Tag Archives: Immigration

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: 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: Projecting demagoguery

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Pierre Poilievre held a press conference on Parliament Hill yesterday, and said a number of bizarre things such as personally blaming Justin Trudeau for the housing crisis and as the reason why prices have doubled, but then used an example of how a permit was being held up at Ottawa City Hall by a planner who was on holiday for two weeks. The federal government has precisely zero levers when it comes to the human resources practices of Ottawa City Hall and the vacation days of its planners. Furthermore, he insisted that Canada is the only place in the OECD where this kind of thing happens, as though the whole of Europe doesn’t exist, and most especially France where nothing gets done in the entire month of August. But remember, this is entirely Justin Trudeau’s fault.

What as perhaps more telling was when he was asked about immigration levels and if he would make any changes if he were to form government. Poilievre said that Trudeau—whom he has just personally blamed for the housing crisis—“wants Canadians to forget all that and blame immigrants; he wants to divide people to distract from his failings,” and then said that “this is what demagogues do.”

Apparently, irony died, because Poilievre has been behaving like a demagogue this entire time, and has raised immigration before as part of the crisis—and has refused to elaborate or give any targets, nor will he denounce any of his followers who have been treating the immigration issue as a dog whistle and excuse to concern troll about immigration. He has done absolutely nothing to curtail that, except to project it onto Trudeau, and then on top of that, claim that it’s the Liberals who are “nasty” and “mean” on issues like climate change and gender identity. No looking at his own followers, who spend their days online taunting Catherine McKenna as “climate Barbie,” or calling gay people “groomers” or “paedophiles.” Nope, that’s all the Liberals and their supporters. It’s projection, and it’s bullshit, because that’s what the discourse has degraded to.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian authorities say that they have repelled Russian attacks in the East around Kharkiv, and reclaimed some ground as well this week. As Russian missiles have been falling on the northeast region of Kupiansk, there are orders to evacuate civilians but many don’t want to leave. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Denmark to thank them personally for their support, and for the future transfer of F-16 fighter jets. He then headed to Greece to thank their government, and will attend a summit of Balkan leaders. Meanwhile, the head of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau says that ending corruption is no longer just a crime, but a matter of national security, especially because Western partners need assurances around military aid and reconstruction dollars. Kyiv is filling up with destroyed Russian tanks as the city prepares to celebrate their second wartime Independence Day this week.

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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: Morneau’s sore hindsight bias

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As he tries to rehabilitate his reputation after his book was largely ridiculed and lambasted, Bill Morneau is back out there asserting that the pandemic spending programmes were too generous, went on too long, and are one of the causes for high inflation. This is clearly hindsight bias—economist Stephen Gordon resurrected a couple of tweets to push back against these kinds of assertions because they ignore the gravity of the situation at the time, and just how many unknowns they were dealing with at the time. And I do recall that Morneau was proposing measures at the time that were clearly inadequate and were politically unsaleable, which he didn’t seem to understand and then got huffy when PMO override his judgment—likely for the best, because we wound up with the actual desirable outcome. Higher inflation was the good outcome scenario. The alternative was deflation that would have spiralled into a depression, which was what everyone worked to avoid. Morneau just continues to be sore that he was overridden, and possibly that people aren’t taking his post-political attempts at reputation rehabilitation more seriously.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1692258336815624347

Some additional data from Jennifer Robson:

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces are claiming progress on the south-eastern front as they push toward the Sea of Azov, which would split Russia’s forces in the occupied south; there has been fierce fighting in the north-eastern front in the Kharkiv region. The defence ministry is telling military-aged citizens to update their data at enlistment offices and to “overcome their fear.” The US has approved sending F-16s from Denmark and the Netherlands to Ukraine, once their pilots are fully trained—probably early in 2024. Meanwhile, Russia claims that two of their warships repelled drone attacks near occupied Crimea, and that a drone attack damaged a building at the centre of Moscow.

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Roundup: The ugly discourse that won’t be disavowed

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As the housing debate rages on, there is a particularly ugly strain of the discourse that is revealing itself throughout, which has to do with the rapid immigration increases in relation to the housing crunch/crisis, and that there is no real way for there to keep pace. This has led to some people lamenting that it’s too bad that the decades long, multi-party consensus on immigration is unravelling because governments haven’t been serious about housing. I’m not really buying it, though. My sense is that a lot of this is just dog-whistling and concern trolling—that these are largely the people who opposed immigration to begin with and who are taking the opportunity of the housing crisis to have a “legitimate” reason to blame immigrants for something.

