Tag Archives: Iran

Roundup: Ambrose rules out a return

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It was a day of a lot of movement within the Conservative leadership race, with big repercussions to come. Early in the day, we got word that two more names were added to the Conservative race – rookie backbencher Derek Sloan, and failed leadership candidate (and aspiring narcissist) Rick Peterson. Sloan has already come out and said that he’s open to having a debate over abortion, and he’s putting forward this absurd notion that they need to stop being apologetic about being Conservative – which would be great if the party actually put forward conservative ideas like market-based solutions to problems rather than just populist pandering. Shocking. Peterson, meanwhile, is continuing his schtick that his business success is going to translate to political success, even though he did abysmally in the last election and couldn’t secure a nomination to run in the election, which shows you just how profound his organizational skills are. Nevertheless, expect him to position himself as the “Western” candidate in the race.

And then the big bombshell – Rona Ambrose announced that she is officially out of the race. It wasn’t a surprise really, especially as word has been circulating in Conservative circles that she hasn’t made any phone calls or secured any kind of organization while she considered her options. Nevertheless, it now opens the race wide open because a lot of people who had been holding their breath and waiting for Ambrose to make a move can now make their own moves. It also means that currently, Marilyn Gladu is the only woman in the race, which can’t be healthy for the party either. (It also makes me wonder who the Red Tory in this race is going to be, because it’s not actually Peter MacKay).

And just minutes after Ambrose made her announcement, another would-be candidate, former staffer Richard Décarie went on Power Play to expound on his social conservative views. It went as well as can be expected.

While most of the other candidates quickly came out to condemn these comments, there are a few things to note here – Décarie is worth following because he has attracted some organizational heft, particularly from those who were behind Tanya Granic Allen in Ontario, and it’s not insignificant, and when you recall that Brad Trost did come in fourth the last time around. There is a particularly strong social conservative organization within the party, and they do a lot of fundraising and organizing, and that can’t be overlooked when it comes to a leadership race, where those to factors are going to count for a lot more.

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Roundup: Cutting through Pallister’s bluster

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With the Cabinet meeting in Winnipeg, Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland took an opportunity to meet with premier Brian Pallister yesterday, and boy howdy, was his tone in interviews afterward a hugely problematic mess. Pallister kept insisting that the province wasn’t getting the “respect” they deserved for their environmental plans, while ignoring the legitimate concerns that the federal government has – to the point where he was deliberately obscuring the actual issues at play.

One of the main issues in contention is the federal carbon price, which Pallister has famously waffled on (to the point where Paul Wells has referred to him as “Canada’s tallest weather vane”) – first he was going to implement one, then got huffy and stopped the plans because he didn’t want to increase it every year as is the plan, and because he saw momentum with other conservative premiers in challenging it in the courts. With those challenges coming down squarely in the federal government’s favour, Pallister is again floating the idea of implementing it, but doesn’t want it to increase, saying that a low price will let them meet their Paris targets. The problem, of course, is that there needs to be a common carbon price across the country so that provinces don’t undercut one another, which Pallister (and others) continue to ignore, as though the fact is a triviality when it’s the crux of the whole issue. All the while, Pallister is swearing up and down that he’s not asking for a special deal, when he is in fact demanding just that. I’m not sure how else you would describe being exempted from increasing the carbon price in line with the rest of the country as anything other than a special deal.

Add to that, Pallister is demanding a cookie for past emissions reductions when there is a hell of a long way for the country to go to meet our current targets. Ontario is trying this tactic as well, when the Ford government has completely derailed the province’s planned reductions, and insisting that you’ve already done your bit just puts even more pressure on Alberta and Saskatchewan, which I’m not sure Kenney and Moe would appreciate terribly. Pallister was also on TV grousing that he’s not getting credit for exporting cleaner electricity to Saskatchewan and the United States, which is funny because the reward for that is money, which presumably they are earning for doing so. Suffice to say, all of Pallister’s excuses are amounting to a pile of bullshit, and it would be great if our media brethren could do better at calling him out on it.

