Tag Archives: Gun Control

QP: Selectively quoting reports to one another

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There were only three Liberals in the Chamber today, which remains a problem, but they keep telling themselves they’re setting a “good example.” They’re not. Pierre Poilievre led off, and he lamented a Canadian Federation of Independent Business report citing that up to twenty percent of small businesses may close because of the pandemic. Appearing by video, Chrystia Freeland quoted this week’s IMF report that praised the federal government’s quick action in providing supports. Poilievre then gave a mendacious comparison of unemployment figures, to which Freeland responded with comparisons of the participation rates in the labour force. Poilievre railed about people not getting jobs, but Freeland repeated her IMF quotes. Pierre Paul-Hus was up next, and he gave a fictitious version of the CanSino deal, to which Freeland read the talking points on the vaccine portfolio. Paul-Hus demanded a back-up plan for vaccinations, to which Freeland haltingly read talking points about the breadth of the portfolio as being Plans A, B, C, and D.

For the Bloc, Sébastien Lemire quoted that experts did not agree with the CanSino deal and falsely quoted the “putting all our eggs in one basket” notion, for which Freeland read assurances that the government always listens to expert advice, before repeating the assurances about diversifying the portfolio. Lemire then complained about the Laval candidate not getting funding, for which Freeland read that the researcher got a million dollar subsidy from the government.

Rising for the NDP, Jagmeet Singh complained in French about the federal sickness benefit, and demanded it being improved — though in 94 percent of workplaces, sick leave is a provincial responsibility. Freeland read that the sickness benefit was an important programme, and that provinces have put protections for employment in place. Singh repeated his demand in English, and Freeland agreed that paid sick leave is important, which is why they provided the benefits they could.

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Roundup: A hollow gun control bill

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The much-ballyhooed gun control bill tabled this week is going over like a lead balloon on all sides – not only the predictable caterwauling from the gun lobby, but also gun control advocates who see the bill as largely an empty shell that doesn’t really do much at all. And then there are the provinces, many of whom are opposed to this kind of measure and who are accusing the federal government of doing an end-run around them, as cities are creatures of the province – which of course this bill is doing, because the federal government is trying to respond to demands while provinces (and most especially those run by conservatives) refuse to take action.

Matt Gurney lays out a lot of these contradictions in this piece, and concludes that this bill is more about political showmanship than it is about doing anything concrete – which is 100 percent correct. The Liberals are in something of a tight spot – their base is in large urban centres, where this is a pressing issue, and they are trying to look like they’re doing something when provinces aren’t, which means kludging what few levers they have available (in this case, using federal criminal law powers and tying them to municipal regulations). At the same time, they’re trying not to obliterate what little support they still have in rural seats, some of which they have fought to regain, tooth and nail, after the long-gun registry, which hobbled them for decades. I can see themselves thinking they’re clever enough to try and play both sides, but that rarely ends well.

Meanwhile, here’s Gurney with a lengthy thread with more on the deeper reading into the bullshit inherent in these measures, and you should click through and read the whole thing, because it put so many things into context. Suffice to say:

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QP: Random accusations and incoherence

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For the day’s proto-PMQs, prime minister Justin Trudeau was present, along with three other Liberals — still a pathetic turnout and contemptuous of Parliament. After a late start, Erin O’Toole led off, mini-lectern and script in front of him, and he accused the prime minister of being out of step with allies and his own caucus on China, and demanded that Canada remove itself from the Asia Infrastructure Bank — as though that would do anything. Trudeau stated that they continue to express their concern about China’s activities and human rights record, solidarity with the two Michaels, and that more discussions were happening in next week’s virtual G7 meeting. O’Toole tried to wedge Canadian job numbers with the Asia Infrastructure Bank, and Trudeau took the opportunity to pat himself on the back for the measures they rolled out to help those who lost their jobs because of the pandemic. O’Toole then worried about our vaccination rollout, and the lack of domestic production capacity, and Trudeau read about their investments in Canadian bio-manufacturing, and how the vaccine plan was on track. O’Toole switched to French to repeat the question and got the same answer, before he demanded to know how many Canadians would be vaccinated next week — as though he can answer for the provinces, but Trudeau listed what deliveries we were expecting this week,

Yves-François Blanchet led for the Bloc, and stated that the Quebec government was investing in that Laval vaccine candidate, to which Trudeau listed what investments that particular researcher was given by the federal government. Blanchet was not mollified, and he continued to rail that multinationals got contracts instead of Quebeckers, for which Trudeau chided that we can hear the frustration in the Bloc leader’s voice because Ottawa was delivering for Quebec.

