Tag Archives: Immigration

Roundup: Sophistry and the “Canadian Dream”

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A piece widely shared over the weekend in the Globe and Mail, titled “The Canadian dream is on life support,” was a curious bit of writing, as the Elder Pundits of this country treated it like a damning indictment of the current government. While Omer Aziz’s ultimate conclusions in the piece are correct—that the federal government needs to admit that things have gone wrong, throw out their old assumptions and pivot, and they need to throw away their talking points while they’re at it—his process of getting there was torturous, and full of outright sophistry.

One of the things that really stood out for me in the piece was just how shallow the analysis really was, particularly in the fact that it served as something of an apologia for the premiers. You wouldn’t know it from reading the piece, but while he levels much of his scorn at the federal government, many of the problems he described are the fault of provincial governments, even where he asserts that they are solely federal such as with immigration. His attention to things like international students were the fault of provincial governments—most especially Ontario and BC—who let their post-secondary institutions treat these international students like cash cows (because they cut funding to those institutions), and allowed the public-private partnership colleges that were largely fraudulent to flourish, again because these provincial governments weren’t doing their jobs, while the federal government was told to just trust them (and I’m not sure how the federal immigration department was supposed to be auditing these institutions in the first place). Likewise, provincial governments scream for temporary foreign workers, and the federal government has to operate on a certain level of trust that these provincial governments know their labour markets best. With his condemnation of the supposed laxity of our criminal justice system again ignores that policing and the administration of justice are provincial matters, but that is never mentioned. He even sides with Facebook on their cutting off of Canadian news and says that the Canadian government wasn’t nice enough to them. Come on.

There are things going wrong in this country, but many of them are complex, and have roots in decades of policy choices by federal and provincial governments that have taken us to this point, and it’s hard for any one government to unwind these structural problems. This kind of essay does a disservice by trying to be simplistic about the problems and solutions to those problems.

Ukraine Dispatch

A father and son were killed in a Russian missile strike on the Kyiv region on Sunday, while three civilians were killed in attacks on Kharkiv and Donetsk on Saturday. In the Kursk incursion, Russians claim that they are increasing security in the area (as videos of their troops surrending en masse flood social media), while president Zelenskyy says that this move puts pressure on Russia as the aggressor. There was a fire reported on the grounds of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, but the structure itself appears to be intact.

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Roundup: Vandenbeld’s side—and a warning

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Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld penned an op-ed over on National Newswatch to explain her side of what happened at the Status of Women committee last week, which has led to her and her staff being targeted and harassed off-line (because this is one of the tactics that Conservatives also employ and pretend they don’t, even though they know full well that they send their flying monkeys at the people they single out over social media). It’s an illuminating read that has a lot more of the backstory about how this committee was operating under its previous chair, some of the procedural elements of what happened that got lost in the noise around the witnesses walking out (never mind that they were set up from the start), and some of the rationale behind why this is happening. Don’t get me wrong—I think she still made a mistake in trying to make the public pivot to the abortion study motion, but the rest of the piece is a good insight into the problems at hand.

“Following Trumps playbook, since becoming Conservative Party Leader, Pierre Poilievre has put out a narrative that Parliament is broken, and the institutions are rigged. The Status of Women committee was living proof that this narrative was not true. And so Poilievre had to destroy it.”

This is one of the most important points as to why things are happening the way they are, beyond the clip-harvesting exercises. It’s one of the primary reasons why the Conservatives have been going hard after Speaker Fergus, why they are abusing privilege in demanding reams of unredacted documents and demanding that the Law Clerk do necessary redactions and not trained civil servants, why they try to tie arm’s-length agencies to the government or prime minister personally. It’s all out of the same authoritarian populism playbook.

But while she pointed out, I feel the need to call out Power & Politics’ abysmal coverage of this issue yesterday, with the guest host (reading from a script on a teleprompter) saying that Vandenbeld’s “behaviour” led to her being harassed, and in the discussion with the Power Panel that followed, was dismissive of the “minutiae of parliamentary procedure” when that was one of the key cruxes of what happened. Procedure was quite deliberately abused, and it led to this confrontation. And the panellists themselves being dismissive of the overall problem, and giving the tired lines of “only five people in the country care about this,” or “I’m shocked that there’s politics in politics!” as though what has been happening is normal. It’s not. Institutions are being deliberately undermined and that is a very serious problem, and it would be great if the gods damned pundit class in this country could actually arse itself to care about that fact rather than just fixating on the horse race numbers for once.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine says that it downed two Russian missiles and four drones overnight, but that shelling killed four people in the Donetsk region, and that homes in the Kyiv region were damaged by a drone attack the night before. There are unconfirmed reports of a Ukrainian force in the Kursk region of Russia, but Ukraine won’t confirm or deny.

