Tag Archives: Jason Kenney

Roundup: Weasel words on conversion therapy

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In the wake of the Liberals announcing that they were looking at what measures they could take at a federal level to ban “conversion therapy,” the question was put to Andrew Scheer if he opposed it. Scheer responded that while he opposes “forced” conversion therapy, he will wait to see what the government proposes around banning it before if he’ll support it. The Conservatives quickly cried foul that the Global news headline was that “Andrew Scheer will ‘wait and see’ before taking a stance on conversion therapy ban” was just clickbait that didn’t reflect his actual quotes (and Global did update their headline), but not one of them pointed out the fact that Scheer’s own words were, to be frank, weaselly.

Scheer said that he opposed “forced” conversion therapy, and that he’s opposed to “any type of practice that would forcibly attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation against their will or things like that.” And you note the weasel words in there – about only being opposed to “forced” therapy, or to change it “against their will.” The giant implication that not one conservative rushing to defend Scheer is that there are types of “voluntary” conversion therapy that he is okay with, and that is alarming because any kind of so-called “conversion therapy” is torture, whether entered into voluntarily or not – and it ignores that when people enter into it voluntarily, it’s because they have such a degree of self-loathing that they have deluded themselves into believing that they can change their sexual orientation in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and a lot of that self-loathing comes from the sorts of violence, whether physical, mental or spiritual, that has been inflicted upon them. And it does look entirely like Scheer is being too cute by leaving a giant loophole in the window for his religious, social conservative flank to not feel threatened by his position, because it lets them carry on with the mythology that there is such a thing as “voluntary” conversion therapy, and that this is all about their “love the sinner, hate the sin” bullshit that asserts that homosexuality is just a learned behaviour and not an intrinsic characteristic. So no, I don’t think Scheer has been at all unequivocal.

Meanwhile, Scheer’s apologists will demand to know why the government refused to act on a “conversion therapy” ban when presented with a petition about it in March, but again, this is an issue where there is a great deal of nuance that should be applied. The government response was that these practices tend to fall under healthcare or be practiced by health professionals, which makes it provincial jurisdiction, and that while there can be some applications of the Criminal Code with some practices, it required coordination with the provinces to address, which they have been doing. What the Liberals announced this week was that they were seeing if there were any other measures they could take federally, which might involve the Criminal Code. Again, it’s an issue where it’s hard for them to take a particular line, so they’re trying to see what it is possible to do – that’s not a refusal, it’s an acknowledgement that it’s a complicated issue.

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Roundup: Intelligence and context

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There was a lot of flurry yesterday about supposed revelations made in Federal Court that CSIS has been spying on peaceful environmental groups. Except, people who used to be at CSIS, will tell you that’s exactly not the case. And the reporting on this hasn’t exactly helped either because it’s in a very defined frame with tropes that somewhat credulously take what these groups are saying and putting it with the redacted documents and drawing conclusions, that again, people who used to work there, will dispute, and those voices aren’t in the reporting. So here’s Stephanie Carvin and Jessica Davis, both of who used to work at CSIS, offering some proper context for what those documents say.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148217645986131969

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148217647852642304

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148233105825812480

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148235622529818625

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148235624580833283

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148235626380181505

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148301752770408448

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148222236832215040

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148230145968418817

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Roundup: The premiers’ pre-meeting

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While a Council of the Federation meeting will be happening this week in Saskatoon, Jason Kenney has been planning a pre-meeting for several premiers at Stampede, last night and today. It’s an interesting bit of dynamic because while Kenney is one of the most junior members of the Council (with only PEI being more junior), he’s trying to act like a bit of a ringleader for the various conservative-led provinces as they wage war against Justin Trudeau and the federal government. We’ll see how well that goes over.

Meanwhile, John Horgan says he’s hoping that they can use this meeting to get something accomplished, and that it won’t be a number of premiers trying to have a stand-off against Trudeau in advance of the election. But given that several of those premiers have been having public tantrums over the carbon price, two of them now having lost their court challenges, I’m quite certain that they’re going to have some kind of theatrical blow-out for the sake of Andrew Scheer to come in and try and look statesmanlike. (Have I mentioned that fixed election dates are garbage?)

