Tag Archives: Jason Kenney

Roundup: A delayed return

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We have a date – well, two of them. Justin Trudeau announced yesterday morning that Cabinet would be shuffled on October 26th, and that the House of Commons would return on November 22nd, which is ridiculous. After an election where Trudeau kept punctuating the “urgency” of a number of files, some of them COVID-related, and with a list of priorities to take care of in his first 100 days of the new parliament (apparently that clock doesn’t start ticking until Cabinet is sworn in), the decision to delay the return of Parliament for two months after the election is egregious – especially because this is a hung parliament where the confidence of the Chamber should be tested at its earliest opportunity, and two months later is not that.

I am generally pretty forgiving of the fact that it can take our government longer to get its act together post-election – as compared to the UK, where they have nearly twice as many MPs – but they can get a new government sworn in and a new Parliament started within three weeks of an election. But it should not have taken Trudeau this long to deal with this shuffle as it has, even if one or two Cabinet contenders had to deal with recounts. And yes, the government dispatched the Governor General on her first state visit abroad this week, but that again was his choice, and he could have either delayed that trip, or announced the Cabinet before she left the country.

More to the point, this reduces the fall sitting of the House of Commons to a maximum of four weeks, but you can bet that in practice, it’ll be less than three. Committees won’t really get up and running, and sure, he may introduce a number of priority bills, but they will see precious little debate in that time. What we will get are the Address in Reply to the Speech From the Throne, and probably the Fall Economic Update, plus a number of Estimates votes, which will be rushed through without any actual scrutiny (they may get some modicum of scrutiny on the Senate side), but I’m not sure we’ll even see the Budget Implementation Bill for said economic update making it past second reading unless it is bullied through at all stages under the threat that emergency rent and wage subsidies will expire without passage. It’s undermining democratic norms for the sake of expediency, and that is the last thing we want to be encouraging any government in engaging in, regardless of stripe.

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Roundup: Unvaccinated MPs should stay home without pay

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It has begun – Conservative MPs warning that there will be a privilege fight if they don’t get to come to work in the House of Commons unvaccinated. This time it’s Mark Strahl, who was the party whip in the previous session, and he thinks that they should be allowed to attend if they submit to rapid testing, which is not a prophylactic against COVID. And a privilege fight is nonsense, of course – it’ll be the MPs themselves who set the rules that you need to be vaccinated to be in the Chamber (or possibly in the entire Precinct) – and by then, the rules around needing to be vaccinated to board a plane or train should also be in force. And if Conservatives on the Board of Internal Economy want to protest this rule, they’ll be outvoted, and that’ll be it. And if he brings a privilege motion to the House, the majority there can vote it down as well. There is no winning hand for anti-vaxxer MPs here.

The real question here is whether the other parties will bow to some sort of accommodation scheme, like letting unvaccinated MPs stay home and attend virtually – something I think should be opposed (the Bloc is already opposing it) because Parliament doesn’t work well in a hybrid setting. We tried it, and it was terrible. And frankly, MPs should also insist that those who refuse vaccination should not only have to stay hope – and not participate virtually – but should lose salary as well.

Parliament is an essential service, and they have a lot of work to do, and catering to a small percentage of conspiracy theorists and malcontents is only going to prolong this pandemic, and continue to overburden our healthcare system and create a lost generation of youth who will have missed out on opportunities. MPs are supposed to set an example – that starts with doing the responsible thing and being vaccinated.

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Roundup: Counting down to Kenney’s referendum

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Alberta is a little over two weeks away from Jason Kenney’s bullshit “referendum” on equalisation, which won’t actually accomplish anything, but will send his rhetoric into overdrive. (This is also when he will be holding his equally bullshit “Senate nomination election,” which is also blatantly unconstitutional, but that is a rant for another day, and I’ve filed numerous columns on the topic already). This referendum will do nothing about equalisation – it won’t do anything about amending the constitution, and if he thinks he’ll bring the federal government to the table to renegotiate the terms of equalisation, Justin Trudeau will once again remind Kenney that he was sitting at the Cabinet table when Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty imposed the current formula. It’s a waste of time and money, all in the service of Kenney trying to continue to drum up anger at Ottawa as a way to distract the province from his own record of failure.

