Tag Archives: Immigration

Roundup: Making demands with a smile

Posted on by

Manitoba premier Brian Pallister was in Ottawa yesterday to meet with prime minister Justin Trudeau, and to try and offer some “friendly advice” about dealing with the whole “Western anger” situation. Pallister also penned an op-ed for the Globe and Mail that was full of said “advice,” most of which was pretty dubious, but in the aftermath of his meeting, he said a bunch of things like the country can unite around climate action if they set their partisan differences aside – in other words, if the federal government abandons their plans and just lets the provinces do whatever, adding that a carbon price “isn’t the only way” to fight climate change – technically true, but it’s proven the most effective mechanism and the only one which deals with the demand-side of the problem. (In subsequent interviews, Pallister also ignored that the point of the national price is to avoid provinces from undercutting one another, which you would think might be a big deal). Pallister also made some hand-waving gestures around a municipal handgun ban given the province’s problem with violent crime, but that’s already being panned locally.

But back to Pallister’s op-ed, which was largely an exercise in blame-shifting and simple fiction. He blames the divisions on the federal government’s “economic, energy and environmental policies,” which is curious and convenient. Those policies? Bill C-69, which he blames for delays in a Manitoba flood mitigation project for which the new regime doesn’t apply. That project has been under the Harper 2012 assessment regime, which should be a clue as to why the federal government saw the need to make changes to it – not that it stops Pallister from repeating a bunch of the fictions that have been applied to the legislation by its opponents. He also counsels finishing the Trans Mountain pipeline, which is what the federal government is in the process of doing. Pipe is going in the ground. People beating their chests about it won’t make the process go any faster.

Pallister then goes on to complain about interprovincial trade barriers which is – wait for it – entirely in the hands of the provinces and not the federal government to lower. He makes mention of 34 exceptions which the federal government controls, but that’s 34 out of hundreds, and this government has set up a process to work with provinces to harmonize regulations that create barriers. They have been doing the heavy-lifting – more than the Harper government did – but it’s gone completely unacknowledged. That Pallister is shifting blame to the federal government is pretty rich when it’s the provinces who are the problem. His final “advice” for unity? Giving the provinces more money for healthcare. I’m not sure what that has to do with national unity or “healing the divisions,” but there you have it. It’s pretty clear that like Jason Kenney and Scott Moe, Pallister is trying to use the focus on this “anger” to try and leverage it to what he wants, and he won’t let the truth be a barrier for him. Just because he delivers the message with a smile doesn’t make the “advice” friendly.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Frank dialogue and tone-deaf pronouncements

Posted on by

The Conservatives had their big post-election caucus meeting, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, they voted not to enact the provisions of the (garbage) Reform Act that would give caucus the ability to turf their leader and force a new leadership contest – predictably under the rubric of empowering the “grassroots,” which as was explained in yesterday’s post, does the complete opposite. As this is going on, Angus Reid had a poll of Conservative voters that showed them particularly split on whether they want Scheer to stay or go (42 percent go, 41 percent stay, 17 percent undecided), so that could be an indication that their own base is leaning toward dumping him at their leadership review in April – especially as the convention will be in Toronto, an area where the party was shut out, and they may be more motivated to punish him for it.

As for Scheer, he arrived at his planned press conference three hours late because the meeting kept going, and it makes one wonder if the “frank discussion” going on inside were to blame – it’s possible there was an airing of the grievances happening, particularly for those who lost their seats. It didn’t seem to daunt Scheer, however, because when he arrived at the microphones, he essentially repeated his stump speech from the campaign. Sure, he said that “no one was more disappointed than me,” but he offered no signs of humility in defeat. When asked about the failure of his climate plan, Scheer said that they simply didn’t communicate it clearly enough rather than admit that it transparently wasn’t an actual climate plan (and his own senators have publicly clocked him on this fact). When asked if he thinks homosexuality is a sin, he prevaricated – again – and forcefully stated that he will defend people’s rights, which shows that he hasn’t learned anything from the campaign about his evasiveness.

