Tag Archives: Iran

Roundup: The “bigger picture” of continued hybrid sittings

Posted on by

The Procedure and House Affairs committee is looking in to the future of hybrid sittings, and the Speaker wants them to consider the “bigger picture” of all of this. Of course, the bigger picture is that a) by trying to tie future use of hybrid to sickness or work-life balance, MPs will be creating an impossible attendance standard and create a monstrous culture of presenteeism; b) ministers will not only evade accountability not being in the House, and will be unavailable for MPs to see them during votes—which is the one time they are most available—and this is already happening as ministers are getting used to taking off when votes start and doing them from their phones in their cars, which is very bad; it also means that minister and MPs in general are less available to be found by the media; and c) the big one is of course the human toll that these sessions take on the interpretation staff. The NDP, as usual thinks you can just hire more interpreters, except there are no more interpreters to be hired. They literally cannot graduate enough of them to cover the existing attrition even before the injury and burnout rate from Zoom is factored in.

But MPs have consistently ignored the human toll, preferring their convenience, and whinging about long travel distances and having families, as though there aren’t options available to them that aren’t to most other Canadians. I will keep beating on this drum, because we won’t be able to maintain a fully bilingual parliament for much longer if this keeps up (we’re barely doing so as it is), and it’s probably going to take things absolutely falling apart for them to care, and that’s a problem.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 223:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that Ukrainian forces have made rapid and powerful advances in both the east and south, and in places where Russian forces are retreating, they are abandoning posts so rapidly that they are leaving dead comrades behind.

https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1577324136220839937

Continue reading →

QP: Triple, triple, triple the clip-gathering

Posted on by

The prime minister was in Halifax to announce new support programmes for those who were affected by Hurricane Fiona, but his deputy was present. Pierre Poilievre led off in French, and he cited a faux report that half of Canadians are $200 away from insolvency, which is not actually true, and accused the government of raising taxes, returning his false “triple, triple, triple” the carbon price line. Chrystia Freeland praised their solution of the doubled GST rebate, and called on the opposition to support their other measures. There was another round of the exact same in English, and then Poilievre lamented high gas prices. Freeland again called on the rest of the House to support the rental support and dental care provisions. Poilievre pivoted to the downing of Flight PS752 1000 days ago, and insisted that it was legal for them to plan a similar plot, which is absurd and wrong. Marco Mendicino gave a pro forma condemnation of the downing before insisting that Canada is not a safe haven for terrorism. Poilievre disputed this, and demanded that the IRGC be listed a a terrorist group, to which Mendicino called on all members to stand with the families, and listed actions they have taken for those families.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and he accused the government of changing EI rules for seasonal workers, to which Carla Qualtrough said that benefits continue to remain available as the pilot project has been extended to 2023, and broader reforms are coming. Therrien insisted that seasonal workers didn’t qualify, and Qualtrough reiterated her answer.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and in French, demanded that tax loopholes be closed for the “ultra rich” (because it’s just that simple, you see). Freeland reminded him that they have taken measures to ensure that the rich pay their fair share, particularly banks and insurance companies, and note their luxury tax. Singh repeated the question in English, and Peter Fragiskatos reminded him that $1 billion has been invested in combatting tax evasion, including audits related to the Panama Papers.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Independent thought alarm, Iran edition

Posted on by

I hear the independent thought alarm sounding as Liberal MP Ali Ehsassi, who is Iranian-Canadian, is being critical of the government’s response when it comes to sanctions on the Iranian regime, and he wants them to do more. This being said, he has stressed that the minister, Mélanie Joly, has been very receptive to talking to him about the situation, and hearing his ideas, but that wasn’t of any interest to the CBC. No, they were interested in the narrative that even Liberal MPs aren’t happy with the government’s moves to date on sanctioning the Iranian regime, and lo, they put on an “expert” who says the government should do more, in spite of the fact that the don’t have the actual capacity to enforce more sanctions, let alone monitor the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

I don’t expect the party to come down on Ehsassi for this, and the Liberals have demonstrated that they are willing to put up with a certain degree of independence from their MPs (more so than pretty much any other party right now), but I always find the reaction of the media interesting in situations like this, because as much as they claim they want more independence for MPs, when it gets demonstrated, they immediately start acting like this is either an attack on the government/prime minister, and they try to wedge it as much as possible to make it sound exciting. But all this really does is crack the whip without the party Whip ever needing to do a thing, because the media is enforcing discipline more than he ever could. Some members of the media should probably reflect on that fact

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 222:

Ukrainian forces have made a major breakthrough in the south, advancing along the Dnipro River and threatening Russian supply lines in the region. In the northeast, the liberation of Lyman is providing a staging ground to press into the Donbas region.