Meanwhile, here is Andrew Leach with a few thoughts:

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Roundup: Alberta is broken, part eleventy-seven

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Things are increasingly broken in Alberta, and I’m not referring to the province’s horrific case rates, collapsing ICUs, and Jason Kenney’s continued refusal to take appropriate public health measures in the face of this. No, I’m referring to the fact that a group of MLAs including the gods damned Speaker and deputy Speaker came out as quasi-separatists yesterday with a looney-tunes “Free Alberta Strategy” which is 100 percent handwaving and pretending that they can simply opt-out of federally-imposed laws by sheer force of political will, and the mistaken notion that Quebec did it and they can too. (Spoiler: Quebec didn’t actually do it, and what few things it did do pretty much devastated their economy). This thread helps to clarify a lot of what they’re asking for and why it’s eye-rollingly ludicrous.

There are a few things to unpack here. Much of this stems from Kenney’s farcical referendums that will take place next month, the central of which is to demand a renegotiation of equalisation, which is where these quasi-separatist loons are drawing their inspiration from. It encouraged this kind of magical thinking that somehow Alberta could just stamp its feet and hold its breath and the federal government would somehow surrender its jurisdiction over things. That’s not how this works. But it’s also about Kenney’s entire attitude toward governing, and how he was building anger toward Trudeau in particular so that it would distract the population from his own failings. I have tended to liken Kenney to an arsonist who would set fires and get far enough ahead of them to put them out so that he can look like a hero – but he hasn’t put them out. He poured a glass of water on them and demanded a medal, while the very fires he set are spreading. Everything that is happening in this province all started with a match that has his name and fingerprints all over it. It’s not just trying to pretend that there’s a “good parts only” version of populism that he’s cherry-picking, or that he is somehow “tapping a relief well” to keep it from blowing up in his face. It blew up. The province is in a crisis, and he keeps lighting more fires because he can’t help himself. Things are going to get even worse in the coming weeks, and try as he might, Kenney has nobody to blame but himself.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1442925906679320582

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1442932249666621441

And then there’s the whole issue with the Speaker and his deputy. This is the second time now that said Speaker has compromised the avowed neutrality of his position, and he needs to be removed by the Legislature at once, as well as his deputy. It is unacceptable that they remain in their positions any longer, as they cannot be trusted to be neutral presiding officers in the Legislature.

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Roundup: Did Paul hit a glass cliff?

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Not unexpectedly, Green Party leader Annamie Paul announced her resignation yesterday morning, citing that she didn’t have the heart to go through the restarted leadership review process, and saying that she didn’t expect when she smashed the glass ceiling, that the shards would rain down on her and that she’d have to walk over them. Without denying that some of her problems related to racism, misogyny and antisemitism, I find myself somewhat conflicted about the notion that she is a case of a glass cliff.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1442538999579561984

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1442541082126913547

Why I’m unsure this is necessarily applicable is because the party wasn’t in a great deal of a mess when Elizabeth May decided she no longer wanted to be leader, and it was certainly doing well electorally (they had just won two additional seats for the first time ever federally), and they had some provincial successes that they were counting on. Unlike most “glass cliff” scenarios, it wasn’t like a woman or minority was brought in to clean up a mess or was outright set up to fail. But part of what happened is a problem that is getting more common in Canadian politics, which is that we have so utterly bastardised our party leadership selection processes and fetishised “outsiders” coming into parties to lead them that we have set up the expectation for someone like Paul, who had no political experience, to come in and lead a party as though it were an entry-level job. When Mike Moffatt talks about the pipeline of talent to replace a leader, that’s not unique to the Greens either – the federal Conservatives also suffer from that problem, in part because Stephen Harper actively killed the ambitions of anyone else in the party and surrounded himself with yes-men, so it’s no wonder that his successors have largely proven themselves to be duds (and Rona Ambrose was never intended to be a permanent leader, so any course-corrections she made to the party were largely undone by Scheer and O’Toole). Did Paul get mentorship and training to succeed? Erm, was there anyone in the party that could give it to her? Aside from Elizabeth May – which may be the problem. This is also a problem when you choose leaders who don’t have seats, and who lack the political judgment about how to go about seeking one as soon as possible (and when your sitting MPs refuse to give up their seat to the leader). There are a lot of points of failure here, including structural ones in how leadership contests are conducted – but I fear that simply calling this a glass cliff may be absolving Paul a little too much of her own culpability in her political demise.

Where the party goes from here we’ll have to see. May said she had no interest in being interim leader, though I suppose she will be back to being “parliamentary leader” for the party, though I suspect she may also want to make a run for Speaker as she has previously expressed a desire to do (which she will lose). But the party is going to find itself dealing with fairly existential questions pretty shortly.

