Tag Archives: Jagmeet Singh

Roundup: Dairy commissions and questions of jurisdiction

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There were a couple of announcements for prime minister Justin Trudeau’s daily presser yesterday – that Health Canada had approved a serological test that was critical to the work of the immunity task force; that some $1 billion in additional funds was being allocated to regional development agencies to help struggling businesses; and that the student benefits would be open for applications as of Friday. There were a lot of things that came up during the Q&A – demands from reporters for a budget or a fiscal update, for which Trudeau said that they couldn’t predict what was going to happen in a few weeks, so it didn’t make much sense to try to lay out a plan for the next twelve months. On the Canada-US border, it was strongly hinted that the current closure would continue for another month, but he wasn’t going to speculate past then. He talked about the need to work with provinces and municipalities as transit operators face a huge revenue shortfall. Regarding Norway’s sovereign wealth fund pulling its investments out of the oilsands, he remarked that it was clear that climate considerations were becoming a bigger feature in the investment landscape. He also promised to look into the issue of health researchers in the country facing layoffs because funding sources evaporated and they aren’t eligible for the federal wage subsidy because of a technicality.

And then it was off to the House of Commons, first for the in-person meeting of the Special Committee, which descended into farce fairly quickly and stayed there – Andrew Scheer railing about the revelations that potential fraud of the CERB isn’t being caught up-front, while his MPs both demand easier access to small business supports while clutching their pearls about the potential size of the deficit, apparently blind to the contradiction in their position. Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh was demanding that the federal government swoop in and offer some kind of national guarantee around long-term care, giving Trudeau the chance to chide him about his disregard for provincial jurisdiction (and Trudeau was a little sharper on this than he often is).

The special committee eventually gave way to a proper emergency sitting of the Commons to pass the latest emergency bill, this time on increasing the borrowing limit of the dairy commission, while many a journalist mischaracterized this as “debating” said bill. There was no debate – it was pre-agreed to, and each party would give a couple of speeches that may or may not be related to the bill before they passed it at all stages for the Senate to adopt on Friday. At the beginning of this, however, Singh was back up with yet another motion, this time to call on the government to ensure that there was universal two-week paid sick leave – which is, once again, provincial jurisdiction. (The motion did not pass). I’m torn between trying to decide if Singh is genuinely clueless about what is and is not federal jurisdiction (a position bolstered by his promises in the election around things like local hospital decisions), or if he’s cynically trying to make it look like the federal government doesn’t care about these issues when they have no actual levers at their disposal to make any of these demands happen. Either way, federalism is a real thing, and trying to play it like it’s not is a real problem for the leader of a federal party.

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Roundup: Promising an improper bill

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As part of his press scrums coming out of pre-sitting caucus meetings, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh declared that the party’s first private members’ bill would be to make universal pharmacare a reality. And apparently no one in the media pushed back against this, because let me tell you, it’s a whole lot of hand-wavey bullshit, and it quite literally goes against the rules of Parliament.

For the uninitiated, private members’ bills have a very limited scope, and they are not allowed to spend public funds. To spend public funds, you need a Royal Recommendation, which only the government can provide. (It would have been nice if The Canadian Press article could mention that fact rather than simply say that PMBs have a tougher time passing). You can’t make pharmacare a reality without money, and given that it’s an area of provincial jurisdiction, it’s likely any bill would be unvoteable. In his release, Singh says he wants to legislate the necessary criteria by which provinces will get funding for the programme, which is a very interesting way to go about negotiating something that is in their area of jurisdiction. (Also, Singh’s constant line that Trudeau is somehow acting on the bidding of Big Pharma ignores that they are not happy with him, particularly over the changes the government made to the Patented Medicines Price Review Board – essentially, Singh is lying for the sake of a talking point he’s borrowing from the Justice Democrat crowd in the US). Singh also says that restoring the health transfer escalator will bring the provinces onside, which holy cow is a lot of money, but also ignores that the escalator was rising faster than healthcare spending, so it meant provinces were using that money for other things. But it’s only money, right?

