Tag Archives: Jason Kenney

Roundup: Trying to jam the Liberals on the MOU

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Because Pierre Poilievre thinks he’s a tactical genius, he has announced that next week’s Conservative Supply Day motion will be about the MOU with Alberta, and forcing a vote on the language about a pipeline to the Pacific, in defiance of the tanker ban.

It’s a transparent attempt to try and jam the Liberals, at least rhetorically, into supporting the motion in order to show support for the MOU, after which Poilievre can keep saying “You supported it!” and “Give me the date when construction starts,” as though there’s a proponent, a project and a route already lined up (to say nothing about the long-term contracts about who is going to buy the product once it’s built, because yes, that does matter). The thing is, these kinds of motions are non-binding, and really means nothing in the end. So if a number of Liberals vote against it, it doesn’t actually mean anything, other than the rhetorical notion that lo, they are not fully in lock-step on something, which actually sets them apart from pretty much every other party where uniformity and loyalty to the leader and all of his positions are constantly being enforced in one way or another. Maybe he will tolerate differences of opinion—or maybe he’ll crack the whip. We’ll see when Tuesday gets here.

Ukraine Dispatch

The International Atomic Agency says the protective shield around Chornobyl has been damaged by Russian strikes.

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Roundup: “Clarifying” only to the media

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The issue of Poilievre’s attack on the leadership of the RCMP has not gone away, and the party spent the day trying to manage the fallout, both with the new scripted talking points they handed out to their MPs when faced with media questions (obtained by the Star) that were intended to “clarify” what he meant, and the fact that Poilievre’s comms people have been sending statements to the media to again, clarify that he was only trying to cast aspersions on former commissioner Brenda Lucki and not the current management (even though the current commissioner was Lucki’s deputy, and frankly, should have disqualified himself from the position based on his response to the Mass Casualty Commission’s findings).

The thing is, Poilievre has not made any clarifications on his social media channels, or on the party’s official website, or any place that his supporters might actually see it—only to media outlets so that his followers can dismiss them as “fake news” precisely because they don’t see it on his social media channels. It is a deliberate choice, and this is not the first time that has happened, and rest assured, it won’t be the last. This is Poilievre trying to tell two different groups two different things, but unlike Erin O’Toole, he thinks he’s being cleverer about it because his followers can’t see the version he’s telling the media on his direct-to-voters channels. This is not clarification—this is fuckery, and we should be calling it out for what it is.

Immigration polling

The CBC has been working on a story about polling about feelings of immigration, and feeding the bullshit narrative that the “consensus has been broken,” when there wasn’t really a consensus to begin with. That poll also shows that the Conservatives’ feelings about immigration spiked to the negative, but kept making pains to say that this doesn’t mean that they’re xenophobic (even though that’s kinda what it means). But then they went and interviewed Jason Kenney on Power & Politics, and guys, just stop. Don’t interview Jason Kenney. All he does is 1) lie; 2) get indignant; and 3) lie some more. In this case, he kept insisting that this rise in anti-immigrant sentiment wasn’t because people are more xenophobic, but because Justin Trudeau broke the system. Oh, and Indigenous people are the most anti-immigrant. Nothing about far-right propaganda going mainstream on social media, nothing about his party pushing MAGA talking points, nothing about the scapegoating because premiers like him did fuck all to provide housing or healthcare for the immigrants that they were demanding to fill labour shortage, or when their strip-mall colleges were defrauding foreign students as they were imported to be cheap labour. Nope—it was all Justin Trudeau.