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Roundup: Return of the two Michaels

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Friday was very much an exercise in life coming at one fast, as Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with American authorities, and hours later, the extradition order she was under was dropped and she was free to return to China. A few hours after that, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were on their way back to Canada, the fig leaf that their arrests were not hostage diplomacy in retaliation for Meng’s arrest completely gone, and they arrived on Canadian soil in the early hours of Saturday morning, with prime minister Justin Trudeau and foreign affairs minister Marc Garneau greeting them on the tarmac in Calgary. Spavor debarked there, Kovrig then continued onto Toronto, where he was met by his estranged wife and his sister.

With all of this in mind, there are questions as to where our relationship with China goes next. Garneau says that they are “eyes wide open,” and that they are now following a four-fold approach to China: “coexist,” “compete,” “co-operate,” and “challenge” – which seems to be a more articulate policy direction than the “tough but smart” that Garneau’s predecessor, François-Philippe Champagne stated several months ago. This certainly came up during the election, but the Liberals didn’t articulate much of a foreign policy in their platform, and we got very little in the way of debate on the subject. It is not insignificant, however, that Canada did lead a group of Western allies in a pact against the use of hostage diplomacy, whether practice by China or others (and there are others), so it’s not like the government sat on their hands the whole time either. It will also be exceedingly difficult to disentangle our trade from China – particularly in our agricultural sector – so it will be very interesting to see what this process looks like going forward over the next couple of years.

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Roundup: Misleading to the point of misinformation

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As they tend to do after every election concludes, Power & Politics had David Meslin on to talk about electoral reform, because apparently, we are going to re-litigate it once again. (The saving grace is that this time they didn’t have Meslin using his LEGO to show different PR results). The problem? The graphic that the show produced as an example of how the results of this election would be under PR was essentially misinformation.

https://twitter.com/Catelli2Oh/status/1440818668217135110

The assumptions made to produce said chart is that Canada would employ a system of pure proportional representation, and then allocate seats in that regard. But this would be a PR system that nobody is actually asking for, and which would be unconstitutional because seats are allocated on a provincial basis, while such a system would be unable to take that into account under the current 338 seat model. That’s a pretty big deal. Most people advocate for some form of mixed-member proportional, where you vote for a local MP, and then vote a second time for a party, which will then allocate someone from a list into a number of seats designed as “top-ups” to make the seats more closely resemble the “popular vote” (even though such a thing is a logical fallacy under our current vote construction). Furthermore, it would assume that we’d have the same parties, which is unlikely (and Meslin went at great length about how great it would be for the big tent parties to break up), and even more to the point, under a different voting system, voting behaviours would be different. With all of this in mind, the fact that the gods damned CBC produced an infographic with a misleading characterisation of what Monday’s vote might have looked like under PR is not just irresponsible – it’s downright misinformation.

It’s also concerning that Meslin thinks that as many as 21 seats for the People’s Party under such a system is no big deal, and he thinks we should have more radical parties for the sake of “innovation.” The notion of a far-right party getting 21 seats and putting them in the potential position to be kingmakers in a coalition government is frightening to say the least, but we’ve also seen in other countries that use PR, such as Germany and the Netherlands, that when far-right parties breach the threshold to attain seats, they grow in popularity because they are given respectability and a platform to espouse their views. One of the great strengths of big-tent parties, that Meslin completely ignored, is that they moderate extremes, which is actually a good thing in politics. Big tent parties build coalitions of regions and factions within themselves, rather than having smaller parties building the coalitions externally post-election. It’s one reason why radical parties are short-lived, and why disruptive parties tend to “self-correct” within a couple of election cycles, because they can’t maintain the necessary organisation that Canada requires. These are features of our system – not bugs, and it would be great if CBC didn’t turn to the same guy every election to make the same misleading points, time and again.

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Roundup: Bracing for election night

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With voting day just days away, we’re starting to see a few “reminder” stories about how our system works, so that we can have some reasonable expectations about what the outcomes might look like on Monday, and why it will mean things like the current government staying in place and having the first chance to test the confidence of the new Chamber once it’s been summoned. There is an interview with Emmett Macfarlane here about how any decision will unfold on Monday night and why Trudeau will remain prime minister until he chooses to resign, which is good. There is also a piece from the Canadian Press which maps out different scenarios about how the evening may play out and what these scenarios might mean.

