Tag Archives: Jason Kenney

Roundup: Kenney announces his next big distraction

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By now you’ve heard that Jason Kenney has announced the referendum questions that Alberta will be voting on in October as part of Kenney’s mass distraction plans. It’s unheard of to have multiple referendum questions – in this case, daylight savings and removing equalisation from the Constitution – on top of an unconstitutional sideshow of Senate “nominee elections,” and yet Kenney is putting these all together with the upcoming municipal elections. This has the bonus for Kenney of muddying the waters of those elections, where more progressive candidates tend to do better, particularly in the cities, and he gets to claim that he saves money by holding them at the same time, but this is a lie. Municipal elections are run by the municipalities themselves, while these referenda and bogus “nominee elections” are held by Elections Alberta, and just because they happen at the same time and can co-locate spaces doesn’t change the fact that it going to cost more.

The thing is, the referendum on equalization won’t actually do anything because even if they sent a message to the rest of Canada and brought everyone to the table to negotiate, the only thing that’s in the Constitution is the principle of equalization – the formula itself is federal legislation, because the programme is paid out of federal general revenues. But Kenney is content to keep lying to the public and pretending that Alberta signs a cheque every year that Quebec cashes and pays for its child care system with (which it doesn’t – they pay for that out of their own taxes, and they reap the direct economic benefits from it as well). As well, the myth that Quebec killed Energy East is being invoked (Quebec had nothing to do with it – the proponent couldn’t fill both Energy East and Keystone XL with their contracts, so Energy East was abandoned as Keystone XL looked like the more likely to reach completion – not to mention that it wouldn’t have actually served the Eastern Canadian market), which is again about stoking a faux sense of grievance. The fact that Kenney is stoking this anti-Quebec sentiment because he thinks it’ll win him points (and hopefully distract the angry mob that is gathering outside his own door) is not lost on Quebeckers when it comes to Kenney’s good friend, Erin O’Toole, looking for votes in the federal election.

But as economist Trevor Tombe keeps saying, Alberta doesn’t need equalization in the same way that Bill Gates doesn’t need social assistance – Alberta is still making way more money than any other province, even with their harder times economically. The province’s deficit is not a result of equalization or money supposedly being siphoned east (again, equalization comes out of federal taxes) – it’s a result of a province that refuses to implement sales taxes or other stable revenue generation, and expecting everyone else to subsidize that choice (while also cutting corporate taxes under the illusion that it would create jobs, but didn’t). This is just Kenney handwaving and shouting “look over there!” because he knows he’s in trouble, and he needs to keep everyone focused on a different enemy. He shouldn’t be rewarded by people falling for it.

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Roundup: The jobs numbers are in

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It was jobs day at Statistics Canada yesterday, and the June figures showed that there was a big recovery in part-time employment, largely in accommodation and food services, as well as retail trade – signs that the economy is starting to open back up across the country, and this was before we had any re-opening in Ontario, showing that there is still definitely room to grow. There were also more people looking for work, which meant the unemployment rate was a little higher than it might have been otherwise.

Of course, this was entirely being spun in entirely disingenuous ways by Pierre Poilievre, who has made an artform of lying with statistics. He called a press conference to decry that there was still a loss in full-time employment (never mind that full-time employment has held far steadier during the pandemic than part-time work, particularly because a lot of that part-time works is in the service industry that couldn’t operate during the mockdown/lockdowns). He decried the unemployment figure, but deliberately ignored that every country calculates their rate differently, and didn’t mention that if we calculated our rate the way the Americans do, there is a marginal difference between them.

But more to the point, he has spent the past couple of months trying to build this narrative that a job recovery projection in the budget was a promise to have fully restored the million jobs lost from the start of the pandemic by this point. Never mind that we had a third wave that was far deeper and longer than could have been anticipated when those projections were made (and you can thank murderclown premiers for reopening too soon before the second wave had subsided, and then waited too long to impose new measures once again), or that projections are not really promises. Yes, there is still more work to do in order to recover the employment we had pre-pandemic and to do the work of removing barriers so that women and minorities can better participate. But there’s no need to lie with statistics to make a point or as a means of trying to hold the government to account for its actions (or inaction) during this pandemic.

