Tag Archives: Justin Trudeau

Roundup: Substance-free gong show, English debate edition

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The English debate, with its much higher stakes, was no better than the French. It too lacked substance or any meaningful exchanges because they had a schedule of topics to get through, and wouldn’t you know it, they weren’t going to let exchanges get interesting or involved – they just wanted to move on. Justin Trudeau tried to paint Erin O’Toole as weak, Singh tried to paint Trudeau as unable to fulfil promises. Trudeau warned that Singh was trying to instil cynicism among progressives because he refused to acknowledge any work done. Annamie Paul kept insisting that the key to everything was to work together. And Yves-François Blanchet and moderator Shachi Kurl started getting into it, and that gave Blanchet the victim card he was looking for in the Quebec media, particularly around Bill 21.

https://twitter.com/ChrisGNardi/status/1436172199430328323

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1436142521118334983

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1436154327169581083

The fact that they are still moaning the fact that we’re in an election is getting really tiresome – but not quite as tiresome as the fact that Trudeau still can’t make a convincing case for it. He keeps trying to go hard on insisting there are huge and sharp divisions between the different parties, which is why he needs the electoral support to carry on making tough choices about the pandemic. What he won’t spell out is that he needs that support because the spring session was a toxic swamp that stalled virtually all bills for months, including the budget implementation bill for the fall economic update and all of the pandemic supports therein. The fact that he refuses to say that, for whatever “happy warrior” shtick he thinks is going to win him points, just gives the other parties a pass for their petty bullshit in the spring, and the campaign of dishonesty that accompanied it, and it just keeps him from making an actual case. I don’t get it, but clearly this hasn’t blown over.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1436137253504536581

If you need lists of takeaways, you have plenty to choose from – CTV, Maclean’s, the Star, and CBC. The CBC also has a half-assed fact-check of things mentioned during the debate.

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Roundup: An insubstantial gong show of a French debate

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So, that was the French “Commission Debate.” Honestly, they should just burn this whole format down. The questions from “ordinary Canadians” are the kind of bullshit that TV executives think that people will spoon up (in spite of the stone-faced eleven-year-old unimpressed with the leaders pandering to him). Getting talent from each of the participating partners to ask questions is branding nonsense that adds little, especially when these same journalists can ask questions of the leaders in media availabilities daily. Packing in a list of topics that needs to be choreographed to the second means that the moment a leader started to get on the ropes about something, oops, time was up, next topic. Ridiculous.

With this in mind, it was another night of no real winners or losers, because it was just so insubstantial. Sure, Erin O’Toole choked on the child care question, but will it matter? Who knows? Same with Singh getting hit with the assertion that Jeff Bezos is in the United States and not Canada, or Annamie Paul getting a stake through the heart with the Greens having lost their raison d’être. They were good lines for the journalists who asked them, but will that actually have an effect? Doubtful. I can’t believe that they’re still trying to make “why are we having an election?” an issue in week four, and I still can’t believe that Justin Trudeau refuses to point out that Parliament was toxic and dysfunctional and couldn’t pass legislation for five months. And that he hasn’t called out the disingenuous “we need to work together” entreaties when these were the same leaders whose MPs were engaged in procedural warfare. But hey, “happy warrior” and all of that. And now we get to do it all again in English tonight.

Meanwhile, here were some of my reactions watching it all unfold.

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Roundup: The PBO’s dubious stamp of approval strikes again

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With less than two weeks to go in the campaign, the Parliamentary Budget Officer says he has returned 75 of 100 costing requests, but the Conservatives have not authorised release of any of theirs yet. The Liberals appear to have released most of theirs, and the NDP have only released two so far – but theirs are both fairly problematic.

Their first costing was for their pharmacare plan, basing it on Quebec’s 2016 formulary, and drawing their assumptions out from there for five years, and presumes that they could get a national plan up and running by next year using that formulary as an example. That’s a virtual impossibility, and a national formulary still needs to be negotiated (which the Canadian Drug Agency Transition Office is set up to coordinate once more provinces sign on), but hey, they got the PBO’s stamp of approval. Their costing for their wealth tax is also loaded with plenty of poor assumptions, has a huge uncertainty around a behavioural response – tax avoidance is a whack-a-mole problem – and most importantly, the base assumption is for a tax on “economic families,” when our tax system is built around individual filers. They would need to create a whole new tax system to capture this one percent of net wealth. And as Lindsay Tedds points out, there is no way this could be administered to get revenues for the current taxation year, but hey, the PBO put his stamp of approval on that one too.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1435346365228400643

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1435349658805624834

The notion that the PBO should do platform costing because he’s “neutral” is a poor move, because costing is an inherently political exercise. It requires implementation decisions that have huge effects on what is being projected, and those are decisions that he should be far away from.

