Tag Archives: Iran

Roundup: Agitating for a political document

Posted on by

Unable to score points on the vaccine procurement in a meaningful way, now that sufficient quantities have arrived, Erin O’Toole has recently tried pivoting to the federal budget, or the fact that there hasn’t been one in some 700 days. Given that the party is losing its lustre in public opinion polls as being “good fiscal managers” – a bit of branding that rarely, if ever, actually proved itself to be true, O’Toole is trying to bolster their street cred. The problem, of course, is that many of his arguments are, well, not actually sound ones.

For starters, no federal budget is like a household – not even close. It’s a bogus populist argument that just refuses to die, but everyone keeps repeating it and buying into it. More to the point, O’Toole is trying to claim that nobody knows how government money is being spent, which is a falsehood. Any money that the government spends has to come through the Estimates process, which gets voted on in Parliament after going through committee study. Afterward, how that those appropriations wound up being allocated get reported in the Public Accounts, which are released every year. All of this spending is being accounted for.

What O’Toole is looking for is a political document that lays out spending plans in broad strokes. It does not on its own showcase how that money gets allocated and spent. In fact, there has been a disconnect between the budget and the Estimates going back a few decades now, because governments and civil servants preferred it that way, and when the Liberals tried to better re-align those processes in the last parliament, it did not go very well thanks in part to institutional inertia pushing back. Suffice to say, it is not true that money is being spent blindly. MPs have ostensibly been in control of the process the whole time – but whether they have paid attention to what they were voting on is another matter entirely.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The importance of our distinctions

Posted on by

There has been no shortage of columns on the future of the Canadian monarchy over the past few days – I’ve even contributed my own – and they are all over the map between “Our current system works” and “Barbados is going republican so why can’t we?” But one of the fundamental problems with many of these pieces is a fundamental lack of basic civics. Like, the most basic, which then gets even more compounded with wrong-headed expectations about what our other political actors should be doing. A huge example is the importance of keeping the ceremonial head of state functions away from the head of government functions, but this is failing to find as much traction these days, and that’s a problem.

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372200793546366976

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372202091712819200

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372203588466978820

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372205703843225607

I would dispute with Philippe a bit here in that people would get fussed about honours being handed out by prime ministers or ministers, particularly if it’s a PM that they disagree with. That’s one of the primary reasons why honours should be with the Queen via the Governor Genera/Lieutenant Governors, because it keeps it out of the hands of politicians and the whims of the government of the day. When you start turning honours over to politicians, bad things happen – recall the gong show that was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medals, where MPs and senators were given a number to hand out apiece, and some of them went to certain individuals that would never have been eligible for any other honours in this country.

But of course, as Dan Gardner points out, so much of this stems not only from our poor civics education, but the fact that we are so saturated with American pop culture and politics that so many in this country believe that we are analogous in so many ways. Hell, we have political parties in this country who simply swallow the positions of American politicos and just divide by 10, thinking that’s all it takes, like we’re not separate countries or anything. It’s a huge problem and not enough of us are pushing back against it. The Crown is a big part of what keeps us distinct, and we need to better appreciate that. I can say from personal experience that one of the comments I’ve received most about my book is that people read the chapter on the Crown and say that it finally makes sense to them because they’ve never learned it properly before. We have a problem and we need to solve it before more people think that the solution is to become Americans.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1372205403782676486

Continue reading →

Roundup: Listing invaders as terrorists?

Posted on by

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s assault on Capitol Hill, Canadian officials have been trying to give some assurances that it couldn’t happen here, and that our own intelligence officials are on the ball when it comes to these right-wing extremists. Which is good to know. Meanwhile, certain leaders are demanding that the Proud Boys be declared a terrorist organisation for their role in Wednesday’s attack, so here’s former CSIS analyst Jessica Davis to explain what that would entail and what it would mean.