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Roundup: When lower carbon is not lower carbon

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As the various interests trying to promote the continued development of Alberta’s energy sector amidst changing global markets and the need to move to a carbon-constrained future, one is bound to find a number of arguments that are inherently self-serving and containing falsehoods (such as the fiction that Andrew Scheer and Jason Kenney keep trying to promote that somehow Alberta energy can reduce the environmental footprint in China and India, and that we can take their emissions credits for it). Energy economist Andrew Leach found another one promulgated by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (which I will remind you is an organization that has gone so far to the one side that major players like Royal Dutch Shell have withdrawn from the group, because they understand the need for mechanisms like carbon pricing).

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Roundup: Congeniality by way of TV

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Maclean’s has a profile of the TVO series Political Blind Date, which pits politicians from rival parties – sometimes from the same level of government, sometimes from different provinces – in situations that help them understand each other’s viewpoints and helps to break down the partisanship barriers. And this is great – but what it was missing was any particular context as to why partisanship has grown to such toxic levels in the first place, and that has a lot to do with parliaments and legislatures rejigging their rules to be more “family friendly.”

Until the early 1990s, parliament used to hold evening sittings three nights a week. At six o’clock, the House would adjourn, and everyone would head upstairs to the Parliamentary Restaurant (aided by the fact that there was a dearth of restaurant options in the area, and liquor laws were such that you bought a bottle of booze that was kept behind the bar in the restaurant with your name on it). MPs would eat together, drink together, get to know one another across party lines, and it developed a sense of congeniality, and at eight o’clock, they’d head back to the Chamber and debate for a couple of more hours. The arrival of the Reform Party and the move to end evening sittings to be “family friendly” ended the congeniality and cross-party opportunities to just be parliamentarians together. With no impetus to break bread together, caucuses grew insular, and it became easier to treat other parties as the enemy rather than just having opposing points of view. Now, it’s rare that cross-party friendships occur unless there is committee travel that helps MPs bond, but that’s not very often. It’s disappointing that we are now relying on a TV show to build these relationships which used to be part and parcel of being an MP.

What’s particularly sad is that this kind of thing is now infecting the Senate, which used to be a far less partisan place than the House of Commons, and for which many senators have formed close and long-lasting friendships across the aisle. They still have more of the convivial culture that the Commons did, but that too is fading as the new Independents, eager to burn things down and declare anyone with partisan affiliation to be tainted and in some cases the enemy (particularly the Conservatives), it is polarizing the Chamber, and souring the mood therein. For a move that was supposed to lessen partisanship, Trudeau’s brilliant attempt to reform the Senate is doing the opposite – just one more unintended consequence that nobody bothered to consider, and all Canadians suffer as a result.

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Roundup: Orphan well alert

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A story that did not get enough attention yesterday was out of Alberta, where the organization that is tasked with cleaning up abandoned oil wells is sounding the alarm that the provincial regulator’s rules are not sufficient to prevent the creation of more of these “orphan” wells – at a time when more companies are offloading assets to smaller companies. This is the kind of practice that usually results in the orphaning of these wells in the first place – that the smaller companies start losing money when the price of oil tanks, and they can’t live up to their obligations to clean up the abandoned ones with the money they’re making from the active ones they’ve bought along with them.

This issue was the subject of a Supreme Court of Canada decision last year, where the court said that bankruptcy trustees who take up these companies with the orphan wells can’t simply abandon these obligations under their bankruptcy proceedings as they’re trying to sell the active wells to new buyers – that their environmental obligations can’t be jettisoned because it’s inconvenient for them. (More on the underlying issues here). This also reinforces the polluter-pays principle, which governments say they’re in favour of – except when it’s inconvenient. Like right now, for Jason Kenney.