Continue reading →

QP: Triple, triple, triple the bad math

Posted on by

Even though the prime minister was in town, he was not in Question Period today, though his deputy was. Pierre Poilievre led off in French, worrying that housing prices have doubled, and that bills take up 60 percent of an average paycheque, while the government’s solution is to “triple, triple, triple” the carbon price. Steven Guilbeault reminded him that the carbon price is the most effective in the world, and that emissions have been reduced by nine percent and the revenues go back to households. Poilievre switched to English to decry the carbon prices, misleadingly talking about missed targets and insinuating that it was tripling overnight when it’s over a decade, and misquoted the PBO about the cost to households, before repeating his “triple, triple, triple” line, to which Guilbeault reminded him that O’Toole stated that pricing mechanisms were the best way to go. Poilievre repeated his assertions, and Guilbeault needled the Conservatives for constantly flip-flopping on their position on carbon pricing. Poilievre insisted that the Liberals “attacked” a woman in rural Newfoundland and called her a “polluter” for heating her home, and Guilbeault pointed out their programme to help people transition off of home heating oil. Poilievre mocked the government programme to help people afford a “tax,” accused the government of putting people into energy poverty, and demanded the carbon price increase be cancelled. Chrystia Freeland responded this time, saying Canadians understand that climate change is real, and that the global economy is in the midst of a transition to a green economy, which is why the government is helping Canadians and industry make that transition.

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/1577002549261078541

René Villemure led for the Bloc, and he accused the government of secretly giving contracts to Liberal donors around Roxham Road, to which Helena Jaczek read in French that they negotiated fair market value and publicly releasing the details would release commercially sensitive information. Villemure insisted this was just the government sowing doubt other contracts, which were not proven to be in any wrongdoing. Jaczek repeated a version of her statement in English. 

Peter Julian rose for the NDP, and he demanded immediate EI for the Atlantic provinces in the wake of Hurricane Fiona, to which Carla Qualtrough says that Service Canada has waived the requirement for a record of employment. Alexandre Boulerice denounced Poilievre before repeating the same question on EI, and Qualtrough assured him that EI modernisation is on the way. 

Continue reading →

Roundup: Demanding LNG with someone else’s money

Posted on by

While the federal Conservatives continue to promote the fantasy notion that Canada can somehow supply Europe and Japan with LNG to displace Russian supply—something that was never going to happen because of the timelines for projects to be built and that they need to be in operation to make their money back—under the notion that Ottawa needs to “get out of the way,” again ignoring that there has been no market case for it, Jason Kenney is going one step further and demanding that the federal government to build LNG export infrastructure. Which is odd because the Conservatives howled with outrage when the federal government nationalized the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline in order to sufficiently de-risk it for it to complete construction. If there’s no market case, why not get the federal government to do it?

But let’s also remember that the proposed Kitimat LNG facility on the West Coast, fully permitted and approved, is not being built, because there is no market case. Hence why Andrew Leach is calling out Kenney’s nonsense below, particularly the fact that Kenney is calling on the federal government to spend their money rather than Kenney spending his province’s own money. You know, like he did with Keystone XL, and whoops, lost billions because he made a bad bet and the American administration didn’t restore its permits. Funny that.

 

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 217:

UN human rights investigators have found that Russia has been violating international law when it comes to the treatment of prisoners of war during the invasion of Ukraine, which shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also asked for Canadian help in ridding his country of mines left behind by Russian forces. Meanwhile, there are reports that Russian conscription officers are at borders trying to intercept would-be conscripts from fleeing the country.