You can’t just handwave this. I point this out over Twitter, and every NDP apologist under the sun insists that a) this is about keeping pressure on the government, and b) that the Liberals have somehow backed away from their campaign promise, which is false. The campaign promise was a $6 billion “down payment” while they negotiate with the provinces, because it’s largely provincial jurisdiction. They committed to following the Hoskins report, and already started with the creation of some of the necessary organizational tools necessary. A few days ago, the health minister said she couldn’t guarantee that it would happen during this parliament because it’s contingent upon negotiation with the provinces – provinces who are publicly reluctant, and we haven’t even broached the subject of how to negotiate a national formulary, which is a Very Big Deal and integral to any pharmacare system. And yet Singh was out promising that this could be done by 2020, because since when are these kinds of negotiations a problem? Yeah, that’s not how this works, kids, and lying about what Trudeau promised in order to justify Singh’s promises doesn’t make you a hero.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1220070604872671232

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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: Lethal overwatch?

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There’s been some chatter about a story in the Guardian that purports to show BC RCMP communications that would have allowed for “snipers” and “sterilizing” of Indigenous protests in the province over LNG pipelines – which the minister of Indigenous services wants some answers to, and which the RCMP denies is actually legitimate, citing that the terminology used isn’t consistent with their own, or that some of it is being misinterpreted (in particular “lethal overwatch). To that end, here’s Justin Ling with a bit of context and nuance to consider before you get agitated at what’s being reported, as it may not necessarily be correct.

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Roundup: Performative fiscal demands

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In spite of the fact that Bill Morneau strongly hinted on Thursday that there would be a “fall” fiscal update this week (and technically it is still autumn for another couple of weeks), the Conservatives dispatched Pierre Poilievre yesterday to performatively demand one – along with a bunch of the usual demands for tax cuts and “cutting red tape” (as though governments haven’t been trying to do just that for years). The tax cuts are coming – at least, the planned increase to the basic income exemption, targeted at lower-income brackets – which the government has stated repeatedly will be their first order of business, thought the Conservatives demand more tax breaks for “entrepreneurs,” while the NDP want that income exemption to phase out earlier so as to pay for dental care – ignoring, or course, that such a programme would rely on negotiations with the provinces, just like pharmacare. But hey, once you’re on a talking point, best to stick with it, right?

Meanwhile, the first confidence vote of the new Parliament will likely be tomorrow, as it’s the final Supply Day of the year, and when the Supplementary Estimates need to be passed, and we can imagine that it’ll be a long day of votes and Committee of the Whole to deal with them, before they head off to the Senate, where they might – might – get a bit more scrutiny than they’ll get in the Commons. But a vote on the Speech From the Throne is unlikely to take place until after the Commons comes back from their break in January, just looking at the math on the calendar.

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Roundup: Payette’s personal contributions

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With some adjustments to the pomp and ceremony to accommodate Parliament’s new dual-building status, the Speech from the Throne went ahead yesterday, and the speech itself was not all that exciting. There was a big focus on the environment and climate change, a whole section on reconciliation with Indigenous people, and this government’s watch words of “middle class prosperity,” and the government sprinkled just enough hints that could mollify the other opposition parties if they were looking for something to justify their support, though both Andrew Scheer and Jagmeet Singh came out to puff their chests out and declare that they weren’t happy with what was in the speech.

More concerning was the fact that the Governor General herself contributed to writing the speech, which is unusual, and dare I say a problem. Her role is to read the speech on behalf of the government, and there are centuries of parliamentary evolution as to why this is the case, but her having an active hand in writing the speech – even if it’s the introduction (and in particular the notions of everyone being in the same space-time continuum on our planetary spaceship), it’s highly irregular and problematic because it means that Payette is once again overreaching as to what her role in things actually is, and that she’s unhappy with it being ceremonial (a failure of this government doing their due diligence in appointing her when she is not suited to the task). While one of my fellow journalists speculated that this may have been what was offered in exchange for her having to read a prepared speech (something she does not like to do), it’s still a problem with lines being crossed.

And then there was the reporting afterward. When Andrew Scheer said that he was going to propose an amendment to the Speech during debate, Power & Politics in particular ran with it as though this was novel or unusual, and kept hammering on the fact that Scheer is going to propose an amendment! The problem? Amendments are how Speech from the Throne debates actually work. It’s part of the rules that over the course of the debate, the Official Opposition will move an amendment (usually something to effect of “delete everything after this point and let’s call this government garbage”) to the Address in Reply to the Speech, and the third party will propose their own sub-amendment, and most of the time, they all get voted on, and the government carries the day – because no government is going to fall on the Throne Speech. There is nothing novel or special about this, and yet “Ooh, he’s going to move an amendment!” Get. A. Grip.