For the NDP, Jagmeet Singh got up, and in French, demanded a promise from the government that they would not call an election in the pandemic, and Trudeau took the opportunity to call out the Conservatives for stalling the latest pandemic aid bill. Singh repeated his demand in English, and Trudeau noted that in a minority parliament, the government doesn’t have the sole determination of that, before praising their efforts today.

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Roundup: Aping the Americans for the sake of chaos

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I frequently chide NDP leader Jagmeet Singh for his propensity to create jurisdictional confusion with the intent of making promises he can’t keep, and trying to make the Liberal government look unwilling to help (when they simply don’t have levers at their disposal), and yet, he keeps it up, again and again, and refuses to be called out on this particular brand of bullshit. And yesterday was case in point, yet again, as he laid out how an NDP government (post-election) would handle the vaccine distribution – using the military, and setting up federal vaccination sites.

As you can expect, this particular pledge is just more bullshit masquerading as a solution to which problems don’t actually exist. Oh, and yet another example of Singh simply lifting what the American Democrats are doing and insisting that it’ll also work for Canada. Never mind that in the US, where they don’t have public health care, the need for military intervention in the problem is more acute, especially as the rollout is a complete gong show in many states. This is not really a problem here, even though certain provincial governments are less than competent – but it’s certainly not the problem that the Americans are facing, so we don’t need their solutions. This having been said, while Singh thinks that federal vaccination sites will speed up delivery, the problem is not human resources, for which provinces have plenty of trained people and access to Red Cross volunteers, but it’s largely logistics. The notion of setting up federal sites in parallel to existing provincial ones, where it’s unlikely that their IT will communicate well (seriously, every province has their own IT systems and health record formats), and they will only create back-end confusion that will simply cause chaos in trying to determine who has been vaccinated with which product, and whether they’ve had both doses, and how to contact people who need second dose appointments if you have two systems that don’t interface well. There is no world in which this ends well. He should know this and ensure that the federal role is to ensure provinces have all the support they need, but no, he needs to keep trying to inflate the federal role (probably so that he can look like the hero).

His particular demands for publicly-owned vaccine and PPE manufacturing is also problematic in a number of ways. We can all see the need for some domestic manufacturing capability of PPE, it would seem to me that public ownership is a solution in search of a problem, particularly given that federal management of emergency stockpiles was not exactly stellar. As for publicly owned vaccine manufacturing, which particular platform would this entail? It’s highly unlikely that a publicly-owned vaccine manufacturer would have invested in mRNA technology while it was still unproven for wide-scale vaccinations, which wouldn’t do us any good in the current environment. I get that they have an ideological bent to public ownership, but articulate the problems you’re trying to solve – something that they refuse to do when called out.

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Roundup: An oncoming vaccine delivery crunch

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It looks like the vaccine delays are at an end, with ramped up deliveries planned through to the end of March, and Pfizer’s Canadian president insisting that they fully plan to meet their contracted deadlines. Add to that, there is more talk of AstraZeneca vaccines on the way (which could be from India as well as the US), but as has been pointed out in this breakdown of vaccine delivery math, this is going to put more pressure on provinces to get those doses into arms.

Why is that concerning? Well, provincial government competence is a very live concern. Ontario, for example, still hasn’t set up a web portal or call centre to book appointments for vaccinations, when they’ve been caterwauling that they need more doses – only, whoops, it turns out that they can’t even bloody count the doses they’ve delivered and they only delivered half as many as they thought they had. That’s not exactly encouraging (particularly because the government is being run by a gang of incompetent murderclowns).

Add to that, Ontario’s ethical framework for vaccine priorities is far more confused than it should be. Would that this government could get its act together, but no. This is only making a bad situation worse, but remember, everyone has to keep praising Ford for how he really exceeded his (low) expectations, rather than holding him to account for the thousands of unnecessary deaths that have occurred on his watch.