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Roundup: Trudeau’s feeling punchy in Calgary

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues his tour of the country as the pandemic wanes, and yesterday stopped in Calgary to meet with both Jason Kenney and Naheed Nenshi, and there were some particular notes that Trudeau’s tone had changed, and that he was more combative than he has been in the past – in particular, taking shots at Kenney’s government over their resistance to dealing with climate change and the economic opportunities that come with the green economy, and that Kenney had endorsed banning niqabs in the country as an example of how the previous government didn’t take systemic racism seriously. (And if anyone wants to point out that Kenney was the party’s “ethnic outreach” minister, remember that his particular focus was on communities where they felt they could target social conservative votes, citing their mutual dislike of the gays, marijuana, and so on).

There was in particular some politics being played about the announcement over funding for Calgary’s Green Line LRT project, where the province – which has been apparently slow-walking it for a year now – approved the funding in a press release shortly before Trudeau’s announcement, and weren’t at the announcement themselves, which sounds about typical.

Trudeau, meanwhile, pushed back against the notion that there is some kind of unfairness in equalisation, and that Alberta is being somehow disadvantaged. While he pointed out that the current formula was negotiated with Kenney at the Cabinet table, it bears repeating that equalisation is not the province writing cheques to one another – it comes out of general revenues from federal taxes, and Alberta pays the highest federal taxes because they have the highest incomes in the country by far – even during these tougher economic times for the province as a result of the downturn in the oil market. Not that Kenney is going to tell the truth of how it works when he’s trying to nurse a faux grievance in order to score political points (much as he’s doing with his bullshit “senate nominee elections”). Part of this newfound punchiness on Trudeau’s part has to do with the narrative of election speculation, but also that Kenney has been weakened, and the Conservatives nationally are losing ground, and Trudeau likely sees an opening. There is talk that they could take several seats in Edmonton and Calgary thanks to both softer Conservative numbers and the fact that they could lose ground on their right flank to the swivel-eyed loons in the “separatist” Maverick Party, which gives the Liberals more of an opening. Trudeau also made the point that they want Alberta to have representation in the government, and perhaps people learned their lesson after shutting them out in the province out of spite, only to realize they made a big mistake afterward. We’ll see where it goes, but the shift in tone is notable.

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Roundup: Lies about inflation and the central bank

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For weeks, the Conservatives (and Pierre Poilievre in particular) have been making a bunch of bogus and nonsensical attacks against the government and what they term the “inflation tax,” which makes absolutely no sense, but is predicated on the wild notion that the Bank of Canada is allegedly printing money to finance the government’s “out of control” deficits, and that this is going to drive up inflation and turn us into Venezuela. It’s bullshit – the Bank of Canada is independent from government (and it should be shocking that the Conservatives are suggesting otherwise given the history of the independence of the central bank in this country), quantitative easing is not “printing money,” and given that a year ago, in the early days of the pandemic, we were facing deflation as a country, an expansionary monetary policy was the right move to make. We’re still in need of stimulus, because the recovery has been so uneven, but the Bank of Canada knows this, because it’s their job.

https://twitter.com/trevortombe/status/1405250437838610432

With this in mind, it was no surprise yesterday that when the inflation figures were reported, the fact that it clocked in at an annualized 3.6% had the Conservatives, and Erin O’Toole in particular, trying to make hay of this – and media outlets didn’t help with their headlines that this was the highest rate in a decade, without putting that in proper context. Now, part of that is the base effect of last year’s massive drop, which is going to take time to work itself out in the data; but it’s also in part based on factors from right now, the most important of which is housing prices, which have skyrocketed as demand has outstripped supply. None of this is a surprise, and none of this has anything to do with the size of the federal deficit or the Bank of Canada’s quantitative easing, and yet that is the narrative being painted. It didn’t help that O’Toole’s examples lacked any logical consistency, such as blaming increases in post-secondary education on the federal government, when that’s a provincial jurisdiction. Not that truth matters.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1405152487821168642

Compounding this, however, is the completely irresponsible way in which this was being spun by shows like Power & Politics, where the framing was “the cost of everything is going up!” followed by asking panellists if the government should do something about it. And to their credit, most of those panellists said no, leave it for the Bank of Canada, but the fact that the host kept torqueing this notion about “prices are rising!” and trying to constantly get people to say something – anything – inflammatory about inflation, was not only irresponsible, but shows actual contempt for proper economics reporting by the gods damned CBC. They don’t care about actual information or reasonable discussion, they want the false balance of opposed partisans battling it out, and the “drama” that creates. It does such a disservice to everyone that it amazes me that they can get away with it.