It’s not like Kenney brought in a bunch of far-right loons into his provincial party’s fold while he kicked out the centrist normies, who then poisoned the discourse further. It’s not like he wasn’t playing stupid games trying to get newcomers to turn against one another for his benefit. It wasn’t like he wasn’t doing his part to poison the sentiment toward asylum seekers when he was immigration minister. No, everything is Trudeau’s fault. I wish the CBC would wise up to this, but of course they don’t. Both-sides! *jazz hands*

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-20T22:08:02.371Z

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian attack knocked out power in much of Chernihiv region on Monday. Ukrainian attacks have forced Russia’s Novokuibyshevsk refinery to stop production, and the Orenburg plant to reduce production coming from Khazahkstan.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1980176600818651155

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Roundup: No First Ladies in Canada, so stop asking

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Because this is sometimes a media criticism blog, I’m going to sigh and rub the bridge of my nose, and maybe massage my temples a few times of this particular doozy of a piece in The Walrus about Mark Carney’s wife, Diana Fox Carney. The subhed refers to her as the “unofficial First Lady,” but in the story itself, it just refers to her as a “First Lady” along with other spouses of heads of state or heads of government interchangeably, and I just can’t you guys.

Guys. Stop it.Canada's "First Lady" is Queen Camilla. Stop trying to import Americanisms, even if you try and couch them in "unofficial" status.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-09-15T11:44:05.416Z

First of all, it matters that we’re a constitutional monarchy and not a presidential republic. That means that our “First Lady,” if we were to have one, would be Queen Camilla. If you were discounting the Canadian monarch, the next candidate would be the spouse of the Governor General (who once upon a time was called the “Chatelaine/Chatelain of Rideau Hall” as an unofficial title). Yes, this matters, in particular because the difference between a head of state and a head of government matters a great deal, particularly when it comes to the kind of role they play within government, and just because the American system fuses the two together, that’s pretty much unique in the world, and is a far cry from how our Westminster system operates. And right at nearly the very bottom of the piece, she writes:

In this way, being a first lady in Canada is fundamentally different from being one in the US, where the position, while unofficial, comes with an office and staff. In Canada, the prime minister’s spouse has no formal role or institutional support, and technically isn’t even the partner of a head of state. As a result, the title “first lady” doesn’t really apply in the same way.

No kidding! In fact, it undermines the whole gods damned point of your story. You just tried to compare apples and hedgehogs, tried to mash two fundamentally different concepts together, and then was like “Oh well, maybe she’ll get more active at some point!” No! We don’t elect spouses, and they don’t have a role for a reason. If she wants to have a role, she should seek a seat. (This especially goes for Poilievre’s wife, by the way). But trying to jam the spouse of a prime minister into the “First Lady” box is both fundamentally wrong, and a sign of really lazy conceptualizing of how our system of government works. The Walrus should absolutely know better.

Speaking of terrible reporting, the Globe and Mail put out a story yesterday that had the headline that “Liberal staffers strategized over $1-billion loan for Chinese ferries while Freeland dismissed federal connection,” which sounds like they were maybe somehow involved in the loan or procurement while claiming otherwise. But no. The story was about how comms staffers in ministers’ offices were trying to spin the story. That’s it. I saw lots of reactions on social media from people who read the headline and assumed that something hinky was going on that should be looked into by parliamentarians, but no. It’s about comms staffers spinning. Can we just not? This was not a story, and it especially was not a story about some kind of cover-up.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-09-14T20:02:07.093Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched a massive attack against Zaporizhzhia, killing at least one and injuring at least seven so far. International monitors say that cluster munitions have resulted in over 1200 civilian casualties since the Russian invasion began in 2022.

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Roundup: Kenney’s omitted immigration changes

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The Conservatives are full-on throwing everything they can at the wall to see what sticks, and yesterday it was the moral panic over immigration figures. Pierre Poilievre put out a press release decrying that permits issued had blown past the proposed caps, and that the system is “facing collapse,” which I’m pretty sure is bullshit, before promising to propose “fixes” in the fall, which you can already be assured will mostly be comprised of dog-whistles. (And remember, the problem is less with immigration numbers than it is with premiers who are not doing their jobs with regards to building housing of properly funding healthcare).