The problem, of course, is that television news in this country is abysmal, and we’ll spend the night listening to inane banter that pretends that there is no sitting government (exacerbated by the fact that they are currently observing a convention that refers to the prime minister as the “Liberal leader” in order to have an exaggerated sense of “fairness” around his incumbent status), and they will throw around terms like “prime minister-elect” even though we don’t elect prime minister (it’s an appointed position) and the fact that if it is the incumbent – which it’s likely to be – he’s already the prime minister and won’t require an “-elect” or “-designate” title to go along with it. We’ll also no doubt hear talk about him getting a “mandate” even though that kind of thing is utterly incompatible with our system of government. And no matter how much people like me will call it out over social media, nobody will care, and they will continue to completely misinform people about our basic civics without any care in the world, because that’s the state of media in this country right now.

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Roundup: Sitting on money, waiting for ICU to collapse

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In case it had escaped you that the incompetent murderclowns who run Ontario are incompetent, we learned yesterday that Doug Ford and his merry band of murderclowns sat on the entire $2.7 billion additional health transfer from the federal government that was supposed to go toward the COVID response, and, well, didn’t. This was during the second and third waves, which didn’t need to happen, and they were explicitly warned that reopening would mean disaster, and they did it anyway. They had money to help them improve testing, tracing, and doing things like improving ventilation in schools, and they didn’t. They sat on it to pad their bottom line.

Is there a lesson here? Yes – don’t give provinces more money without strings attached. You would think that this should be obvious, given that before Jim Flaherty unilaterally changed the transfer escalator from six percent to a minimum of three or GDP growth, we know that provinces were not spending that health transfer only on health – the growth in health spending was far below the growth in the health transfer. For them to demand yet more money with no strings attached – particularly for outcomes – while we have examples like Ford here, who are using the money to reduce their deficit in spite of all the lives that could have been saved it was actually deployed meaningfully, there should be no argument. If they want the money, they need to have metrics and outcomes to ensure that it’s being spent on what it’s supposed to be.

Meanwhile in Alberta, the COVID situation has been allowed to deteriorate so badly that ICUs could be overrun in ten days, forcing doctors to triage who gets ventilators and who will be allowed to die. With this in mind, Jason Kenney finally relented and started re-imposing public health restrictions, but in a byzantine and complex manner, and has said they will allow vaccine certificates or a “restriction exemption program,” because they can’t actually call it a vaccine passport or certificate. Kenney also both apologised for the situation and then did not apologise for lifting the restrictions when he did, so that clarifies things. I’m curious to see if this ricochets through the federal campaign – some Conservatives seem to think it will. In either case, Jason Kenney, his health minister and chief medical officer of health all should be resigning for letting this foreseeable tragedy happen on their watch, but we all know that they won’t, because what does accountability matter any longer?

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Roundup: A promise of extra-illegality

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On a day of more organized protests outside of hospitals around the country, prime minister Justin Trudeau has decided the way to deal with this is…more criminal sanctions. Which is ridiculous, because there are already criminal sanctions around nuisance, harassment, and intimidation, and creating a law specifically for healthcare workers is kind of ridiculous and merely clogs up the criminal code – and I don’t care that they think they’re sending some kind of message. There are existing laws and police should enforce them. Of course, the NDP are saying that this was their idea first, while in more technical terms, Singh says that the victims being healthcare workers should be considered an aggravating factor during sentencing, but the effect is largely the same – this is virtue signalling using the Criminal Code rather than a useful exercise in enforcing existing laws.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1437477651225133056

In Alberta, however, premier Jason Kenney has been warning that he can use the province’s recent law about critical infrastructure – designed to criminalise Indigenous protesters who blockade railways or pipelines – and how they can apply to this situation because the law is so broadly worded. That alone should be concerning about how this law was intended to be applied, but nevertheless, this does appear to be an unforeseen use for this particular piece of legislation.

https://twitter.com/EmmaLGraney/status/1437470976472666116

Meanwhile, Althia Raj worries about Trudeau inflaming “divisions” in the country as the PPC gains more followers among these protesters and the anti-vaxx crowd, but this is a  credulous take if I ever heard one. These are not rational actors we are dealing with. They are part of an embrace of conspiracy theory that is happening across the Western world, for whatever the reason, and this is a very big problem. I’m not sure I see the utility in appealing for Trudeau to be soft-peddling to these conspiracy theorists, but I will note that there has been one party who has been winking and nodding to these conspiracy theories, and even going to far as to promulgating them in the House of Commons, and that party is not the one that Trudeau leads. There are consequences for O’Toole and company for doing so, and we are reaping what they’ve sown. It’s too bad that people in the media are not calling it out.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1437467693934854149

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