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Roundup: Chalk up another moral victory

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The NDP did what they are very good at yesterday, which is to get a non-binding motion passed in the House of Commons, and declare a moral victory in spite of the fact that it does little more than make a statement. In this case, it was their Supply Day motion on calling on the government to drop their litigation on both the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision around First Nations children taken into foster care, while the second is round survivors of the St. Anne’s residential school. The Cabinet abstained from the vote, while most Liberal backbenchers voted for it – agreeing in principle to parts of the motion, and making a statement, but not binding the government to do anything. And while the NDP pats themselves on the back and says that they are “forcing” the government to drop the litigation, it does no such thing. It was merely the House of Commons voicing an opinion.

Part of the problem is that there is very little ability for people to discuss what the litigation is actually about in a meaningful way. According to Singh and company, this is about “taking First Nations kids to court,” which isn’t it. As a lawyer, Singh very well knows that there are complex issues that governments are obligated to sort out, especially if there is a bad precedent that it can set. In the case of the Tribunal decision, the government says they will pay compensation – and they are negotiating with two other class action lawsuits on similar matters to do just that – but the Tribunal ordered individual remedies for a systemic claim, which it should not be able to do, if the logic holds from previous Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence that said that they could not offer systemic remedies for individual claims. The government, however, mumbles about the jurisdiction of the Tribunal rather than explaining this, and it means they look like the bad guys. With the St. Anne’s case, I’m less familiar but the government’s line has been that they are seeking clarity on some five percent of survivors who have not yet been compensated, and in some of those cases could be getting more compensation for some of those five percent – because complex issues can require complex litigation to solve.

Unfortunately, that’s not what most journalists will sort out. Instead, we get the usual both-sidesing of this, where you get the advocates insisting the government is being “incomprehensible,” and the government gives some pat talking points, and they leave it at that. It’s why, for the Tribunal litigation, I went and talked to law professors and got some outside perspective on what the issues actually are, and why they matter for a government to bother litigating them. We’re being failed because most journalists are too incurious to sort the issues out, and that’s a problem. Legal stories are complex, but they deserve some attention paid to them so that we’re not left with the misleading narratives that are now being allowed to circulate unchallenged. Media needs to do better.

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Roundup: Misconduct at CBSA? You don’t say!

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It was not really a surprise to see the news that misconduct investigations of CBSA officers has increased over the past year – even in spite of travel volumes being down precipitously over the last year – and cases included things like interfering in an immigration process, belittling clients, abusing authority and sharing private information. Partly why this isn’t a surprise for me is because I’ve been tracking some of this for a while – I’ve heard horrific stories from lawyers, and from the Senators who have been pushing for independent oversight for CBSA for years.

That independent oversight still hasn’t happened. There have been numerous bills introduced in Parliament to provide it, and the most successful to date was a Senate initiative to create an Inspector General for CBSA. This was something the Liberals used to be in support of. Ralph Goodale was set to sponsor the bill in the Commons, until he became minister for public safety, then suddenly wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. When the bill passed the Senate unanimously, no one in the House of Commons dared to sponsor it there, MPs on the Liberal side having been warned away, and Conservatives were certainly not going to sponsor a Senate Liberal bill (and the Bloc and NDP most certainly were not either). The Liberals did introduce a weak sauce version of an oversight bill at the end of the previous parliament, with no time for it to go through, then again early in the current one, which died on prorogation and hasn’t been introduced since. That version would put CBSA under the RCMP’s Civilian Complaints and Review Commission, but for all intents and purposes, CBSA would still be investigating itself, meaning that the oversight is certainly not independent (and the CCRC is having a hard enough time getting the RCMP to sign off on its own complaints, which can’t be formalized until such sign-off).