And now, the hot takes on the Speech, starting with Heather Scoffield, who calls out that the Speech neglected anything around economic growth. Susan Delacourt makes note of how inward-focused this Speech is compared to its predecessor. Chris Selley lays out some of Trudeau’s improbable tasks in the Speech, as well as the one outside of it which is to play a supporting role to Freeland and her task at hand. Paul Wells clocks the vagueness in the Speech, but also the fact that they are setting up for games of political chicken in the months and years ahead.

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Roundup: Pride vs St. Patrick’s Day

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Andrew Scheer’s new deputy leader, Leona Alleslev, started off her new role with a bang this weekend by doing the media rounds, and when asked about Scheer’s continued refusal to attend Pride parades, Alleslev responded with “Have we asked anybody if they marched in a St. Patrick’s Day parade?”

Oh no she better don’t!

Alleslev apologised several hours later, but by then you had a lot of Conservatives completely outraged that this was the kind of thing that was going to lose them the next election (and renewing the calls for Scheer’s resignation). While the point was made that she shouldn’t have needed to apologise because it was Scheer’s lines she was parroting, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone would have even for a second thought that there was an equivalence to the two. And Scheer’s own campaign communications director started a lengthy tweet thread to show all the various ways in which Scheer paid lip service to every religious and cultural event out there – except Pride, which is something that speaks volumes.

Alleslev also went on to insinuate that those who raised questions about Scheer’s leadership – and the numbers are growing, as are the profile of raising those questions – are somehow being “disloyal” to the party. And this irritates me, because this notion that parties are supposed to be personality cults for leaders is toxic and antithetical to how our system operates. The leader is not the party. The party is more than the person who leads it at any one moment, and it would be great if everyone could get on the same page about this because it’s kind of embarrassing for everyone who is carrying on otherwise.

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Roundup: Putting Alleslev at the fore

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As expected, Andrew Scheer named Leona Alleslev as his new deputy leader yesterday, but left the majority of his House leadership team in place. Alleslev is a bit of a curious choice, given that she was a Liberal until a little over a year ago until she crossed the floor in a huff (and in conversation with MPs, it seems that a large part of her reason for crossing was because she was essentially being ignored by the PMO when she was trying to step up, and she felt unappreciated for her efforts, which is fair enough). There were plenty of sarcastic responses from long-time Conservatives over Twitter, given how she campaigned against Stephen Harper in 2015. Others Conservatives – Scheer loyalists in particular – were trying to insist that Alleslev represented the way the party needed to bring Blue Liberals into the fold – but this assertion is fairly problematic given that the Venn Diagram of Blue Liberals and Red Tories would show a fairly significant crossover in areas of being socially progressive, which is partly where the Conservatives are having problems right now. As well, it’s hard to qualify Alleslev as reaching out to those voters when she goes on TV and just parrots all of Scheer’s talking points, particularly around the environment, to the point where she was contradicting her previous statements and trying to walk them back when called on them. I’m not sure how demonstrating groupthink is reaching out to new voters. It’s also hard not to be cynical about Alleslev’s appointment as a box-ticking exercise about her being both a woman and from the GTA as the political reasons as to why she was chosen.

Scheer also took the opportunity to vow that he was staying on as leader, and insisted that the party needed to pull together behind him. This while Stephen Harper’s former campaign manager, Jenni Byrne, also called for his ouster, and there also talk about how Conservatives in Alberta are angry that he wasn’t able to defeat Trudeau in spite of Trudeau doing his level best to defeat himself in some cases.

In amidst this, Lisa Raitt was also keeping herself in the media, putting out the supposition into the public sphere that the more xenophobic populism that reared its head during the party’s last leadership campaign branded them during the election, and that it changed the perceptions around the party. (Raitt is also defending Scheer and saying that his weakness is that he doesn’t come off as a “strong man” on any particular area). And while Raitt is trying to insist that the likes of Kellie Leitch (and eventually Maxime Bernier’s Twitter persona) were somehow isolated incidents, she ignores the fact that Scheer himself promulgated far-right conspiracy theories about the UN Compact on Global Migration, that his comms team spread racist memes about irregular border crossings, that he offered succour to avowed racists because he thought he could use them to “own the Libs,” and that even though he knew that the xenophobia and far-right element of the “yellow vesters” had taken over that so-called “convoy” to Ottawa, he nevertheless still met with them – in full view of their xenophobic signs and symbols – and then took weeks to actually denounce white supremacy when called on it. So I’m having a hard time giving Raitt the benefit of the doubt for this theory of hers.