Enter Jason Kenney, who went on an extended rant about how he “fixed” the system when he was minister, and how Trudeau and company broke it, but this is also revisionist history. He talks about the sweeping reforms he brought in in 2010, and how everyone praised it, but he omitted that he blunted most of those reforms before they could be implemented. You see, in 2010, it was a hung parliament and the Conservatives couldn’t push through draconian immigration legislation, so they needed to work with the opposition (most notably Olivia Chow as the NDP’s immigration critic), and they passed a bill that had plenty of safeguards in place. In 2011, there was an election where they got a majority, and before the 2010 bill could be fully implemented (because the coming-into-force provisions were going to take as long as a year), Kenney rammed through a new bill that curtailed most of those safeguards, and used tales of international migration cartels, and human smuggling rings that would bring people into the country to collect social assistance, which those cartels would then collect, and so on. Yes, there were problems with high rates of claims from certain countries, but like most things, Kenney was less than honest and building his scaremongering case, while also doing the thing where he played economic migrants against asylum seekers, and made “good immigrants versus bad asylum claimants” arguments to justify his legislation.

https://twitter.com/jkenney/status/1960088637925961993

The other thing that Kenney is blatantly ignoring is that the world is not the same world as it was in 2010, and the migration situation is vastly different than it was back then. So yes, the current government is facing different challenges, but I wouldn’t expect Kenney to be honest about well, pretty much anything, because that’s who Jason Kenney is.

effinbirds.com/post/7790141…

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-08-24T20:02:02.229Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine has been stepping up drone attacks on Russian oil refineries and fuel terminals, squeezing their war economy.

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Roundup: A Harper-esque repackaging

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Day twenty, and it was a pretty quiet day in terms of announcements, where both the Conservatives and NDP just repackaged their existing promises. Mark Carney was in Ottawa to meet with his Canada-US Cabinet committee, and didn’t make any announcements, and had very limited media availability. When he did speak, Carney warned that global economies were slowing because of the US tariffs, and said that part of the meeting was about giving instructions to officials for preparing for negotiations with Trump post-election, whoever forms/retains government.

Pierre Poilievre was in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he repackaged his announcements to date and called them the Canada First Economic Action Plan™, because he decided that what he really needed a Harper-esque branding. He later put out a release about making banks recognise skilled trade apprenticeships to be able to put RESPs toward. He also declared that a Conservative government wouldn’t legislate restrictions on abortion (but I suspect there is a truck-sized loophole to that promise around private members’ bills about the rights of the unborn or some other chicanery which would get an ostensible free vote), and rejected Kory Teneycke’s assessment of “campaign malpractice.” Poilievre will be back in Ottawa today, and making an announcement in Nepean.

Jagmeet Singh was in Ottawa at the Broadbent Centre’s Progress Summit, where he packaged his recycled policy ideas to date as protecting “what makes Canada, Canada.” Singh will be in Timmins, Ontario, this evening.

In other campaign news, here is a comparison of the Liberal and Conservative policies on criminal justice. The CBC decided to start fact-checking crowd size claims at Liberal and Conservative events using crowd science experts, and they are both over-reporting (though the Conservatives are doing so much more egregiously).

Ukraine Dispatch

The Ukrainian parliament looks to extend martial law powers, which pushes back the possibility of new elections. The Americans’ special envoy on peace negotiations with Russia wants Ukraine to give up four regions that Russia only partially occupies, which Ukraine is rejecting.

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Roundup: Running interference for Scott Moe

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There is no shortage of terrible opinion pieces in Canadian media, but I believe that the prize for utterly missing the point comes from the Globe and Mail yesterday, where John Ibbitson tried to lay the blame for Saskatchewan’s flirtation with lawlessness on Justin Trudeau, with the headline accusing him of “botching” national unity. It’s a…curious accusation, because the implication therein is that if the federal government doesn’t accede to every demand or tantrum of the provinces that they can be accused of damaging national unity. I take that back. It’s not curious, it’s utterly absurd and wrong.