Why this issue deserves more attention is because Kenney (and to a lesser degree Scott Moe, who is following the pattern set out for him by Brad Wall) has been demanding that the federal government spend their dollars on cleaning up these orphan wells under the rubric of it being job-creation, or good for the environment. Kenney’s demand for retroactive stabilization funds as an “equalization rebate” (which is ridiculous) has been cited on more than one occasion as a means of using the funds for this purpose, which would essentially be offloading the responsibility onto the federal government because the regulator hasn’t been doing an adequate job when these sales happen, and the provincial government hasn’t created strict enough regulations to prevent these wells from being orphaned in the first place. That’s something that we should be holding him – and the industry – to account for, but that means cutting through the obfuscation. There should be no reason why the federal government should be taking on this expense, but this is what they are being asked to do.

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Roundup: Framing for controversy

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I try to give my brethren in the media the benefit of the doubt as often as possible, but yesterday there were two egregious examples of places where they framed a quote in a way that gave it a particular perception, and then went and tried to make news about that perception. The first example was to take a quote from Trudeau from the Global News interview from the night before, and tried very hard to make it look like Trudeau was blaming Trump for the deaths on Flight PS752.

“If there were no tensions, if there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families,” said Trudeau. “This is something that happens when you have conflict and war. Innocents bear the brunt of it and it is a reminder why all of us need to work so hard on de-escalation, moving forward to reduce tensions and find a pathway that doesn’t involve further conflict and killing.”

If you notice, the focus was – quite rightly – on the fact that civilians get caught in the crossfire of war. But the various outlets in this country (and the US – Fox News in particular) tried to frame this as Trudeau blaming Trump, which he didn’t actually do. And then, CBC had their Washington correspondents getting reaction to the “perception” that Trudeau was blaming Trump, even when he wasn’t, and in interviews, kept aggressively going after the perception of the comments, without actually acknowledging that they were trying to create that very perception with the very frame they put around those comments. The lack of self-awareness and self-reflection was entirely galling.

The second incident in a single day was taking a comment that Stephen Harper made, where he called for “change in the nature of the government” in Iran, and headlined it “calling for regime change” which has a very specific meaning, and got their reaction quotes based on the notion that he called for regime change – again, putting a frame around comments which were so bland as to be not worth reporting. (Note: CBC was not the only offender here, and they had to issue a “clarification,” which was really a correction, as a result; the CTV piece eventually changed their headline and lede, but didn’t note that they had made the correction).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1217233046908416000

Two instances of torqueing quotes and placing dubious framing devices around fairly innocuous quotes to spark controversy in a single day. Not good, guys, and like Robert Hiltz said, this is the kidnd of thing that erodes trust. Let’s be better than this.

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Roundup: Officially on the way to Canada

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It’s official – Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, will be splitting their time between Canada and the UK as they “transition” to private lives, according to a statement from the Queen – and that has a bunch of coverage already in a bit of flurry. Despite a UK outlet erroneously reporting that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already agreed to pick up security costs for the couple in Canada, Bill Morneau stated that the matter hasn’t been discussed yet (which didn’t stop certain media outlets in this country from trying to make it sound like it was a fait accompli, because there’s nothing they love more than cheap outrage stories – never mind that if they’re no longer senior royals, they may not be entitled to the same protection that they currently have). Even if we were to cover it, at $1.7 million per year, that’s still a fraction of what we paid for when Barack Obama visited Ottawa for an afternoon, so let’s keep that cheap outrage in check.

BC premier John Horgan said he was very excited about the possibility of the couple moving to BC, and suggested some potential jobs for them in the area. (I have some suggestions of my own, which should be on macleans.ca later today). Here is some analysis of the results of the meeting with the Royal Family as to the next steps for the couple in the wake of the announcement. As well, here is some media analysis to show how Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, has been treated differently from Meghan, and it’s proof of how framing devices absolutely matter in media in how stories are presented.

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Roundup: Giddy or furious?