Meanwhile, Matt Gurney makes the point that the party isn’t listening to what people in the GTA have been trying to tell them about what will and won’t fly there if they want to win seats there ever again, and are being told to “calm down” in response – which could spell trouble for Scheer.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Performative or procedurally correct?

Posted on by

The NDP held their first post-election caucus meeting yesterday, saying goodbye to departing MPs and welcoming their rookies and returning MPs, and when they met the press afterward, Jagmeet Singh announced that he is going to press for pharmacare and for the government to abandon their application for judicial review the Human Rights Tribunal compensation for First Nations youth. But there are problems with both – on the former, he is proposing the party’s first private members’ bill be taken up with the matter, and on the latter, the substantive problems with the Tribunal likely exceeding its statutory authority to make that kind of compensation order is kind of a big deal and as a lawyer, you would think he might have an appreciation for bad jurisprudence while still pushing for the government to go ahead with the compensation that they said they would honour. But you know, performative outrage.

Which brings me back to the notion of pharmacare legislation. The whole promise is built on both bad practice and bad procedure. Remember that when it comes to private members’ bills, they are allocated by lottery, meaning that it’s random as to who gets what slot, and Singh is not proposing as leader to take away the slot of the first NDP MP whose name comes up so that he can dictate what bill will be presented. That’s not only heavy-handed, but it actively removes the independence of that MP (which the NDP is used to doing while pretending they don’t, but let’s call a spade a spade). So much for any of the issues that MP cares about – the leader demanded their spot. The second and more important aspect is that private members’ bills can’t initiate government spending, and pharmacare is provincial jurisdiction, meaning that it’s depending on negotiating with premiers. The bill, essentially, is out of order, unless it becomes an exercise in demanding a national strategy, which the NDP love to do, but one of their MPs went on TV last night to say that they intend to use it to lay out the framework they want to implement. I can pretty much guarantee you that it means the bill will be dead on arrival, and that the committee that decides on what private members’ business is voteable will decide that it’s not. (The sponsor who was forced to give up their spot for this bill will then demand that the Commons vote to override the committee, and when they don’t, the NDP will wail and gnash their teeth that the Liberals don’t care about Pharmacare, which is a script so predictable it might as well be a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie).

https://twitter.com/BradWButt/status/1189643457444417536

What the NDP could do instead is use their first Supply Day to debate a motion on Pharmacare, which would then have a vote and let them scream and moan if the Liberals don’t adopt it for the reason that they’ve already committed to the implementation plan in the Hopkins report (which the NDP decry as not being fast enough), but at least that would be procedurally sound. But their apologists have been telling me on Twitter that all private members’ bills are theatre and only exist to make a point (untrue), or that they could simply get a minister to agree to it in order to spend the funds (never going to happen), but hey, it’s a minority parliament so the NDP can pretend to dictate terms as though they actually had bargaining given the seat maths. It’s too bad that they can’t be both performative and procedurally correct.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Costed platforms away

Posted on by

As we head into the Thanksgiving long weekend, Justin Trudeau kicked off the day in Ottawa with a rally about International Day of the Girl, before heading to Surrey BC to savage the Conservative platform release (more on that in a moment).

Jagmeet Singh was in Ottawa to unveil his platform’s costing (finally), and it was tepidly received in terms of grades from Kevin Page’s Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy. Much of it relies on new revenues that are highly uncertain, and some of their assumptions don’t really test the effect they would have on the broader economy, which could be a problem.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1182644769731862528