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Roundup: Ending a sitting on a witch hunt

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Alberta’s legislature wrapped up its session last night, and it saw the passage of bills that included rolling back protections of LGBT students in schools, changing overtime rules and cutting wages for students, not to mention Jason Kenney spending millions of taxpayer dollars to promote conspiracy theories and to conduct a witch-hunt against people who say mean things about the oil industry. So much of it would be cartoonish if there wasn’t such a worrying trend of Kenney simply lying to keep his population angry. And if you pay close attention to this Postmedia wrap-up of the sitting, it doesn’t call out the moments when Kenney egregiously lied (especially around the stunt with the ear plugs) and the story just both-sidesed the whole thing. We’ve taught them that they can get away with lying, so they’re doing it with impunity.

Meanwhile, here’s Stephen Maher on the witch hunt public inquiry, and Andrew Leach has been throwing shade at the whole thing, which is always worth a read.

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Roundup: More trouble in Rideau Hall

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The news out of Rideau Hall is rarely good these days, and yesterday, it was about high levels of harassment and job dissatisfaction being reported by the staff there. I’m not entirely surprised by this, given that most of the established and long-time staff abandoned it shortly after Julie Payette was named governor general, because she and her hand-picked secretary (who had no government or Crown-related experience) essentially made everyone’s lives miserable. This after it was revealed that Payette still refuses to move into Rideau Hall because she’s unhappy with the lack of privacy there, while she has decided to decamp to the Citadelle in Québec City – her other official residence – for the summer. (On that note, it’s probably the most use the Citadelle has had continuously in quite a while). All of this makes one wonder if she wasn’t told when she was offered the position that it’s a very public role and that living in an official residence would come with issues like staff being in the building at all hours. It seems odd that she wouldn’t have known this going into the job (and possibly a sign that Justin Trudeau and his office did a terrible job in either selecting her or preparing her).

Meanwhile, I remain concerned that we’ve heard nothing from the PMO about how they’re planning to replace the lieutenant governor of Saskatchewan following his untimely death this week, because the provincial government will be paralyzed until that is filled. If we had a functioning vice-regal appointments commission, there would have been more names from a short-list on record that could be drawn from fairly easily for a replacement, but now it’s an opaque box, and if there is another Judy Foote-like appointment in the works, that could be yet another self-inflicted wound for this government.

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Roundup: Proving the SCC’s point

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It was only a matter of time after Alberta premier Jason Kenney announced that he was reviving his province’s sham Senate “election” laws that the two so-called “elected” senators from the province started chiming in, and lo, Senator Tannas did just that on the Alberta Primetime politics show on Alberta’s CTV affiliates this week. During the hugely uncritical interview, Tannas proclaimed that getting an “endorsement” from the public gives him the right to speak up “more forcefully,” and that he and fellow “elected” Senator Black are “listened to differently” because they of their special status.

Let me remind you what the Supreme Court of Canada said when it comes to consultative elections – that it would give the Senate a popular mandate, which would change the constitutional architecture of the institution, and you can’t do that without a formal constitutional amendment. In other words, Tannas is proving the Supreme Court’s point – that his “election” (which was a sham, let’s be clear) confers upon him some kind of special authority, which is whole point. Now, Tannas did try to couch some of his criticisms for his nominally appointed colleagues from Alberta because he has to work with them, but amidst the myths about Bills C-48 and C-69 and the complete self-aggrandisement, there was virtually no pushback at Tannas about what the Supreme Court said, or the fact that the process that got him “elected” was a sham worthy of a People’s Republic.

There seems to be almost nobody pushing back against Kenney and his unconstitutional legislation and the sham that these “elections” really are. Why, here’s Don Braid with a lazy garbage take that lauds the farce that Kenney puts on because he’s swallowed the rhetoric about those bills whole, along with the fairytale nonsense about a “Triple E” senate and what it purports to do (never mind that the only thing it would do is create 105 new backbenchers with an overinflated sense of self). Repeat after me: Kenney is only doing this to invent a future grievance, while he lies about those two bills. It would be great if someone could be bothered to call him out on it.