The political will for this seems to be non-existent, which is strange, considering that the Liberals did reimplement plenty of other oversight for national security institutions like CSIS and CSA, and while some of CBSA’s activities call under the ambit of the new national security oversight bodies, it doesn’t capture the oversight of all of their activities. There are known problems with CBSA, and it’s unthinkable that a law enforcement body like it doesn’t have proper civilian oversight. The disconnect is unfathomable, but puts another mark in the column of Liberals being weasels about their promises once again.

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Roundup: The meltdown over NACI

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There was a collective meltdown yesterday as the National Advisory Committee on Immunization delivered its most recent recommendations, saying that they recommended that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine be deployed for those over 30 (even though the current supply in the country is currently on hold pending a review of its quality control), and then cited that mRNA vaccines remained their preferred candidates – and everyone lost their minds.

This is not really unexpected if you have been paying attention, where the chair of the committee in particular has said that because of the “safety signal” attached to AstraZeneca related to the particular blood clots (which are very serious – there is a reasonably high fatality rate related to them) that it would be preferable to get mRNA vaccines, but if someone could not wait for them, then they should get the first available vaccine, even if it’s AstraZeneca. In their minds, it’s about being transparent around the risk factors associated, and they’re right. It’s just that this makes it harder for governments and public health officials to carry on with message that the best vaccine is the first one you are offered. Both are correct, and NACI has a lot of nuance in their guidance that is difficult for people to parse effectively, which is a problem, but it’s a question of whether the problem is NACI’s in how they communicate their guidance, or a problem in particular with media who are supposed to be able to take complex issues and translate them to the public, and yet are not very good at it (often walking away from these releases citing that they are “more confused than before,” which they shouldn’t be if they paid attention). It especially isn’t helped when certain journalists, talking heads, and especially certain MPs conflate the very different roles that NACI and Health Canada have, and try to assert that they should always be “on the same page” when they have different roles. Health Canada determines the safety of the vaccines, NACI offers guidance on the best way to deploy them, factoring in the current local epidemiology and vaccine supplies – guidance which provinces can accept or reject. It’s also why that guidance is always changing – they are reacting to current circumstances rather than just offering a simple recommendation once and being done with it, which most people are not grasping. And they have operated pretty much invisibly for decades, because there hasn’t been the kind of public attention on new vaccines up until now, which is why I really dislike the calls by people to “disband NACI” after yesterday’s press conference.

I get that people want clear binaries, and simple instructions, but that’s not NACI’s job, really, and expecting them to change their way of communicating after decades is a difficult ask. There is a lot of nuance to this conversation, and I will point you to a couple of threads – from professor Philippe Lagassé here and here about this kind of advice and how it’s communicated to the public; as well, here is hematologist Menaka Pai, who talks through NACI’s advice and what it means.

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Roundup: Committee rudeness undermines their work

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There is a piece on the Canadian Press’ newswire right now about how victims of sexual assault who went before House of Commons committees to testify, whether it’s on the PornHub issue or the Canadian Forces’ problems with sexual misconduct, have been ill-treated by MPs, usually by rudeness, or not allowing them time to deal with the trauma related to this kind of testimony. And they’re absolutely right – and Commons committees are some of the worst offenders for this kind of behaviour.

Why? Part of this is because MPs lack some basic self-awareness. There are tight rules around timelines in committee hearings, as to how long an MP has to ask questions and get answers, and they get so wrapped up in the issue of their time that they get tunnel vision, and witnesses essentially get railroaded by it. The bigger and more prevalent part, however, is that MPs are more concerned about scoring points at these hearings that they are simply being partisan dicks about everything. Ask anyone who has testified before both Commons and Senate committees, and they will tell you that Senate committees are far more preferable, as they are more interested in the subject matter and the actual expertise or experiences of the witnesses than they are in using those witnesses to score points on their behalf. And much of the time, they’re barely paying attention, because they don’t have to actually write the report at the end – the analysts provided by the Library of Parliament do, and MPs simply approve it or write dissenting recommendations. It’s a problem and it really, really devalues the role that Commons committees should be playing in our basic democratic processes in this country.