Andrew Scheer headed out to Delta BC to release his party’s full platform and costing, and hoo boy is it chock full of cuts – though not the ones the Liberals are darkly warning about. That said, pushing back infrastructure spending loses momentum that was starting after funds allowed provinces and municipalities to do longer-term planning, and their talk of keeping the public service from growing and cutting via attrition while simultaneously pledging not to use outside contractors means that work clearly isn’t going to get done, and that will be a problem that they can’t just hand-wave away. Also, some of those cuts are basically a black box, and it would seem to play right into Trudeau’s hands when he can point to Doug Ford promising “efficiencies” in Ontario and promises not to fire anyone, and well, we’ve seen the opposite happen.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1182751336799952897

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1182763966948229120

Continue reading →

Roundup: Hypothetical subways and more traffic

Posted on by

It was a quieter day, post-debate, but the leaders were all back on the road, mindful that there is still another debate later in the week. Andrew Scheer in Markham to promise funds for two Toronto subway projects – while lying about the Liberal record on said funding (the funds haven’t been released because there isn’t an actual plan for those lines yet) – and to further promise that he would fund any infrastructure project designed to ease congestion. Erm, except that this is a promise to induce demand because all of the data show that if you build more traffic infrastructure, that traffic just grows to fill it. It doesn’t actually relieve congestion – it just contributes to making it worse.

Jagmeet Singh was in Toronto to talk student loans, and when pressed about Bill 21 by the media, he said that if it made it to the Supreme Court of Canada that the federal government would “have to” take a look at it then – which isn’t really true, and they could put arguments forward at any court case along the way. This makes Singh’s position to basically punt the problem down the road for a few years, for apparently little electoral gain.

Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, went to Iqaluit in Nunavut, where he spoke about the North being on the “front lines” of climate change, and to meet with elders in that community. It also lets Trudeau make the claim that he’s the only leader to have visited the North during the campaign, for a few hours in any case.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Trying to draw in the Supreme Court

Posted on by

If this election could get any stupider, it did yesterday. Justin Trudeau started the day off in Sudbury, and after arriving by canoe, he promised not only to further expand the areas of land and waters that are protected areas as part of ongoing roll-out of green policies in advance of today’s “climate strike” rally, Trudeau also promised an expansion of the “learn to camp” programme, including bursaries of up to $2000 for low-income families. As someone who hates camping, this is borderline offensive – but it’s also one of the whitest of white people policies in the book. (Seriously – ask a person of colour how they feel about camping). I get that the idea is that it promotes connecting people with nature and the importance of conservation, but this was probably one of the dumbest campaign promises to date.

Andrew Scheer was not much better. From Trudeau’s riding of Papineau in Montréal, Scheer tapped into the Trumpian “Lock Her Up!” mentality by promising not only a judicial inquiry into the Double-Hyphen Affair, but also to pass a cartoonishly named No More Cover-Ups Act, which would empower the RCMP to go directly to the Supreme Court of Canada for access to Cabinet documents – all of it predicated on the lie that the RCMP are investigating the PMO (they’re not) and that they can’t get access to documents (because the Clerk of the Privy Council said no to a fishing expedition). It’s all very gross and unseemly. Not only do we not demand that the police investigate our political rivals (this isn’t a banana republic, and if the Liberals lose, then they will have faced political consequences for the Affair), but politicising judicial inquiries is a Very Bad Thing. Dragging the Supreme Court into one’s political vendettas is even worse (and I have a column on that very topic coming out later today about that very issue).

As for Jagmeet Singh, he was in Campbell River, BC to reiterate his promise to build half a million housing units, but to also flesh out his promise for income supports of up to $5000 per year for low-income renters. But again, this is provincial jurisdiction so the rental income supports will have to be a carefully designed policy, while he has yet to explain how he’ll rapidly build all of this social housing when the cities where it’s most needed are very tight labour markets, which means there likely aren’t enough construction workers to do the job, and that will drive up the costs of building these units by a lot. (Singh also completely mischaracterised the output-based system on carbon pricing as part of his trying to downplay the current government’s record, because he’s doing politics differently).