Meanwhile, Matt Gurney posits that Scheer’s ability to survive now turns on whether he can convince enough people that he can actually do better in the next election – and that’s becoming harder to do. Paul Wells poses more questions that the Conservatives need to consider regarding Scheer, the direction of the party, and their ability to build a winning coalition internally that has proved fairly elusive in recent decades.

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Roundup: Tribunal orders and judicial review

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This week, the Federal Court will hear the case of the federal government’s judicial review of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal’s compensation order for First Nations children who were apprehended and removed from their homes by child and family services. The reporting on this is going to be emotional, and as you can see from both the CBC and Canadian Press reports previewing the hearings (which will be webcast for the first time), the focus of who they’re speaking to are Indigenous people – fair enough – but almost zero time in either report is spent on the actual legal arguments, which are significant. Only the CBC report included the line that “Ottawa has argued in court filings that the tribunal order was an overreach and that the original case was about systemic discrimination, which required a systemic fix, not individual compensation, which is the purview of class action law.”

This is a pretty significant thing, because one of the arguments is that the Tribunal, in making the kind of order that it did, was exceeding its statutory authority to do so. That’s a pretty big deal, and why the government would be looking for a judicial review – to ensure that the Tribunal isn’t allowed to overreach, and doesn’t create a precedent for future instances of overreach. It may seem like petty details, but it’s a pretty significant issue when you look at how the administrative tribunal system in this country is set up, and the role that it plays in the broader justice system. The fact that this is being ignored by the mainstream press isn’t surprising, because administrative law isn’t sexy (even though it’s one of the most contentious issues that our Supreme Court is grappling with at this very moment), but we shouldn’t dismiss it.

The government – and prime minister Justin Trudeau in particular – has stated that there will be compensation, and they are already working on a settlement for the class action lawsuit in question, which may include boarder compensation so as not to have to separate compensation streams for the same apprehensions. And they should absolutely be held to account to that promise that they made – but the Tribunal order cannot and should not be the end all and be all, and we need to recognize that, and ensure that some of the broader context is being discussed.

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Roundup: Singh thinks he has leverage

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Yesterday it was Jagmeet Singh’s turn have his one-on-one with prime minister Justin Trudeau in advance of the Cabinet shuffle and Throne Speech, and Singh came with his own list of priorities and demands – most of them as unrealistic as Andrew Scheer’s. And Singh’s insistence that he was open to voting against the Throne Speech, and that the party was ready to go to another election at any time, was simply precious. Unable to read the room, or calculate the seat maths, Singh apparently thinks he’s going to play kingmaker when there are more willing partners on the dance floor.

To that end, Singh was demanding immediate action on pharmacare, and pretending that Trudeau hasn’t been clear that he plans to implement the Hoskins Report, which called for a universal pharmacare system. The problem is that you can’t have “immediate action” on it, because it’s actually a very complex thing. You can’t actually just say “we’ll pay for all pharmaceuticals” because the costs would be extraordinary, and phasing it in with a single national formulary is actually incredibly challenging to do, especially across all provinces and territories, because they have different formularies currently and you run the risk of reducing people’s existing coverage (as what happened in Ontario when they briefly offered pharmacare for all young people in the province). It’s going to require careful negotiation with the provinces and stakeholders, and Singh’s constant refrain that this can happen immediately is fantasyland – just like his request that they also consider adding dental care in there.

As for some his other demands, the one about more “science-based” targets for emissions reductions is pure buzz-word. Science is not public policy, and you can’t just hand-wave and go “science” because it doesn’t work like that. Demanding the government abandon its judicial review of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision on compensation for Indigenous children in care? As a lawyer, you think he would be sensitive to the concerns of bad precedent – particularly if the Tribunal did exceed their statutory authority. Energy-efficient retrofits? Electrified transit? Green jobs? It’s like they haven’t paid much attention to the Liberal climate plan and what carbon pricing does to create market incentives. Electoral reform? Apparently he didn’t pay attention to the hot garbage report that the parliamentary committee released last parliament. His “super-wealth tax”? The one that would require the government to rewrite the entire tax code to make it conform to American concepts? I’m sure they’ll get right on that. Singh has no leverage, and yet he thinks the government should simply adopt the NDP platform or have the party’s support withheld. I’m sure the government will get right on that.

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