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1347288295588433920

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1347289102006300672

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1347289537026936832

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1347289891932172289

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1347290272447782913

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1347291762759528452

Continue reading →

Roundup: The slow part of the economic recovery

Posted on by

It was a big day for economic news – the Bank of Canada stating that they expect interest rates to continue to be at near-zero until 2023, as the economic recovery moves into a much slower phase as we wait for a vaccine for the pandemic. They also stated their plan to change how they buy bonds going forward. A few hours later, Chrystia Freeland gave a major speech wherein she stated that the government was going to keep spending until the pandemic was over, because they can at a time of such historically low interest rates, and because it provides businesses and households a necessary bridge through the economic turmoil until the pandemic is over. And for those of you in the back, it’s not 1995, and even with all of this added spending – which is time-limited – is not going to create a debt bomb. It’s just not.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1321497252783775744

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1321498671389777920

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1321498708551241729

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1321507072773685250

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1321499588683948032

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1321496597000323080

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1321500584046784512

Of course, conservative pundits set about clutching their pearls that the government is taking on the debt instead of households, apparently not comprehending that they have more tools and levers at their disposal than households – but these are the same chuckleheads who equate government debt with credit card debt. The Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report noted that much of the recovery to date has been on the back of consumer spending, which is one more reason why allowing households to go insolvent and enforcing consumer austerity would only harm the economic recovery – we saw this in the Great Depression, where consumers who had money but didn’t spend it because of the social stigma prolonged the depression for years. And yet, we keep hearing “taxpayer dollars!” and “leaving debt to our children,” as though leaving them a weak economy is any better – particularly if that debt is affordable and is treated as an investment with programmes like childcare, that creates more economic returns. This should not be a difficult concept to grasp – and yet…

Meanwhile, here is Kevin Carmichael’s parsing of the Bank of Canada’s rate decision and Monetary Policy Report, while Heather Scoffield gives her own thoughts on Freeland’s speech.

Continue reading →

QP: Fundraising from alleged gangsters

Posted on by

It being Wednesday, prime minister Justin Trudeau was present, and ready to answer — well, respond to — all questions put to him. Erin O’Toole led off, reading a script in French that was concerned about the world health information network and it being sidelined, which he blamed the prime minister directly for. Trudeau stood up and extemporaneously stated that they always had an eye out when it comes to infectious diseases and the Chief Public Health Officer was on the COVID file in December. O’Toole accused the government of reading press releases out of Beijing, and Trudeau disputed that, talking about being multilateral partners on this. O’Toole switched to English to repeat his first question, to which Trudeau accused him of drumming up alarmist political points before repeating his points about Dr. Tam being engaged early on. O’Toole added bombast to repeat the accusation, and Trudeau went on a tear about the Conservatives cutting science while his government invested in it. O’Toole then changed gears to talk about Senator Salma Ataullahjan’s candidacy for presidency of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, to which Trudeau said that governments don’t give endorsements but he wished her well. Yves-François Blanchet led off for the Bloc, raising the death of Joyce Echaquan, to which Trudeau stated that it was a reflection of systemic racism in Canada. Blanchet demanded the government do the work with the First Nations that the Quebec government was doing in response to the death, to which Trudeau first pointed out that Blanchet finally admitted that there was systemic racism in Quebec, before pointing out efforts the federal government was making. Jagmeet Singh was up next to lead for the NDP, and in French, he demanded that a future COVID vaccine be made freely available to Canadians, and Trudeau stated that they were working to ensure that it would be. Singh changed to English to reiterate the same question, insisting he wanted clarity, and Trudeau rambled about what a great job they have done on procurement to date.

Continue reading →

Roundup: O’Toole on the third ballot

Posted on by

On a third ballot result, Erin O’Toole won the Conservative leadership race. The big event turned into a very big disaster. It was delayed by over six hours because the machine they were using to open the envelopes with ballots started destroying thousands of ballots, and it was well past midnight by the time the first ballot was even announced – far beyond the day’s news cycle and past the deadlines for newspapers’ first editions, which had long since gone to print. While we were waiting, Andrew Scheer gave his farewell speech, which was bitter, and full of jejune understandings of conservatism or the political landscape – he railed against imaginary left-wing straw men, scared up a Bolshevik threat, lied about the media – to the point where he called The Post Millennial and True North (aka Rebel Lite™) as “objective” that more people should pay attention to, which is incredible.