Ibbitson goes to great pains to both point out how unprecedented it is that Saskatchewan is going to break federal law, but then turns around to run interference for Scott Moe and tries to insist that this is really Trudeau’s fault because he used federal spending powers to “bend provinces” to his will rather than negotiate, and in imposing the federal carbon price on provinces who failed to meet national standards. Both of those are half-truths at best—there is nothing illegitimate about using federal spending powers to get provinces on board to ensure that there are equitable services across the country, particularly for programmes with greater economic good such as early learning and child care. As for the carbon price, provinces had an opportunity to come up with their own system that met minimum standards, and most provinces refused. He also didn’t explain that when the system was enacted, most provinces already had carbon pricing in place (Alberta and Ontario both changed governments who dismantled their systems and were subsequently subjected to the federal system), and he doesn’t spell out that BC and Quebec have their own systems that meet the standards.

Yes, the federal government should have found a different solution to the problem of heating oil than the “pause,” and doomed themselves when they announced it with all of their Atlantic MPs behind them. I’m not disputing that. But while Ibbitson insists that this doesn’t justify Saskatchewan’s lawlessness, he thinks that the best solution is to “reach some sort of compromise.” Like what? He won’t say. He just laments that “Canada doesn’t work like that right now.” Did it ever? What compromise can there be when one province breaks the law and tries to justify it with a fig leaf of “fairness” but obscures the facts and truth of the situation? This kind of white bread, milquetoast “Why can’t we find a compromise?” handwringing is a hallmark of a certain generation of punditry, and it serves absolutely no one.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces downed 33 out of 37 Russian drones fired at Odesa, the remainder of which damaged infrastructure, though there were other attacks in the north in Sumy and Kharkiv that cost civilian lives. There are concerns that safety is deteriorating at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, as the international community keeps trying to convince Russians to leave the site. India says they have encountered a human trafficking racket which promises young men jobs in Russia, and then forces them to fight in Ukraine on their behalf.

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Roundup: Arguing over an appearance already scheduled

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It’s not even a sitting week, and yet we were treated to another instalment of the parliamentary clown show that has infected our House of Commons. The Procedure and House Affairs committee held an emergency meeting to demand that David Johnston appear before them to explain his reasons for not recommending a public inquiry. But the moment they got there, the chair said that Johnston was already scheduled to appear at the committee on June 6th, and that this had been arranged previously, and it just confirmed that this insistence he appear right away was just really, really bad theatre.

And then it went downhill from there, as MPs spent the next four hours debating a motion for Johnston to appear even sooner than the 6th, for no less than three hours, alone, because remember, they need to put on a bit song and dance about how they’re so serious! about all of these allegations. As I said, bad theatre. And then, the Liberals and NDP decided to try and be clever about this, and include a recommendation in the motion that all party leaders go through the security clearance process in order to read the full report and all of its classified evidence used to compile it. Well, that didn’t go over very well, and in the end, the Conservatives voted against their own motion because they didn’t want to be called out for refusing to actually read the full documents.

Spending four hours to try and sound tougher about a pre-scheduled meeting, to give themselves the last word, is just one more reason why our Parliament is no longer a serious institution. It’s appalling that they have wasted everyone’s time and resource like this, because Michael Cooper needed to make himself look like a tough guy. Inexcusable.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Wagner Group mercenaries are preparing to turn over control of their positions in Bakhmut to Russian soldiers, while Ukraine says that Wagner is only turning over positions on the outskirts of the city, and that they have drawn Russian forces into the city, where they are inflicting high casualties and weakening Russian defensive lines elsewhere. A prisoner swap took place for 106 Ukrainian soldiers, some of them captured in the fighting in Bakhmut. Russian control of one of the dams along the Dnipro river is causing flooding because they haven’t been working to level the water flow with the other dams in the network.

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Roundup: New sanctions on Iran, new enforcement resources

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Mid-afternoon, on the Friday before a long weekend, the prime minister and deputy prime minister hastily called a press conference and announced new sanctions against the Iranian regime—the top 50 percent of the IRGC will be permanently barred from Canada under powers in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which have thus-far only been applied to genocidaires from Bosnia and Rwanda. As well, more sanctions to other individuals have been announced, but even more importantly was the announcement of $76 million to establish a new sanctions bureau at Global Affairs so that we have the capacity to actually monitor and enforce these sanctions we’ve been applying.