Continue reading →

Roundup: Campaign launch and promises

Posted on by

As we wait for the writs to be drawn up – and I wouldn’t hold my breath on it happening until at least Wednesday, because they want to ensure that the Manitoba election is over first – we’re ready to start seeing the official campaign launches. The NDP were supposed to have theirs on Sunday, but cancelled it out of respect for Hurricane Dorian hitting Nova Scotia and PEI, only to turn around and then do a “bus unveiling” in Toronto and then head to Ottawa to “open” the campaign headquarters – which was essentially launching the “official” campaign anyway. All of which is a bit of a fiction because the campaign has really been going on for months, because fixed election dates are garbage. (Side note: in the week following the point being made that Singh has not yet visited New Brunswick, and the high-profile defections, that he still hasn’t bothered to make a stop in that province).

Meanwhile, because the NDP have already released their platform, the Parliamentary Budget Officer is starting to cost some of their promises, and the first one was released regarding their pledge to eliminate interest charges on current and future federal student loans.

https://twitter.com/twitscotty/status/1170671191629037569

Continue reading →

Roundup: Bashing a fictional plan

Posted on by

In the days ahead, you are likely to hear federal Conservatives start echoing Jason Kenney’s current justification for killing the province’s carbon price based on a report by the Fraser Institute. The problem? Well, the modelling that they used is based on a work of fiction, and not the plan that was actually implemented, and since the federal carbon price is closely based on the Alberta model, they will have roughly similar effects. But hey, why fight with facts when you can use fiction and straw men?

And for the record, here is the EcoFiscal commission explaining how the Fraser Institute got it all wrong.

Continue reading →

Roundup: These aren’t the bots you’re looking for

Posted on by

The discussion of misinformation, “junk news,” and bots have been going around a lot, as have the notions of what journalists can and should be doing to fact-check these things. To that end, here’s a thread for thought from Justin Ling about how this can be working against us in the longer term:

And national security expert Stephanie Carvin adds a few thoughts of her own, to contextualize the problem:

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1161424183185854464

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1161424186214158336

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1161424188500058112

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1161424197408702465

Chris Selley. meanwhile, respectfully suggests that if the government is so worried about online misinformation, that they stop pushing it themselves with their own particular bits of spin and torque that plant the same kind of false notions and expectations in people’s minds – and he’s absolutely correct.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The hollow discontent

Posted on by

The Council of the Federation meeting has concluded, and Jason Kenney is again giving warnings about national unity, but given that his thesis is a house built of lies, one should probably take it with a grain or two of salt. There were the usual demands of higher healthcare transfers (ironic given that the premiers are largely conservatives, at least one of whom was in Harper’s Cabinet when he reduced the rate of increase on those transfers), and federal assistance with pharmacare, and the platitudes about increasing labour mobility – for which we’ll see if Kenney’s theatrical moves around unilaterally reducing a handful of the province’s trade barriers will get any traction. It was noticeable that he didn’t decide to join the national securities regulator, and for as much as Andrew Scheer tried to swoop in with press releases about how Justin Trudeau had “failed” on interprovincial trade, the reality is quite the opposite – after achieving the trade deal with the provinces and the negative list of barriers, they have made substantial progress on chipping away at it.

There was some disagreement – François Legault continued his opposition to pipelines (which throws a giant wrench into their visions of “national energy corridors” that are being used as code-words for pipeline access routes), and Brian Pallister and to a lesser extent, Doug Ford, sniped back at Legault about his province’s “secularism” bill, that the other premiers mostly didn’t say anything about.

When all was said and done, however, it became noticeable how hollow Kenney’s attempt to build some kind of coalition of discontent was – while he was trying to insist on a brewing unity crisis, all of the other premiers were pretty much “one or two disagreements, but we’re good otherwise.” Which kind of blows Kenney’s narrative out of the water – especially when he was forced to admit that the province doesn’t really want to separate. It’s a tacit admission that once again, this is just using lies to try and keep people angry because he thinks he can use that to his advantage, but not enough other premiers want to play with that particular bonfire.

Continue reading →