https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1297768475939819521

As for the result, this was very much about the social conservatives flexing their muscles within the party. Both Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan got over 35% of the votes combined on the first ballot, and there were places where either of the front-runners came in third to Lewis, and she swept Saskatchewan, where MacKay came in last. And true to form, it was those social conservatives’ down-ballot support that played kingmaker to O’Toole over MacKay, who was inexplicably considered the “last Progressive Conservative standing” (which doesn’t make sense because he was in no way a PC MP, especially if you look at his voting record). O’Toole at least has a seat, so that means he can get to work immediately, but we’ll see how many bruised feelings are in the caucus and party ranks given how the campaign played out, especially given that O’Toole hired a professional shitposter to run his campaign.

For his victory speech, O’Toole graciously thanked his competitors, and thanked the “patriotic Canadians” who made the victory happen. He paid special mention to Quebec, where he won the most votes, and made it clear that he was going to keep Sloan in the fold, in spite of some of his odious statements. O’Toole insisted that he was going to unite the party, before he took pot shots at Trudeau. He said they would be proposing a new “positive Conservative vision,” and that they would be ready for the next election, which could be as early as this fall. And then it was onto the doomsaying about the direction of the country under the Liberals, complete with the economic illiteracy that has marked the modern Conservative party. “The world still needs more Canada – it just needs less Justin Trudeau,” O’Toole said, before insisting that everyone has a home in the Conservative party.

We’ll delve into the entrails of the regional breakdowns of the race, and the particular mechanics of it and how that affected the results, but I will tell you right now that I have little patience for these takes about how this result means that the party’s power is shifting eastward – that’s hard to believe given the concentration of their votes, even though none of the leadership candidates came from there. And frankly, the notion that the party requires someone from Alberta to helm it keeps it blinkered, and insular. That’s not how you build the kind of national party that the country needs.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Taking a personal day

Posted on by

Of all the possible misplays for Justin Trudeau to make at the height of a controversy around his poor choices, ethical blind spots, and insistence that he’s being open and transparent, the first day of a two-day recall of the House of Commons saw him absent with the only excuse on his daily itinerary being a “personal day,” which sent the opposition into a frenzy. It’s not like Trudeau chose this day for the Commons to be recalled and for there to be a proper Question Period – erm, except he did. And then wasn’t present. Way to read the room.

Andrew Scheer had his own attempts to make hay, insisting that if the Liberal backbenchers don’t oust Trudeau (without a mechanism to do so, it should be noted), that they were signalling that they were okay with his “corruption” – never mind that a conflict of interest is not actually corruption, and he’s not exactly someone who should be throwing stones considering that he was forced to resign his own leadership after it was revealed that he was helping himself to party funds to the tune of almost a million dollars.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives are also pushing back against the bill being debated, objecting to the “complexity” of the wage subsidy changes, despite the fact that for there to be a proper phase-out and to ensure it’s more broadly encompassing than the programme was initially, there needs to be added complexity. Their objections won’t matter for much, considering that the Bloc has agreed to support the bill regardless so there are enough votes to go around, but it is a change from bills being supported unanimously at all stages, and something that resembles a sense of normalcy slowly returning to Parliament, which is a good thing.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A brief return to the Commons

Posted on by

The Commons will be meeting today in an actual, real sitting and not an abbreviated strange hybrid committee, in order to pass Bill C-20 on disability payments, which they say is in an improved format from their previous attempt in C-17 (which one presumes is now withdrawn from the Order Paper). The bill also includes the changes to the wage subsidy that were announced on Friday, and it sounds like will also have the changes to court system timelines that were previously announced and part of C-17, but the text of the bill won’t be out until the Commons actually sits. We also know that the bill will pass, because the Bloc have agreed to everything, and this means a motion that will see the bill essentially passed at all stages with a couple hours’ worth of speeches in lieu of actual debate or legislative processes, which is less than ideal. We’ll also have a proper Question Period today, so we can look forward to that, and all of the questions on the WE Imbroglio that will come with it. The Senate has not yet announced when they will be meeting to pass it on their end, which may not be until later in the week.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Armed intruder at Rideau Hall