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Roundup: The menace of ignorant premiers

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Occasionally a politician will say something so blindingly wrong and stupid that it makes me incandescent with rage, and yesterday the honour went to PEI’s new premier, Dennis King, who believes that because he’s in a hung parliament that he’s “not the government,” but that “we’re all the government.”

And then my head exploded.

King is the premier, which means he’s the government. And for him to try and abrogate his responsibilities in the face of questions from the opposition is a sickening lack of civic literacy and frankly spine. Trying to shame the opposition into “collaborative government” is frankly trying to avoid accountability. After all, when everyone is accountable, then no one is accountable, and that’s not how our system works. He’s the premier. He is responsible to the legislature for the decisions that the government makes, and while he’s trying to launder them through the opposition in the name of “collaboration,” that’s not how the system works. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hung parliament – that only means that he needs to work harder to secure the support of the opposition, not that they are in government with him. And yes, I’m enraged by this because he and everybody else should know better.

Alberta extremism

On another topic, this story out of Edmonton about extremist billboards calling for civil war against the rest of Canada, and promoting conspiracy theorism and outright lies about Justin Trudeau is extremely concerning because this is how illiberal populism happens. And Jason Kenney has a direct hand of responsibility in this, both by selling lies about the province’s situation and about what Trudeau is and is not doing, and by selling them snake oil in a bid to keep them angry because that’s how he gets votes. But as the anger won’t dissipate now that he’s in charge, he’s forced to try and keep the anger going in one way or another and hope that it doesn’t blow up in his face – hence why he’s inventing new grievances by things like his sham Senate “elections” – because unless he keeps trying to point that anger to new enemies, it will turn on him. I really don’t think he appreciates the monster he’s created, and these billboards are a warning sign that needs to be heeded.

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Roundup: Solidifying the “new” Senate

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Another day, another badly executed wrap-up article on the Senate, this time courtesy of the CBC, which again, has a badly misleading lede in which it claims that “Legislative changes that would have made it harder for a future prime minister to reverse Senate reforms have fallen through.” This is wrong – any changes to the Parliament of Canada Act that the government was contemplating would have had zero effect on the selection process for future senators. Why? Because that’s not governed by that Act, or indeed any piece of legislation – it’s part of the constitution, and clearly spelled out as a prerogative of the Governor-in-Council, meaning the prime minister and Cabinet will advise the Governor General as to who gets appointed. There is nothing that Trudeau could do to bind that advice legislatively – recall the Senate reform reference to the Supreme Court of Canada – that would require a constitutional amendment requiring seven provinces with fifty percent of the population to do.

What would changes to the Parliament of Canada Act regarding the Senate do? The actual proposals were to ensure that leaders of any parliamentary group in the Senate would get commensurate salary increases and resources to put them on par with the what is nominally the government and official opposition in the Senate, and the ISG has been pushing for this pretty hard, but they also were demanding to be part of consideration for vote bells, though I’m not sure why it would matter (particularly given that they have demonstrated time and again that they’re not reliable negotiating partners). But I also suspect that part of the reason why these changes didn’t get proposed was because there is some legal opinion that it would require some kind of buy-in from provinces to make this kind of change, so there was likely little time for the government to add this ball to all of the other ones they were juggling that late in the parliamentary calendar (despite the cries of the ISG). Of course, this hasn’t stopped the media from falsely framing these changes as affecting the selection process, as this has been cited by more than one reporter from more than one outlet, and it’s false.

The rest of the story is again more of the same voices opining on how great the “new” Senate is working, but we fortunately got a bit of pushback from Liberal Senator Lillian Dyck, who did point out that the lack of organisation among the Independents has held up bills and slowed down the process – and she’s right. But nobody wants to talk about that as they’re busy patting themselves on the back for “not being whipped.” There’s more to the Senate than that, and they need to get off this self-congratulation because things aren’t working as well as they like to claim.

