with the existing chamber and set-up perfectly well if we really wanted to.

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Roundup: Pandemics and aid packages

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It was a day yesterday, where COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Justin Trudeau announced a $1 billion aid package to deal with the outbreak, Donald Trump announced travel restrictions from European countries, and the NBA suspended their season (if you care about such things). More and more events are being postponed or cancelled, and the markets have entered Bear Market territory.

(Note: Maclean’s has an updated COVID-19 Q&A here).

As for that $1 billion package the government announced, one of the missing pieces are measures for workers who can’t access EI or sick leave when they are forced to self-isolate, which the government says they’re working on. As for Parliament, it does indeed have a pandemic plan, but it’s still early when it comes to deciding what portions of it need to be activated, and that can include suspending the Chamber’s sittings, but that would require some kind of negotiation with the other parties as to when to pull that trigger, and its duration.

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Meanwhile, Supriya Dwivedi worries that we aren’t warning people enough of the risk coming from the US, given how much of a gong show their healthcare system is. Susan Delacourt takes particular note of Trudeau’s language in asking Canadians to play their part to “flatten the curve” of the spread of the virus. Colby Cosh delves into some of the failure of the US’ centralized Centres for Disease Control in the early stage of the COVID-19 transmission. Heather Scoffield says that adequacy of Trudeau’s $1 billion COVID-19 package won’t last given the state of the economy.

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