Posted on by

The big excitement for the day was that there was an Incident at Rideau Hall first thing in the morning, as a Canadian Forces member, who was armed, crashed his truck through the gates of the compound and headed over to Rideau Hall on foot, where he was then apprehended by RCMP in what sounds like a two-hour “dialogue.” Apparently he wanted to “send a message” to the prime minister – who wasn’t at home at nearby Rideau Cottage at the time, nor was the Governor General in Rideau Hall (but if you recall, she has consistently refused to move into the residence there, preferring to stay at Rideau Gate). He was arrested without incident, and has apparently made online posts about a supposed COVID-19 conspiracy theory – and it comes just a day after anti-lockdown protests were happening on Parliament Hill, featuring a former has-been wannabe party leader who shall not be named, and some of the images seen on the Hill included those of Trudeau being hanged, while others touted these kinds of COVID conspiracies. So that’s fun.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1278788951885721602

Meanwhile, over in Alberta, the rhetoric about the plan to hold a referendum on equalization rolls along, so here is political scientist Melanee Thomas to spill some tea about just exactly what they are talking about, and why the arguments aren’t as clever as they think they are.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Not the provinces’ cash cow

Posted on by

Everything got off to an earlier start yesterday, beginning with the ministerial presser, during which Marc Miller announced another $650 million being allocated to Indigenous communities for healthcare, which would also include added income supports for those living on-reserve, as well as some $85 million to build new shelters for women on reserves. Marc Garneau also announced that the ban on cruise ship docking in Canadian waters was going to be extended to October 31st, which will impact the economies of these communities, but also limits potential vectors for the pandemic. When pressed about the issue of airline ticket refunds, Garneau reiterated the warning that the sector could fail if they were forced to refund all of the tickets, though later on, prime minister Justin Trudeau indicated that there were talks ongoing.

For his presser, Trudeau started off by talking about his teleconference with the premiers and spoke about sick leave being one of the items on the agenda, and it was later in the Q&A that he said that he was offering for the federal government to assume most of the responsibility for the costs, rather than putting it on business owners, but it sounds like some premiers remain rather cool to the idea. After reiterating the earlier Miller/Garneau announcement, Trudeau took questions, which included mention that he was trying to get premiers to agree to some modified orders at the Canada-US border that would allow family reunification, such as cases like the Canadian woman who was trying to get the American father of her unborn child into the country before she gave birth – but again, there are premiers who are not keen. After the questions, Trudeau then gave an unprompted statement on anti-Black racism as a result of what’s going on in the US – that there is a need to stand up as a society, that there needs to be more respect, and that we have work to do as well in Canada. He called on all Canadians to stand together in solidarity, as they know how deeply people are being affected by what we are seeing on the news.

Something else raised in Trudeau’s Q&A was a letter sent to him by five of his Toronto-area backbenchers, calling on him to lead the country in national standards on long-term care, and to press Ontario for a full public inquiry into what happened with the breakdown in care (which I maintain won’t tell us anything we don’t already know). Trudeau praised them for their efforts, and talked about the ongoing talks with provinces, but two of those MPs were on Power & Politics later in the day, and something that I was also glad to hear was Judy Sgro saying that while they wanted federal leadership, they both were respecting that this is provincial jurisdiction and they also didn’t want the provinces treating the federal government like a “cash cow” when you have premiers like Ford demanding more federal funds to fix their own long-term care mess. My own patience for provinces crying out for federal funds to fix the problems in their own jurisdiction is wearing mighty thin, particularly as most of those provinces have broad taxation powers at their disposal (though some of those provinces have less tax room available to them – Ontario, however, is not one of them). Premiers don’t want to have anything on their books and would rather it come from Ottawa’s, so that they don’t have to look like the bad guy when it comes to paying for their own programmes – never mind that there’s really only one taxpayer in the end.

Continue reading →