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Roundup: Putting vaccine procurement facts on the record

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There was a very important interview released yesterday, with the co-chair of the government’s vaccine task force, which blew most of the narratives about the vaccine procurement out of the water. Particularly, it goes through the evaluation of domestic production capacity and candidate development, the decision to create a broad portfolio of vaccine candidates from international sources, and the fact that CanSino was just one of several options – it was never “all of our eggs,” as the Conservatives continue to lie about. She talks about how long it takes to build bio-manufacturing capacity, and people demanding that it be done overnight are like trying to tell a farmer to grow his crops faster. There are just so many falsehoods that the opposition has been circulating in order to give the impression that the federal government has been incompetent in their handling of this vaccine procurement, which this government has not been effective in pushing back against, even when the media does finally get Anita Anand to give proper answers – which tend not to stick in people’s minds. This notion that the government was simply incapable of signing good deals is ridiculous but corrosive (indeed, the opposition parties spent the whole day trying to use the Health Committee’s production powers to force the release of the vaccine contracts, in spite of the fact that they have rigid non-disclosure clauses, for which Liberals on the committee were filibustering), and yet here we are. So, it was good to finally get an interview with one of the people at the centre of this on the record, but man, it should not have taken this long.

Meanwhile, after Manitoba put on a dog and pony show about procuring their own domestically produced vaccines (which couldn’t happen until the end of the year at the earliest), Jason Kenney announced that he would do the same, but started talking about how the company – Provenance – would need 50 million doses ordered before they could properly scale up and produce them, and he wanted other provinces to sign up – err, at a point when everyone in the country should be vaccinated already – and insisted that they could simply sell surplus doses abroad. Well, the CEO of that company went on Power & Politics yesterday to say that oh no, Kenney must have been poorly briefed, and there was no 50 million dose minimum, and if they’re only contracted for two million doses, they’ll produce two million doses – but I’m not sure which of them to believe, because while Kenney is not exactly an honest broker, it’s quite possible he said the quiet part out loud when it comes to Provenance (though the industry minister is supposed to be meeting with the CEO today, so we’ll see).

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Roundup: CSIS has a warning and a request

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The head of CSIS gave a rare speech yesterday, in which he did two things – called for more modernisations to the CSIS Act in order to let the organisation collect more digital information, and to warn about state actors who are targeting the country’s economic secrets, often though partnerships that they then take advantage of (pointing the finger on this one specifically at China).

Meanwhile, here’s former CSIS analyst Jessica Davis’ assessment of what she heard in the speech, which has a few interesting insights.

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1359213965851697154

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QP: Demanding a Line 5 tantrum

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It was another day of the Liberals showing contempt for Parliament by only putting Mark Gerretsen in the Chamber. Erin O’Toole led off in person, demanding that the prime minister stand up for Enbridge Line 5, to which Justin Trudeau, by video, reminded him of everything his government had done in order to push back against American encroachment. O’Toole said that this wasn’t raised in any call for the past several weeks, to which Trudeau dismissed Conservative armchair quarterbacking, asserting that they got the job done. O’Toole then pivoted to praise Northern Ireland for getting written assurances that they would be exempt from EU export controls on vaccines, and demanded assurances in writing, and Trudeau stated that they got “strong assurances” that Canada would not be affected by these transparency measures. O’Toole switched to French to call out the contradiction between the prime minister and industry minister as to when the Montreal vaccine facility would be able to produce the Novavax candidate — by summer, or the end of the year. Trudeau said that he had stated that the facility should be finished by the summer, and can start production before the end of the year. O’Toole then demanded a plan on vaccine delivery, to which Trudeau accused him of fear-no getting, and reiterated the talking points on the quarterly delivery commitments.

Yves-François Blanchet rose for the Bloc, and moaned about health care transfers and that the federal government wants national standards — taking a swipe at the NDP while he was at it. Trudeau stated that they would increase health transfers, that they already had increased investments, and there would be more discussions going forward. Blanchet then railed about national standards over Quebec standards, to which Trudeau reminded him that the Canadian Forces stepped in to help those Quebec long-term care facilities.