Continue reading →

Roundup: No breach of privilege for horse jokes

Posted on by

Our long national horse-joke nightmare is over. The Speaker of the House of Commons ruled that said tweet didn’t impinge on Garnett Genuis’ ability to do his work, and was not a prima facie breach of privilege, and the matter is dropped. I’m just surprised that it took him three days to determine that, but here we are. I was able to return to the House of Commons without fear that I would be removed by security (because the privilege complaint got the Sergeant-at-Arms involved), and things went as they have for pretty much the past almost fourteen years. Sure, Andrew Scheer gave me a death stare, but he’s not going to keep me from doing my job.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1574767434145447940

With that in mind, a few notes and observations—while I might have preferred a stronger statement from the Press Gallery executive, I have come to learn that there was a lot of backroom pressure being exerted by certain Conservatives, so the Gallery didn’t relent to that, which is a positive sign, but still worrying about the overall implications. I am under no illusions—this was a targeted attack on me, and this was a test case for what the Conservatives hoped they could get away with in their attempt to go to war with the media. They figured that I was vulnerable, because I’m a freelancer without a corporation and a newsroom backing me up, and I’m gay, and they hoped it would count against me. It didn’t. The Gallery rebuffed their attempts, and I wasn’t about to let the Conservatives bully or intimidate me. But this was pure intimidation, and We The Media can’t kid ourselves. I was one of the first, but I will not be the last. We’re going to need to get a lot better at solidarity in the months and years to come. Am I going to recycle this horse joke yet again? Probably not. But I’m not going to stop calling out their bullshit, either in print or over Twitter.

The bigger warning sign is about what this says about the state of politics. For Scheer and Genuis, this is just a game, and they are more concerned with scoring points than they are in doing the work of being an MP, whether it’s actual accountability, or policy work, or any of it. And the sad reality is that this is where politics has been headed under the current generation for a few years now. Friends of mine who used to be staffers got so discouraged by this attitude about point-scoring—and this is from all parties, not just the Conservatives—that they wanted out. Their going after me was just another attempt to score a point, and that’s why I’m not going to laugh this off and say “It’s just politics.” Because it’s not “just politics,” and this is not a game. We need to break this mindset, and return to this being a serious place with serious people. Garnett Genuis and Andrew Scheer are not serious people. Oh, and if they couldn’t parse the grammar of that tweet, then they have no business scrutinizing legislation.

And finally, a big thank you to all of my supporters and followers over the past week. It was very heartening to get your messages of encouragement throughout, even as I dealt with an influx of trolls who apparently have nothing better to do with their time than stalk my Facebook, or click on my YouTube videos in order to down-vote them. (Guess what guys—the algorithm counts those clicks, down-votes and shitty comments as engagement in my favour).

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 216:

Russia is claiming to have won overwhelming majority votes in their sham-referendums (conducted at gunpoint) in occupied regions of Ukraine as a pretext for annexation, which no Western country is going to view as legitimate. Meanwhile, Russian men at risk of conscription are fleeing the country, and a Russian-backed disinformation network trying to spread propaganda about the invasion has been shut down.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Threats only matter when it’s your family

Posted on by

The chatter yesterday morning was that the Diagolon crew talked on their online show about raping Pierre Poilievre’s wife just to prove that they could, and lo, Poilievre got angry, referred this to the RCMP, and called the Diagolon crew dirt bags and insisted he had never heard of this group before, even though he very clearly had, and had been playing footsie with them like he has with a bunch of other far-right extremists. And yes, it’s horrifying that they would make these kinds of comments—which they insist were just “a joke” and that they meant no harm (far-right extremists are always “just joking” until they’re not), but Poilievre only seemed to care about rape threats when they were directed as his family, and not, say, the female journalists who reported on his connections with Diagolon, for whom Poilievre decried as a “smear” and sent his flying monkeys after them, who were again subjected to all manner of graphic rape and death threats, which he has never denounced. You see where this is going?

https://twitter.com/TedFriendlyGuy/status/1574412812574769152

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 215:

It is apparently the last day of Russia’s sham referendum in occupied regions of Ukraine, while their forces have conducted drone airstrikes on the port of Odessa.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Royal tour, day one

Posted on by

It is now approximately day eighty-four of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and we have some confirmation now that the fighting in Mariupol is at an end. Both sides are claiming victory—Russia claiming it is a mass surrender, Ukraine stating that the garrison achieved their objectives, and in particular, they tied up Russian forces that couldn’t be deployed elsewhere, as those forces have been pushed back, as far as the border in some cases. There is now a negotiated withdrawal taking place, and prisoner swaps may be in the works, so we’ll see how this plays out.

Elsewhere, it sounds like today is the day that Sweden and Finland both make their applications to NATO, and while Turkey is still being sour about it, but we’ll see what particular concessions they try to extract before their membership is accepted.