Mark Miller is pushing back on this narrative, at least somewhat, pointing out that demographically and economically we can’t really cut back on immigration levels, adding that “The wave of populist, opportunist sentiment that does at times want to put all of society’s woes on the backs of immigrants—I think we need to call that out when we see it.” And he’s right. But he also needs to be far more vocal on the kick in the ass to provinces and municipalities about building more housing (which is their jurisdiction), because they also need these immigrants and have the responsibility of ensuring they have places to live.

What I think has been particularly telling is that Pierre Poilievre has been hinting at this, saying that the immigration system is “broken,” but he also won’t say what he would do differently, or what he would adjust the levels to. It’s the same kind of stupid game he’s trying to play on all of his files—saying just enough about a particular issue that the loudmouths and far-right extremists can read into it the awful things they think, and Poilievre will do almost nothing to dissuade them, so as to get them to think he’s on their side (even though, deep down, he’s not really, and some of them have already figured that out) and to hopefully cash in on their votes. And when you try to corner him on these issues, he will fight straw men or make the attacks personal instead of answering. It’s some of the most cynical of ploys, it’s absolutely corrosive to democracy, but he seems to think the ends justify the means, so he’s going to go for it, consequences be damned.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian drones have pounded grain storage and facilities at the Danube river ports in western Ukraine, which puts further grain shipments in jeopardy. Ukrainian forces say that they have reclaimed the village of Urozhaine in the southeast, but are admitting that the front in the north eastern region near Kupiansk is becoming more difficult.

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Roundup: What our diverse Cabinet isn’t thinking enough about

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It’s one of those mid-August “let’s quote a random academic” stories, but this piece on the added diversity in the Cabinet shuffle did get me thinking about a slightly more serious topic than perceived tokenism and need to ensure that these new ministers are adequately supported. Part of my thinking was simply the fact that I have interviewed some of the previously-new Cabinet ministers from after the previous election, and a recurring theme was that having more diverse voices around the Cabinet table is a net benefit, and that they have a lot of really enriching conversations as a result. Which is fair!

But the other thing I got to thinking about was intersectionality, and how such a diverse Cabinet should be getting better at it—but this is still a PMO with a strong central impulse (because the PM’s circle of trust is so small and too many things funnel through his chief of staff, Katie Telford). This is something that they should be better at, and should be more aware of, but perhaps this is one more of Trudeau’s blind spots, where he believes that simply paying lip service to the existence of intersectionality is enough, rather than actually doing the work.

And with that in mind, here’s economist Lindsay Tedds, who is actually doing the work of intersectionality, and is calling on the government to get their act together.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1689841585746579456

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1689841590423224321

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1689841594617434112

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1689841599197671426

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1689843815614664705

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Russian missile struck a house not far from the Polish border, killing an year-year-old boy. Meanwhile, all of the heads of regional army recruitment centres have been fired as part of ongoing battling of corruption within the country, after audits found abuses within those centres.

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Roundup: Caught out for trying to be too clever

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There has been another ridiculous slap-and-hairpull fight happening between Liberals and Conservatives over Twitter over an article in the Guardian which cites a rights watchdog saying that there are no pro-choice Conservatives left. It’s not actually true, because there are, but the problem is that the Conservatives were trying to be too clever by half when it came to MP Cathay Wagantall’s latest anti-abortion bill. It was structured ostensibly to give legal weight to a foetus when a pregnant person was attacked or assaulted, and it was 100 percent a backdoor attempt to give a foetus rights, which was intended to start the process of enshrining those rights on the road to banning abortion. It was not very well hidden, and every anti-abortion group in the country was counting on this bill. A smart Conservative leader would have either nipped this in the bud entirely, knowing that it was a trap, or marginalised Wagantall and any of her supporters, to demonstrate that they are a very small minority in the party. But no—instead, Poilievre had every single member of his caucus vote for it under the rubric that it was about protecting pregnant people. And it is that vote that this Guardian article cites as the basis for saying there are no pro-choice Conservatives.

But of course, political hay has been made of this, and Liberals across the board are sharing the piece, because this works to their advantage and plays to their base, and Conservatives are howling that they’re sharing misinformation. Never mind that the Conservatives spread all manner of mendacious messages on the daily, most of it outright lies and disinformation, and they don’t even blink, but as soon as something comes along that catches the Conservatives out on something they through they were being clever about, well, suddenly that’s beyond the pale.