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Roundup: Another committee demand

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The Conservatives are demanding yet more “emergency” committee hearings, but because it’s a committee they don’t control, they are getting in front of the cameras to make performative demands. Case in point, yesterday Andrew Scheer called a press conference to demand that the NDP and Bloc agree to recall the public safety committee to examine how a suspected terrorist was able to immigrate and obtain citizenship when he may have been videotaped dismembering a prisoner in 2015.

Of course, the Conservatives’ case and rationale is largely hyperbolic, and their blaming the current government for crime rates is both specious and done entirely in bad faith. But then again, Scheer is a lying liar who lies constantly, so he’ll say anything to get attention, and that’s all this is really about—attention. The Conservatives need to get fresh clips for their socials, and summer committee meetings are precisely the kind of thing that they think makes them look good, so that’s why they have been trying to run committees over the summer, and claiming that the other parties want to be “on vacation” rather than doing work in their constituencies. (This becomes one of those areas where you could accuse the Conservatives of projection in that they treat constituency time as “vacation” or a “break” rather than simply doing other kinds of work in the riding).

This is just one more demand for a dog-and-pony show. I’m not sure what exactly a parliamentary committee could do here.

In case you missed them:

  • For National Magazine, I look at BCCLA’s fight to try to see secret documents to hold CSIS to account for possibly improper spying on environmental groups.
  • Also for National Magazine, I delve into the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision on annuities the Crown owes for several Ontario First Nations for treaty breaches.
  • My weekend column conducts a thought experiment on how the Liberals could possibly hold a leadership contest under their current rules anytime soon.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take looks at the performative hairshirt parsimony on display as people lose their minds over the purchase of the diplomatic condo.
  • My column goes through some of Poilievre and company’s recent deceitful claims when it comes to drug decriminalisation and safer supply.
  • My feature story in Xtra looks at queer diplomacy in Canada, and how we’ve made great strides in the past decade, but we still have a lot more to do.
  • My weekend column on Jagmeet Singh’s continued announcements that are either economically illiterate, or entirely the domain of the provinces.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine says that their forces downed four Russian missiles and 15 drones overnight. Nevertheless, a missile did strike the Kharkiv region, killing one and injuring twelve. The first group of F-16 fighters are now in Ukraine, and ready to be deployed.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1820400963833958849

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1820799395371110697

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Roundup: Calling for price caps

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The NDP are at it again, and by “it,” I mean making stupid demands that should get them laughed out of any room they’re in. To wit, yesterday they demanded price caps on certain grocery items, claiming that the Loblaws settlement over the class action for the bread price-fixing scheme as “proof” that government needs to take action. I can’t think of a more economically illiterate argument that is trying to simply base itself on “vibes” that will only do far more harm than it will do good.

The high price of certain grocery items is rarely an issue of grocery chains hiking prices. It does happen, but there has been little evidence of it when margins have been stable. If you bother to actually pay attention to agricultural news or Statistics Canada data, it’s pretty clear that much of those price increases are a result of climate change-related droughts in food-producing regions, with the odd flash flood or hurricane also ruining crops, and driving up prices. The invasion of Ukraine exacerbated issues by throwing world markets for wheats and cooking oils out of whack, driving up prices as exports couldn’t get to market. And even if you have growing conditions that rebound, often price are locked into contracts with producers or processors for several years at a time, which can delay prices returning to lower levels as supply rebounds. But the point here is that most of this is explainable if you actually bother to look, rather than just screaming “corporate greed!” because you are ideologically predisposed to doing so.

More to the point, this just strikes me as a little bit of history repeating the demands for price controls in the mid-seventies as inflation was reaching double-digits, which then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau mocked with the phrase “Zap, you’re frozen!” We’re not there, and frankly the demand for price caps is frankly ridiculous, and if they persist, we should resurrect “Zap, you’re frozen” to mock them as relentlessly.