Jagmeet Singh then got up for the NDP, and demanded paid sick leave, and fixing the existing federal benefit. Trudeau reminded him that they created a federal programme to help people immediately but it was great to see some provinces step up (because this is 94 percent provincial jurisdiction). Singh switched to French to raise his meeting with François Legault to demand an increase in federal health transfers, and Trudeau stated that they would continue to increase them, and reminded him of the tens of billions sent to province through the pandemic.

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Roundup: The greater danger of spending too little

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Chrystia Freeland unveiled her first economic update yesterday, and much of it was predictable, from the size of the deficit (which every single news source focused on immediately, as though it were still 1995), to the lack of a fiscal anchor while we remain in the pandemic, to the promises for how to build back in a more inclusive and greener manner. One of Freeland’s major points was that there is a greater danger in not spending enough than there is in spending too much – particularly at a time of record low interest rates – and we saw this borne out in the last recession, where the Harper government withdrew stimulus too soon, and the Bank of Canada was forced to keep rates lower for longer and we had a consumer debt crisis as a result. There were “down payments” for the work of getting to national childcare, long-term care and the meeting climate targets, but those are also all areas where they need provincial buy-in, so that’s going to get interesting very fast, especially given the number of hostile premiers that are currently in office. There were also new programmes rolled out for tourism and live events, and plans to extend GST/HST to web giants.

Predictably, the opposition parties were unimpressed. Erin O’Toole spent his response speech lying about what has been done to date, set up a completely false revisionist history of the pandemic, and went on TV to moan that the government “overspent” on CERB – apparently not grasping that the point was to keep people at home so as not to spread the virus (ergo, the Conservative plan is apparently to force people back to work in unsafe conditions so that they can facilitate the spread of said virus). The NDP were also predictable in their demands for wealth and “excess profit” taxes, never mind that they are inchoate concepts that largely don’t work out in practice. This means that we get to go through yet another round of election speculation as people wonder if the opposition will gang up to bring the government down over the inevitable implementing legislation.

Meanwhile, Heather Scoffield remarks on the ambition in the fiscal update, and whether or not the government will have the ability to deliver on any of it. Kevin Carmichael bemoans the lack of a fiscal anchor, but does admit that Freeland is right in that there is a danger of spending too little, or withdrawing stimulus too early (like Stephen Harper did). Paul Wells is disquieted by the lack of details on big items in the update, as well as this government’s propensity to farm out tough decisions to people not in government – which is a problem.

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QP: A smarmy thanks for their concern

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Both Erin O’Toole and Yves-François Blanchet claimed to have been recovered from COVID, though neither has stated that they have received two negative tests to prove that fact, and they were in the Commons to make their debut in the new session — O’Toole his first as party leader. To that end, he led off, with a mini-lectern and script in front of him, and he thanked everyone for their thoughts and prayers for him and his wife when they were diagnosed, before he launched into a demand for why there has been slow progress on the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Justin Trudeau started off with well-wishes to both O’Toole and Blanchet, before he thanked the Conservatives for taking interest in reconciliation and stated that they have been making progress over the past five years. O’Toole repeated the question in French, and Trudeau gave a more expansive answer on the progress that has been made. O’Toole pivoted to the approval of rapid testing, to which Trudeau picked up a script to list the steps taken, and that one test was just approved this afternoon. O’Toole tried to insist that Canada not approving the same tests that were approved in the EU was a violation of CETA, and Trudeau noted that approvals had been granted in the spring in other jurisdictions that later had to be rescinded. O’Toole switched to French to lament the lack of availability for rapid testing, and Trudeau reiterated his previous response on the approval of a test, saying that they respected science. Blanchet was up next, and he led off by first giving a nod to O’Toole for his new role, before he offered the usual demand for higher health care transfers. Trudeau gave his usual response about working with provinces and having already given higher transfers. Blanchet tried to demand to know how many doctors and nurses the federal government was paying, to which Trudeau listed the places where the federal government does have jurisdiction for healthcare delivery. Jagmeet Singh raised the case of the First Nations woman who taped her racist nurses shortly before she died, and decried systemic racism, to which Trudeau offered a script about his condolences and his concerns over the racism on display. Singh then decried that there are still Indigenous communities that have no clean drinking water, and Trudeau listed the progress that they have made to date, and stated that they are still working toward their May 2021 goal of eliminating all long-term advisories.

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