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1687586294262808581

Everyone needs to grow up, but seriously, this is your own fault, Conservatives. You should have known this was going to happen, so acting all wounded when it did is really disingenuous.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Drones purporting to come from Ukraine struck a Russian warship and caused what could in fact be severe damage to fit. Ukrainian forces have working to retake more land around Bakhmut. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian security service says that Russia is planning a false-flag operation against an oil refinery in Belarus in order to blame it on Ukrainians in order to draw Belarus into the conflict.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1687503986008498188

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Roundup: The big separation news

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The big news, meriting a tonne of international headlines, was that prime minister Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, have entered into a legal separation, and that they have gone through all of the legal and ethics processes involved. Trudeau will remain at Rideau Cottage, being the de facto official residence, while Grégoire Trudeau has found a place of her own nearby, and will still be heavily involved because of shared custody.

And while we typically don’t make a habit on reporting on the personal lives of political leaders (unless they cross particular ethical lines, like accepting the lavish gifts from certain companies because they want the promotion on Instagram, as though they were celebrity influencers), there is nevertheless a whole lot of seeking of reaction, the comparisons to his father’s public divorce, questions about what this means for his image and political future (really?), hand-wringing, and some snide comments from certain pundits that if the Trudeaus want privacy they should return to being private citizens, not to mention homophobic remarks from the far-right commenters pretending to be news media. Totally normal stuff.

In reaction, Susan Delacourt notes both the history of the relationship and the constant presence of gossip around prime ministerial marriages and how they are always claimed to be on the rocks. Althia Raj remarks on how this kind of a thing does get politicised, particularly because so much political stock is put in the images of happy families.

https://twitter.com/CristinaStasia/status/1686856298279940096

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian drones damaged grain infrastructure in the port city of Odessa, which has been an organised campaign on Russia’s part since they pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal. Likewise, Russians struck the inland port of Izmail, near the Romanian border, where Ukrainian grain heads down the Danube River, for the same reason, and the result is that world grain prices continue to rise. (This is a major driver of food price inflation). As for the counter-offensive, Ukrainian forces say that they have stopped any Russian advances, but the Russians are dug in, making them harder to dislodge.

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Roundup: A stupid fight over housing jurisdiction

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There is a really, really stupid fight brewing around whose jurisdiction housing is, and I am very nearly at the end of my patience for this. On Monday while in Hamilton, the prime minister said—correctly—that housing is primarily not a federal jurisdiction, but that they are trying to do what they can to support municipalities. And so yesterday, Pierre Poilievre held a press conference to insist that it must be a federal responsibility because immigration, infrastructure and taxes affect housing, and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is federal (erm, except it’s an arm’s-length Crown corporation). But while there are federal policies that can affect housing, that’s not actually a federal responsibility. He knows this, but is trying to muddy the waters in order to blame Trudeau for the problems that provinces and municipalities have created for themselves.

And to put a cherry on this particular sundae, the gods damned CBC comes along and simply both-sides this stupid fight without actually pointing out that under the constitution, housing is a gods damned provincial responsibility. And there is a certain other outlet that shall not be named running a piece about how Trudeau says that housing’s not a federal responsibility while standing behind a lectern with a sign about building houses faster as though that’s some kind of smoking gun and not simply the federal government patting itself on the back for dispersing money—which is not actually an indication of constitutional responsibility. This shouldn’t be rocket science, and yet they also do this with healthcare. Nor is this new—provinces have been shrugging off this responsibility since at least the 1950s, because they know they can get away with it because credulous media outlets in particular let them.

This being said, I am also rapidly losing patience with the whole thing about people angry that Trudeau has correctly pointed out that he is not primarily responsible, and that he should somehow “show leadership” through handwavey means. This makes as much difference as people getting angry that Trudeau hasn’t fixed healthcare. Yes, there are things the federal government can do around the margins to affecting housing, but again, they cannot force municipalities to zone for density. There are stories about how hundreds of millions of federal dollars for affordable housing are languishing in cities like Vancouver because the municipalities can’t get their permitting through. Trudeau doesn’t have the constitutional levers to change that, or a Green Lantern ring to willpower more housing construction. Meanwhile, the premiers sit back and let Trudeau take that blame while they continue to do nothing about the problems, and the media won’t hold them to account. Isn’t federalism just grand?

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1686292418344239104

Ukraine Dispatch:

In the early morning hours, drone debris has hit Kyiv as attacks were thwarted. There were also more attacks on the port city of Odessa and the grain storage there. Russians also shelled a hospital in Kherson, which killed one doctor. Meanwhile, that same office tower in Moscow’s financial centre got hit by another drone attack (and again, Ukraine is not claiming responsibility).

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1686410208338464768

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