Programming Note: I am taking the next week or so off. Columns will continue on schedule but blogs and videos will be taking a bit of a break.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched drone attacks against power facilities in two regions, prompting more power grid disruptions. Another drone attack appears to have overshot and struck down in Romania, but NATO doesn’t believe that this was an intentional attack. A leaked UN report is pointing to Russia as the culprit of an explosion at barracks housing Ukrainian POWs two years ago that killed fifty.

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Roundup: Emergency summer clip-harvesting

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In need of new video clips for their socials, the Conservatives have decided that they need to call an “emergency” committee meeting about the $9 million purchase of a new condo for the Canadian consul general in New York, because if anything is guaranteed gold for them on social media, it’s clips that will be edited in a way to drive anger and outrage, because that’s their whole game. And if you thought that either of the other two opposition parties were going to be grown-up enough to see through this ploy, well, you’d be wrong, because they also signed right up to put on this dog-and-pony show.

Because Parliament is no longer a place for serious discussions, the Bloc decided they needed to sign onto this farce because $9 million is more than some people earn in a lifetime, which I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the price of real estate in New York, but they apparently want to make a point. The NDP, quite predictably, wants to make this about affordability for all Canadians and not just some political appointees, which again, is irrelevant to the discussion because it’s an asset and not something that said consul general is keeping when his appointment comes to an end. Because nobody can grasp that this is both the going price of real estate in New York (which will increase in value), that the existing residence is being sold to cover these costs, that the new residence will be a net savings, but most importantly, that we need a place for the consul general to host politicians, diplomats, and business leaders, and that place needs to reflect well on Canada, which a bedsit in the outer Bronx is not going to do.

The other really stupid aspect of this is that they plan to call the consult general, former television journalist Tom Clark, to testify at the committee, even though this is not his decision, but one of the department, because it’s their asset. This is not accidental or because they don’t understand—it’s deliberate, because the Conservatives want to harvest clips of them calling him a “Liberal insider,” or a “media buddy,” trying to humiliate him by telling him to his face that Pierre Poilievre has promised to fire him as soon as he forms government, and generally denigrating him and his position—which is a tactic straight out of the authoritarian playbook, for the record. Clark, being in New York, is immune from a summons and should ignore it, because the only person the committee should hear from is the deputy minister, and possibly the minister, as she is politically accountable. But summoning Clark is beyond the pale, and they know it, but that doesn’t stop them from planning a social media campaign around it, because that’s what the House of Commons and its committees has become.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian missiles struck the headquarters of a Swiss mine-clearing NGO in Kharkiv, killing six. Russian drones also hit the Danube port of Izmail, wounding there others. Here’s a look at the people in Mykolaiv in the south, who have been under constant Russian attack.

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Roundup: A new Chief of Defence Staff

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The change of command ceremony went ahead yesterday, and General Jennie Carignan became not only the first female four-maple leaf general in Canadian history, but the first female Chief of Defence Staff—also the first in the G7 and G20, but not NATO (where Slovenia beat us to the punch on that). And yes, she has served in combat as a combat engineer (because women were allowed to serve in combat positions in Canada long before the Americans allowed women to serve in combat roles in their military), which is important to note for someone who has reached her position.

In her speech, Carignan pointed to the fact that she is proof that anything is possible, that culture change remains at the heart of what everything the Forces are doing (at a time when the Conservatives are pushing to return to some nonsense “warrior culture”), and that she believes there is a five-year window for us to prepare for emerging threats like Russia and China. It has also been pointed out that she is in the enviable position to be the head of a military with money to spend rather than dealing with cuts (but that could change if Poilievre gets in power), though as a woman, we all know that she’s going to be in for some absolutely rank misogyny, particularly from the right and far-right who will insist that she’s a “diversity hire” or some other such bullshit.

Meanwhile, the Star has an exit interview with General Wayne Eyre, who was essentially Chief of Defence Staff entirely by accident after his two predecessors were both removed for abuse of office and an investigation for sexual misconduct (and when acquitted, claimed he was “exonerated” when he wasn’t, and wrote to every member of the military brass to demand his old job back, demonstrating his unfitness for the job).