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Roundup: Resurrecting sham “elections”

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As part of his ongoing fit of pique against the federal government, Alberta premier Jason Kenney has decided to revive one spectacular bit of political bullshit theatre that some of us had hoped was now dead and buried – the sordid practice of Alberta’s “consultative elections” for senators. The whole notion is unconstitutional, and while the Supreme Court didn’t explicitly rule against the provinces setting up their own “elections” as part of the Senate reference, it was certainly implicitly in there, both in the notion that a consultative “election” creates an expectation of legitimacy, but the logic behind it was also completely blasted during the hearing, when Justice Thomas Cromwell asked if a consultative election is fine, why not a consultative auction? Not to mention that the entire election process in past elections has been little more than the electoral equivalent of a show trial – a sham that resembles electoral democracy but is simply designed to return only candidates from a certain party to then form an illegitimate demand that they be appointed. Kenney’s attempt to say that this gives them “accountability” is ludicrous on its face because they don’t face re-election, so there is no actual accountability that can be exercised. The whole farcical exercise has more in common with the sham elections held in communist countries than it does with the actual electoral practices in the rest of Canada, and the fact that Kenney is looking to resurrect this demented kabuki is just more of his campaign of snake oil and lies whose only point is to keep stoking the irrational anger of Albertans and hoping that it won’t blow up in his face. It inevitably will, however, and the whole country will pay the price for Kenney’s arrogance in believing he can manage the monster he created.

In other news of Kenney’s political bullshit theatre, his piece by Chris Turner dismantles the whole raison d’être of Kenney’s so-called “war room,” by pointing to the literal conspiracy theories that underpin the whole thing, and the mythology that Kenney is trying to spin around why capital has left Alberta’s energy sector. And it’s complete myth, but it gets repeated uncritically constantly, and it goes unchallenged by the media, and yet Kenney is creating this $30 million spin machine to further reinforce this mythology and conspiracy theorism, because again, it feeds the anger of his base, telling them that it’s not the fault of the world price of oil that their fortunes have changed, but rather that it’s the sinister forces of dark foreign money that is really behind it all. Without putting too fine of a point on it, this is the kind of thing that fuels the kinds of populist movements that breed fascists. But Kenney doesn’t care, because he thinks he can control it.

Meanwhile, Kenney has suddenly changed his story about the incident where he handed out earplugs during that debate in the Alberta legislature, and it’s gone from it being “light-hearted morale-boosting” to “one of my MLAs has tinnitus and was being shouted at,” which the video clearly didn’t show, and it’s just one more example of Kenney’s smile-and-lie show that he puts on for media interviews, and you can’t help but feel sorry for the interviewers because trying to disentangle his egregious lies is a Sisyphean task.

https://twitter.com/EmmaLGraney/status/1142194069902364680

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Roundup: Closing it all down for the summer (and the election)

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The House of Commons rose yesterday, earlier than expected after news that Conservative MP Mark Warawa died of cancer. Business was truncated, all remaining bills passed swiftly, and a few tributes were made to Warawa before adjourning the House, ostensibly until September, but the writs would be drawn up for the election before then. There is a chance that Parliament will be called back in the summer to deal with the New NAFTA implementation bill, which was not passed, but apparently they’re waiting on the Americans before we go further.

Over on the Senate, side, a number of bills passed through swiftly, including the reforms to the Access to Information legislation, but the ones that caught the most attention were Bills C-48 and C-69, being the west coast oil tanker ban and the environmental assessment legislation. Immediately after those were passed, Alberta premier Jason Kenney thundered over Twitter about how he was going to challenge them in court – which you can expect the courts to tell him to go pound sand, just as they will with his challenge to the federal carbon price that will be imposed on his province come January. The Senate won’t be passing a number of private members’ bills, including some prominent ones like Rona Ambrose’s bill, but it was a bad bill anyway and deserved to die on the Order Paper. (The Liberals also promised to revive the bill in the next parliament, which…isn’t great, frankly, because it’s either unconstitutional in its original form, or largely symbolic in its amended form).

This means that all that’s left is a royal assent ceremony, which will happen this afternoon, and it’ll be the first time that they’re going to attempt a ceremony with the two chambers in separate buildings. It’s been suggested previously that the Usher of the Black Rod will take a limousine to West Block to knock on the Commons’ door to deliver the message that Her Excellency requests their presence in the Senate, at which point the Speaker and a token few MPs will head over – possibly in limos or little parliamentary busses – to the Senate for the ceremony. We’ll see how it all unfolds.

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