Is this a declaration that the IRGC is a terrorist entity? No, because it would still be impossible to monitor and enforce, and would capture too many low-level conscripts. Will the Conservatives continue to yell and moan about it? Of course they will. There is some commentary that if applied properly, these measures could be more effective than listing them under the Criminal Code, but again, this depends on it being properly applied, and it will take time to build the capacity in the aforementioned sanctions bureau. It also bears noting that this all seems last-minute, reactive, and like this government doesn’t know how to get ahead of issues, so even if they do the right thing, it comes off as being pushed or shamed into it, which doesn’t help the narrative that this government is getting tired.

Danielle Smith

In the wake of her leadership victory, Alberta’s incoming premier Danielle Smith has agreed to run in a by-election for a seat of her own, and one of her MLAs is resigning to accommodate her (and had not planned to run again in the next election), and for Smith, it’s a mostly rural seat, because that’s her base. There is also a vacant seat in Calgary, but Smith would have a harder time there, and also plans not to hold that by-election in advance of next spring’s general election, which is indefensible under political norms. But hey, she’s willing to pretend the whole constitution is free to be ignored, so why should political norms matter? Yeah, this is a problem.

Meanwhile, here’s Jason Markusoff’s lengthy profile of Smith and her reinvention. Ken Boessenkool considers Smith to be a kamikaze mission into modern conservatism itself (and yet it’s almost like the bastardised way in which we now run leadership contests basically makes this an inevitability). Colby Cosh tries to put some context into Smith’s comeback and her outlasting all of her political rivals. Andrew Coyne sees storm clouds on the horizon with both François Legault and Danielle Smith looking to be constitutional vandals. My weekend column previews some of the absolute constitutional chaos, right up to the suspension of the rule of law, if Danielle Smith tries to get her own way.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1578497923016699904

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 226:

There have been explosions in the Kharkiv region, as Russia concentrates attacks on the city while they are being driven back elsewhere in the country. More mass graves have been found in the Kharkiv region, on top of those already found at Izium and in Lyman.

https://twitter.com/TetySt/status/1578462615994368000

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Roundup: Demanding LNG with someone else’s money

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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.

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Roundup: Rage-farming for rural Alberta paranoia

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In Alberta, Danielle Smith has finally unveiled more details for her proposed “Sovereignty Act,” and as you might expect, they’re a lot of bullshit, and most of it predicated on situations that will never, ever actually come to pass, like the federal government invoking the Emergencies Act to impose mask mandates. Of course, that’s not how the Emergencies Actworks, and she’s just rage-farming, ensuring that the rural Alberta party membership that she’s targeting, who are twitchy to begin with and who are consuming vast amounts of American media and conspiracy theories, are just being fed more materials to make them even more paranoid. It’s not surprising, but it’s also alarming that this has somehow become acceptable political discourse. Smith also insists she’s just doing “nation within a nation” assertion, like Quebec, which is not true, and I’m genuinely not sure if she is simply that clueless about how federalism and the constitution works, or if this is pure disinformation for the purposes of rage-farming and motiving the party base through anger and paranoia. Either way, it’s not good, and is a very real problem for the province and the country, because this kind of bullshit is also contagious.

 

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 196:

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant went off the grid yesterday after more Russian shelling in the region, until a fire could be put out. That means that they were relying on backup power to keep cooling systems operational, which gets us closer to a more dangerous place in terms of a potential meltdown that could have catastrophic consequences for that part of the world. The International Atomic Energy Agency continues to call for a demilitarized zone around the plant, but good luck getting Russia to play by the rules. As for the Ukrainian counterattack in the southern part of the country, officials have now confirmed that they have retaken at least two villages, though information remains largely locked down. Apparently, the counterattack is happening slowly in order to save on ammunition and casualties.

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