Closer to home, it was the first day of Charles and Camilla’s royal tour, starting in Newfoundland and Labrador. They visited the provincial legislature, the lieutenant governor’s residence, and the village of Quidi Vidi, as well as met with residential school survivors. Prince Charles did talk about the need for reconciliation in his speech, and that is going to be one of the themes of the tour.

https://twitter.com/ClarenceHouse/status/1526656706914271233

https://twitter.com/ClarenceHouse/status/1526657592495423490

Continue reading →

Roundup: A Ukrainian delegation in Ottawa

Posted on by

We are now on or about day thirty-eight of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russia has accused Ukraine of crossing the border with two helicopter gunships to attack a fuel depot in Belgorod—something that the Ukrainians deny, which raises the notion that this may be some kind of false-flag operation by Russia to justify further action against Ukraine. After all, CSE has outlined some of the disinformation storylines that Russia has been pushing around their invasion of Ukraine, including the fabrication that Ukrainians are harvesting organs from soldiers, which is blatantly untrue—but Russia has been bad enough at their information operations that it may not be too surprising if they staged this explosion in Belgorod. Also pressing is the statement from president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Russian forces have been leaving mines in the area outside of Kyiv, including around homes and corpses.

https://twitter.com/ArmUkraineNow/status/1510096650823421958

Elsewhere, Ukraine has paused its efforts to recruit fighters internationally, given that there are some problems with the legal status of some of them with their home countries, but also the fact that it actually doesn’t make sense to put these people on the front lines with little-to-no training. That said, they stated that they still need help with non-combat roles, such as transporting food, ammunition, fuel, and moving wounded soldiers from the battlefields, so we’ll see if there is still the same enthusiasm for those roles. As for refugees coming to Canada, there are concerns that there are now months-long waits for biometrics appointments at embassies and consulates in surrounding countries, but the government has been putting more resources in those offices, and have stated that it would actually take longer to make the IT changes necessary for visa-free travel than this system which adapts existing travel streams to the country. I guess we’ll see which winds up being correct.

Meanwhile, five Ukrainian parliamentarians have been in Ottawa for the past two days, meeting with Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland, Anita Anand, and other parliamentarians. Part of what they have asked for the government are a specific shopping list of weapons and lethal aid, as well as financial aid. It sounds like there haven’t been any announcements out of these meetings, other than an assurance to watch next week’s budget, so that’s one more thing to stay tuned for on Thursday.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Fuzzy logic, rank innumeracy, and outright lies

Posted on by

Erin O’Toole has apparently decided he’s going all-in for the unvaccinated, and wants “reasonable accommodations” made for them while they continue to flood the healthcare system and push it to the point of collapse, and lo, he wants the federal government to halt their vaccine mandate for truck drivers citing the fragility of the supply chain. (Erm, so when the virus rips through the unvaccinated drivers, that won’t further disrupt the supply chain?)

Logic doesn’t seem to be penetrating O’Toole’s rhetoric—nor the simple fact that premiers are responsible for the management of the pandemic, not the federal government. There are no “reasonable accommodations” because rapid tests are not actually passports that allow the unvaccinated free licence to go out in public (unlikely to be masked either, because the Venn diagram of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers is nearly a perfect circle). All it does is prolong the pandemic and the strain on the healthcare system which is leading to the mockdowns across the country—which again, O’Toole is trying to pin on Trudeau because the federal government continues to offer pandemic supports, and he claims that this is “normalizing” them. (He also calls them lockdowns when they are nothing of the sort). He’s tried to claim that the federal government should have been able to increase bed capacity in hospitals (physical beds are not the problem—the problem is trained staff to tend to the patients in those beds). It’s just a bunch of fuzzy logic, rank innumeracy, and outright lies, and O’Toole knows it, but he’s decided that this is the path that he can exploit politically, and there frankly aren’t enough people, particularly in the media, calling him on his bullshit (because both sides! *jazz hands*).

Meanwhile, O’Toole is also calling for emergency meetings of the health committee to examine the “critical gaps” in the federal government’s ability to manage the pandemic in the omicron wave. Which is…not the federal government’s fault. They provided the vaccines, and the rapid tests when asked, and are deploying military help across the country when provinces ask (never mind that the military is stretched beyond capacity and they can’t do their actual jobs right now). No, what O’Toole has decided we all need is a dog and pony show to deflect from the failures of the premiers so that he can try and pin this all on Trudeau. It would be risible if we hadn’t already seen the Conservatives abuse that very same committee in the previous parliament, for the sake of a few headlines.

Continue reading →