And I can speak to some of this from personal experience. I was once invited to testify before the Procedure and House Affairs committee as they were contemplating hybrid and remote voting rules, and it quickly became apparent that I had been asked not for my expertise or my insights as someone who had been watching Parliament longer than any member of that committee had been an MP – I was there to be treated as a reactionary whom they could hold up their proposals to and show that they were being reasonable and my opinions weren’t. It was kind of a gross experience, and I was rudely treated by a couple of Liberal MPs (one of whom has since become a minister), because they were interested in scoring points. I also didn’t have the added weight of having to re-traumatise myself to provide this testimony to be treated in such a way, like some of the women in the piece were. It’s pretty gross, and it’s a poor reflection of how Parliament operates, particularly in the current climate and context. MPs really need to shape up and do better, if they want to retain any credibility at all.

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Roundup: Waiting for the modelling to show up

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If you weren’t convinced up until now that Ontario is being run by a group of incompetent murderclowns, there was a tacit admission yesterday from Solicitor General Sylvia Jones that the government held off on increasing restrictions because they wanted to see the modelling show up in hospitals first.

Let that sink in. Fourteen gods damned months into this pandemic, they still don’t understand that the modelling is a warning, not a prediction. They decided to wait until the lagging indicators – hospitalisation – was prevalent before “locking down” (but not really), which means that by this point, the spread of the virus is out of control. How they could not understand this fourteen gods damned months later is a sign that they are either wilfully ignorant, or they just don’t care. They were content to let people die because they couldn’t be arsed to stop the spread of the infection that they knew was coming for some wrong-headed notion about trying to “balance” the economy rather than ensuring people wouldn’t die – never mind that the economy would come back faster if they squashed the spread of the virus and it we wouldn’t any more lockdowns.

https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1380194055112511490

I’m still mad about this. I was mad about it all day since the interview hit social media. I would say it’s unbelievable, but given this particular posse of murderclowns and everything they’ve done in this pandemic, it’s unfortunately all too believable.

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Roundup: Confusion over AstraZeneca

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The third wave of the pandemic is now out of control in Ontario while the murderclowns in our provincial government continue to stand idly by, as BC goes into a “circuit breaker” lockdown to try and get a hold of their own skyrocketing numbers – because apparently fourteen months into this pandemic, nobody can grasp that exponential growth means that cases grow exponentially. Funny how that happens.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1376630821717569538

Meanwhile, there was confusion over new advice on the AstraZeneca vaccine as the National Advisory Committee on Immunisation informed provinces on Sunday that they were advising on pausing doses for those under 55, but didn’t make a broader announcement about that until late in the afternoon Monday, leaving a mess of confusion for much of the day. It seems that the blood clotting issue, while still extremely rare, is of a type that can have a forty percent fatality rate, and it’s been seen more prevalently in women under 55 (though it is suspected that it may simply because more women have been vaccinated in the healthcare fields and hence it is showing up more often there). That being said, they have decided to hold off on that age group until they can get more data, which could come in the next few weeks – especially as there have been no reported case of clotting in Canada thus far. It should also be noted that there would be very few AstraZeneca doses given to those under 55, because most provinces are not there yet in terms of their vaccine roll-outs, so those under 55 who have received it are likely some essential workers. (More from Dr. David Fisman in this thread).

While this was going on, there was a little too much made of the (temporary) disunity between Health Canada and NACI, in spite of the fact that they are separate, that NACI is arm’s-length from government, and that they each have different roles to play. Too many people – especially in the media – were just throwing their hands up and proclaiming their confusion, which allowed certain actors like the Conservatives’ health critic to take advantage of the situation and insisting that the minister wasn’t “controlling her bureaucrats” (NACI are not “her bureaucrats), and trying to paint a situation like the government is out of control. Yes, it’s a fluid situation, and there should have been earlier guidance released after the provinces were notified and started pausing their own appointments, but I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to consider the situation as being out of control, or so confusing that nobody knows what was going on. I think there were a lot of dramatics (or possibly histrionics) from people who should know better, but perhaps I’m being too generous.

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