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The potential move of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, to Canada is causing a great deal of media speculation, and a share of boneheaded headlines in international papers (the New York Times being particularly egregious in citing that Canadians are “giddy” – in the very week that we have been in mourning over the downing of Flight PS752 – that they could be adding some “razzle dazzle” to our “bone-chilling” country). And then there are all the polls demanding that Harry be made Governor General, or the speculation that we could make him Kind of Canada if we wanted (which we really don’t). Nevertheless, Philippe Lagassé had a few thoughts on the whole matter:

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1215618283812069377

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1215619724404494337

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1215627487377600513

At the same time as we’re allegedly giddy, we’re also apparently “furious” about potential security costs. Which, could very well be, nothing at all, really. And in the coming week or two, I suspect these stories will be all the more absurd.

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Roundup: A cover-up leads to an admission

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The day was largely spent fretting over the state of the investigation into downed flight PS752 – particularly given the news that Iranian officials had already bulldozed the site before international investigators could arrive, ensuring a cover-up was underway. The Ukrainian government was insisting to the Iranians that Canadians be involved, and we got word that a mere two visas had been issued for Canadian consular officials so far (though François-Philippe Champagne did say that he was expecting more to be approved soon). Champagne later announced the creation of an international working group, comprised of the countries whose citizens were all killed aboard the flight, to press Iran for answers, while in the back channels, there is talk that Canadian officials are telling the Americans that they should have been informed of their plans to kill the Iranian general, given that we’re coalition partners. Amidst all of this, mourning continued across the country. (The National Post compiles profiles of the victims here).

And then, something surprising happened – Iranian officials, including their president, admitted publicly that it was indeed one of their missiles that shot down the aircraft accidentally, and that it was human error that they plan to prosecute those responsible, as well as profound apologies and expressions of regret (while taking a swipe at American “adventurism” in the process). It was a marked change of tone after days of denial, insisting that it was “impossible” that they could have shot it down, and what looked to be a cover-up in the making. One suspects that this will have a profound shift in the narrative in the days ahead, and that Iran will be prepared to pay some kind of compensation, just as what happened in 1988 when the Americans admitted they accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner.

Meanwhile, Adnan R. Khan walks through how the accidental missile strike could have happened, while Colby Cosh offers more parallels and reminders to the 1988 incident of the Americans shooting down the Iranian plane then, how it is remembered differently in the West than it is in Iran, and how our amnesia to is affects the reactions – particularly from those who are howling about “murder” and demanding the prime minister be angry about it. As if to prove the point, Heather Scoffield demands some righteous indignation from Trudeau, and for some of that to be directed to Trump for what his recklessness has cost us – as though that would help the situation or not cause even more problems for Canada down the road.

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Roundup: A likely missile strike

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It was another day of shocking revelations as Justin Trudeau held another press conference yesterday to confirm that intelligence from many sources – including Canada’s own – gave a strong indication that it was indeed a missile that brought down flight 752 outside of Tehran, though it may not have been intentional. He struck a very somber tone, and continued to call for Canada’s participation in the investigation – while Iran’s spokespeople are denying that it was a missile, and so far only limited access is being offered to Canadians (though they are apparently approving the necessary visas for consular access). It’s also important to note that Trudeau specifically referenced Canadian intelligence sources, because it’s less likely (historically speaking) that it would be manipulated for political purposes, than if we simply relied on American intelligence.

Another term cropped up several times yesterday, which was the call for a “credible” investigation – another important consideration as it is likely that Iran may be trying to obfuscate and obscure part of the investigation in order to ensure that they can avoid the culpability for the incident, though we are hearing that lessons learned from crashes like MH17 over Ukraine has helped investigators learn more when one side (Russia, in that case) is not cooperative – and Trudeau did note that he reached out to the prime minister of the Netherlands to learn more about how they dealt with the crash of MH17, as they were the lead investigators there. Maclean’s has a bit more here about investigations and what it may look like.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne glumly notes that there is little that Canada can actually do it if is proved that Iran shot down the plane (presumably deliberately as opposed to accidentally), in particular because we have outsourced our defence to the Americans for so long. Likewise, Matt Gurney goes into more detail about just how limited Canada’s options are when it comes to responding to the worst-case situation.

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