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine shot down sixteen drones and three missiles from Russia, but attacks on the Donetsk region have killed five. The Ukrainian army has been forced to pull out of the village of Urozhaine in the Donestk region after their defensive positions were all destroyed as the village was reduced to rubble. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in the UK for European political community meetings.

https://twitter.com/RoyalFamily/status/1813977906089173311

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Roundup: Disagreeing with NSICOP’s interpretations

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From the G7 summit, Trudeau wouldn’t confirm or deny whether any current Liberal MPs are implicated in the NSICOP report, but also mentioned that there was some disagreement with the conclusions that the committee drew in their report, but again, wouldn’t point to what those disagreements are. His foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, said that if there were “traitors” in the Liberal caucus, they would have been booted by now. So there’s that.

More to the point, if you listen to some of the Elder Pundits chirping away over the Twitter Machine, it’s like they’re allowed to have disagreements. “Oh, Trudeau said that he thinks NSICOP is the right place to do a review but then he disagrees with them! Hmm!” I’m not sure why disagreements are such a scary prospect for these people. CSIS isn’t a magical arbiter of what is true and what isn’t. They get wrong or misinterpret things too. That’s why we need more holistic views, but certain politicians and the Elder Pundits demand absolute clarity, and an authoritative voice that can never be wrong (so long as it confirms their priors, because if it goes against what they believe, in which case all bets are off). But also, NSICOP hasn’t done itself any favours by not really defending their work in public, or by the chair being cute about the conclusions (when he has a record of being overly dramatic in some of his conclusions in order to get attention).

The fact that members of the government aren’t really spelling out the disagreement is frustrating. Is it the murky line between diplomacy and foreign interference? It sounds like it, reading through the lines, but maybe actually saying so would be helpful (and no, unlike what certain Elder Pundits have tried to assert, the difference between the two is not actually a bright line). And deflecting questions on this by trying to change the channel to the “good economic news” has not helped their credibility or the ability of the public to find a shred of reassurance hasn’t helped either. We’re talking about other party leaders needing to be gown ups, but the Liberals have a little work to do on this space as well, and that means stop trying to feed the public pabulum on this issue, and to be as frank as security concerns allow.

Summer sitting?

The Conservatives are once again putting on the dog and pony show to claim that they want to sit through the summer, and are trying to call out the NDP to join them, even though that’s not how this works, they know it’s not how this works, and this move would only advantage the government. This didn’t work at Christmas, it won’t work over the summer, and if they want to run committees through the summer, more power to them, but that doesn’t actually change anything.

Ukraine Dispatch

The 78 of the countries at the peace summit in Switzerland agreed that peace must include the territorial integrity of Ukraine, though not every country attending did sign on. (Full text here). LGBTQ+ soldiers in Ukraine marched in Kyiv’s Pride parade over the weekend, calling for the kinds of partnership rights that would allow couples to make medical decisions or claim bodies killed in the conflict (and also further differentiate Ukraine from Russia).

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Roundup: The PBO immolates what little credibility he had left

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It looks like the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, decided to extend his “winning” streak and cover himself in glory at the Commons’ finance committee yesterday, and once again immolated what credibility he has left. Defending his report, claiming he had access to a confidential report from Environment Canada that he was “gagged” from releasing (which the Conservatives jumped on and launched a thousand shitposts about, because committees are now only about content generation), lamented that the government doesn’t publish more climate modelling of their own, and how he hates how his reports are politicised, even though he’s been at this job for years and knows full well that PBO reports are always politicised, because that’s why MPs like them—so that they can both wield those reports as a cudgel, while hiding behind the shield of the PBO’s non-partisan “credibility” to keep the government from attacking it.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1797780078203671008

https://twitter.com/prairiecentrist/status/1797691621708054916

While this Tony Keller column lays out four major problems with the original carbon price report that the PBO produced—which again, Giroux continues to not really apologise for—energy economist Andrew Leach has some additional comments, driving home both how shallow the analysis is, and the fact that it’s not replicable because the PBO studiously refuses to explain his methodology, relying on “trust us, that’s our job.” But as we saw on P&P and again at finance committee, he complained that the government should be doing this kind of modelling work when it’s literally his one statutorily legislated job to do.

And to be helpful, Jennifer Robson provides some unsolicited advice on how the PBO could make his methodologies more transparent, if he actually wanted to do that (which I doubt, because so many of his reports rely on his pulling a novel methodology out of his ass, according to the many economists I’ve interviewed in the past). But that’s also part of the point about why he has no credibility left, and why he should start drafting that resignation letter.

https://twitter.com/lindsaytedds/status/1797817128483254759

Ukraine Dispatch:

A civilian was killed in a Russian strike on a recreation facility in Kharkiv. Here’s a look at what to expect from Ukraine’s peace summit to be held in Switzerland next week.