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Roundup: Evidence-based dumping a promise

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Because we’re going to re-litigate this issue yet again over the course of the campaign, I’m going to remind you all that Trudeau’s decision to abandon electoral reform was a result of evidence-based policy as opposed to a lie or false promise. The issue was studied. They engaged in polling that was output-based, meaning what people wanted for outcomes rather than simply asking them which system they preferred, because that conditions people who are rote in their responses about what system they think they prefer, without necessarily understanding their outcomes. And the outcomes they were looking for had a lot more to do with status quo than most people like to believe.

Beyond that, the special committee that studied the issue in the House of Commons returned a report that was hot garbage. Its conclusions were to call on the government to design a bespoke version of proportional representation that fell below a certain threshold of what they consider vote percentages to seat allocations which would require a massive number of new seats to be even remotely possible, that also had to have a simple ballot and retained the ability to elect individual MPs who had a connection to the riding as opposed to choosing MPs from party lists. Such a thing is a virtual impossibility. The common talking point is that Trudeau killed it because it didn’t advance ranked ballots, which he preferred (never mind that the Liberals on the committee didn’t advance study of this system in any meaningful way), and both the committee and the media were caught up in one bullshit analysis that relied on a single poll of second choices that declared that the Liberals would have won more seats under such a system, where there is actually no evidence of that. (Seriously, look at how politics works in Australia’s House of Representatives, which is elected by ranked ballot). That was the dominant narrative, which made it poisonous for Trudeau to advance.

But we’re going to get a bunch of people continue to moan about that in this election, including some ridiculous assertions that if the Conservatives form government that it’s because Trudeau didn’t implement proportional representation. (Seriously, if you favour a voting system because you think it’ll keep a certain party out, then you’re a sore loser, not actually interested in democratic outcomes). And no doubt, we’ll see some more garbage journalism like this CBC piece which is obtuse about things like the Conservative platform, and getting comment from a single political scientist who favours reform. Seriously? That’s not how you do your job.

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Roundup: Another day, another position on gun control

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Another day, and Erin O’Toole has yet another position on gun control. In the face of more questions on just where he stands, O’Toole now says that he’ll keep the existing prohibitions in place – but remains cagey on just what those are, never mind that his platform says he’ll repeal them. Also, never mind that his own candidates are saying they’ll repeal the measures the current government put into place.

What is fascinating as well is to watch certain small-c conservative columnists report on this about-face, saying things like this might save O’Toole’s campaign, rather than, oh, this is yet another example of him swallowing himself whole, reversing his positions when it suits him, saying one thing to one group and another thing to another group if he thinks he can get away with it, and generally being a naked opportunist. And these tend to be the same talking heads who spend days if the Liberals “flip-flop” on a position. I expect we’ll see a few more days of questions to O’Toole on his changing positions, and whether they change again in another day or two.

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Roundup: Grading the parties’ sincerity on climate

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One of the great things about the policy landscape in Canada are the number of professors out there who are willing to devote their time and energy to providing advice to political parties, or who will be willing to evaluate their proposals. We had an example of this as professor Mark Jaccard at Simon Fraser University went and checked over the parties’ environmental platforms and did the modelling on them, and then graded them – and the Liberals came out ahead by quite a margin (and in the interest of trying to look “balanced,” the CBC declared that the Conservatives were “not far behind,” though it was literally the difference between an A- and a D).

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1433770709730344962

The full study not only evaluates the targets, but the policies and costs as well – because there are economic costs to some of these plans. Interestingly, he also tests the sincerity of those plans, which is not only a sense of how feasible they are, but also their history as a party of a willingness to do the heavy lifting, and that’s a pretty important measure. “Beware of politicians who promise big but have not subjected their promises and plans to assessment by independent climate policy modellers. In this regard, the NDP and Greens are suspect,” Jaccard writes, and it’s worth reading through why he gives them the scores he does. The economic damage that the NDP plan promises to do would never be agreed to by their union base, and the fact that it would require a police state for them to set the kinds of binding carbon budgets that they propose are demonstrations about how unserious the policies are.