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QP: The overwrought demands for a gas tax holiday

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The prime minister was in town but otherwise engaged, while his deputy was present for QP today. Most of the other leaders were present, and Pierre Poilievre led off in French, and recited a bunch of abject nonsense about the Bloc supporting the government, and wondered why the government didn’t formalise their supposed “coalition.” Chrystia Freeland noted that Quebeckers believe in a lot of things the government does, such as child care, and the that the Conservatives only want to cut, cut, cut. Poilievre said that he would cut taxes, and went on another rant about the Bloc. Freeland responded talking about social solidarity, and raising the rate of capital gains. Poielivre switched to English to take a swipe at the out-of-context comments by Mark Holland on Friday, and wondered if he would also call out his leader for taking his so-called “private jet” (which is not a private jet, it’s the Canadian military’s plane). Holland says that he was mistaken on the math, that it wasn’t 37,000 kilometres, but 44,000 kilometres to meet the supposed savings the Conservatives promised, and that they were meeting the existential challenge of climate change unlike the Conservatives. Poilievre dismissed this as “whacko math,” and decried the government’s climate plans before demanding the gas tax holiday. Steven Guilbeault repeated the point about the Conservatives’ math, which meant that a person could drive from the North Pole to the South Pole and back, and have kilometres remaining. Poilievre again dismissed this and demanded people get their gas tax holiday from the “miserable economy.” Guilbeault replied with another example of how far someone would have to drive to achieve the supposed savings the Conservatives claim.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and decried another Liberal MP’s comments on bilingualism, to which Pablo Rodriguez pointing out that the Bloc keeps voting against language funding. Therrien continued on his tear about the Liberals disrespecting French, and Rodriguez dismissed it as a ridicule question.

Leah Gazan rose for the NDP, and decried the lack of progress on the MMIW report, and Gary Anandasangaree read some anodyne talking points about systemic racism, and that they tabled their progress report today. Heather MacPherson went on a rant about the Liberals not doing enough to stop the war in Gaza. Mélanie Joly agreed the situation was catastrophic, which is why Canada supports the Biden plan.

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Roundup: Fix nominations how?

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Over in the Globe and Mail, Andrew Coyne points to Hogue Report’s comments on party nomination races as a possible vector for foreign interference, and declares that they need to be cleaned up, but declines to say how. He disputes that parties are entirely private clubs, because “Their sole purpose is to seek and wield coercive power over the rest of us. How they go about it is therefore a matter of vital public concern, and regulation in the public interest – at the least, transparency – is entirely justified.”

But how exactly does one propose to do that? Involve Elections Canada with all internal deliberations of these parties, whether it’s a nomination contest, leadership race, or policy convention? While I get the temptation, we have to ask ourselves if any of this is practical, not only because when an election happens, there are a tonne of last-minute nomination meetings, but there are hundreds of registered political parties. Should they only concern themselves with parties that have seats in the Commons? Would they create disparate sets of rules for the big four parties than any others? Could they get away with that in the courts? I’m not sold that this is a solution because it would involve a massive expansion of their powers and bureaucracy, and because they are ultimately reporting to an Independent Officer of Parliament who has no real accountability, the potential for abuse if enormous.

This isn’t to say that things don’t need to change, because they do, but it’s not exactly something that external monitors can fix. In fact, the solution on its face is much less mysterious than it might sound, but it goes back to the original sin of Canadian politics—the decision to remove leadership selection from the caucus to the party membership. Restore this to caucus selection, and you can start separating the parliamentary and constituency party powers again, so that the parliamentary party leader can’t exert outsized influence on the nomination races, and the constituency party is motivated to keep a closer eye on the nomination races, particularly because that’s their job rather than the parliamentary leader trying to stuff the races with its parachute or hand-picked candidates. I would also note that the number of races that would be vulnerable to foreign interference is actually very small, given that you’re not going be able to find diasporic communities in most rural ridings, so again, we should beware what we’re talking about here. I think we need to better appreciate the scope of the problem, and ensure that the right incentives are there for the parties to clean up their own messes rather than involving Elections Canada.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian infantry has been trying to breach local defences in the Kharkiv region, but so far, Ukraine has been holding them off. Ukraine is due to start receiving their first F-16s by summer.

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