What is disappointing in this is that the NDP in particular started making personal attacks against Jaccard, and trying to build lame conspiracy theories that he is somehow being paid off to pump up the Liberals and talk down the NDP, which is both ridiculous and is the kinds of sore loser tactics that we’ve come to expect. (Seriously, my reply column on a daily basis is full of Dippers with hurt feelings because I have the temerity to point out the reality of things like jurisdiction or the fact that you can’t willpower things into existence). Elizabeth May was among those who took swipes at Jaccard, for the temerity of being an economist and not a climate scientist – which is also ridiculous because economics is literally the science of allocating scare resources, and the fact that climate scientists are not offering policy solutions. Science is not policy, and that’s why it’s important to understand the difference between the two and how they complement one another – providing that you’re willing to listen and not get in a huff because someone pointed out that your implementation plans don’t belong in the real world.

https://twitter.com/MarkJaccard/status/1433891783524720641

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Roundup: No knockouts in the TVA debate

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The first official debate took place last night – TVA’s “Face-à-face” which was a debate in a slightly more behaved format than we tend to see with the consortium/commission debates. All four leaders displayed adequate French – though Erin O’Toole’s accent and pronunciation started to degrade the longer it went on – and it was broadly organized around three particular themes: the pandemic, social policy, and the Canada of tomorrow. As with most debates, there was no “knock-out punch,” the leaders largely held their own, and unlike 2019, no one got cornered and slaughtered as what happened to Andrew Scheer.

There were contentious issues – early on, the other leaders tried to gang up on Trudeau about the “unnecessary” election, which Justin Trudeau countered Yves-François Blanchet’s accusations with a reminder that on four occasions Blanchet voted non-confidence in the government and obviously wanted an election. O’Toole also claimed that Parliament was working together and that made the election unnecessary, but that was a complete lie, and there were five months of procedural warfare brought on by his MPs to drive that point home. Trudeau also made the point that the twenty percent of the population that remained unvaccinated shouldn’t be able to stop democracy, and that our institutions were robust enough to deal with it. Blanchet laid into O’Toole about his plans to cancel the child care programme and withdraw the promised money from Quebec in exchange for tax credits that won’t help create any child care spaces. Blanchet and Jagmeet Singh also got into it on a few occasions, particularly around who called whom a racist in the House of Commons, and on any issue that touched on race, Blanchet kept insisting that Quebeckers weren’t racist. It being a Quebec-centric debate (as opposed to inclusive of francophones outside of the province), it had its moments of parochialism, like the moderator demanding assurances from each of the leaders that the future Moderna plant will be built in Quebec and not Ontario.

While everyone is going to assert that either Blanchet won out of natural advantage, or that their own preferred leader “won,” just because I did want to make a couple of observations. Trudeau is still having difficulty articulating the need for an election – most especially around the toxic parliamentary session in the spring. Erin O’Toole kept repeating that he has a plan, and that he has a “contract with Quebec,” and just repeating those assurances, ad nauseum. He also did most of the interrupting and talking over others throughout the evening. Blanchet was chippy and peevish for much of it, while Jagmeet Singh would dodge direct questions in favour of his usual tactic of reverting to some kind of an anecdote about someone he allegedly met. And here are a collection of quotes from the evening, for what it’s worth.

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Roundup: Ford’s vaccine certification falsehoods

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Ontario’s science table released some dire modelling yesterday that showed that unless vaccination rates reach over 85 percent, we may need yet another lockdown to prevent the healthcare system from becoming overwhelmed – yet again. Thus far, only 76 percent of people over the age of 12 are fully vaccinated, so we have a way to go if we don’t want things to get dire, once more.

With this in mind, Doug Ford begrudgingly agreed to finally roll out vaccine certificates (not calling them “passports”) as of September 22, with the app coming a month later, but as with anything Ford and his band of incompetent murderclowns do, it’s half-assed and largely inadequate. In this case, they’ll require these certificates to enter non-essential businesses like indoor dining and theatres, but at the same time, they won’t require staff at these places to be fully vaccinated, because that makes so much sense. And most gallingly, Ford tried to claim that he has to do it because the federal government won’t – which is, frankly, bullshit because this is firmly within provincial jurisdiction, and after provinces grudgingly allowed the federal government access to their records for international travel purposes, many of them either refused to allow the same data to be used domestically (including Ford up until yesterday), or stated that they were moving ahead with their own certification so no need to bother with a federal one (thinking especially of Quebec).

Here’s Justin Ling with receipts about why this is bullshit, including when Ford’s flacks tried to “prove” that they wanted national vaccine certification, when it was in fact for international travel, and they’re content to lie to us to try and shift the blame when the anti-vaxxer crowd starts protesting (and yes, they did immediately after).

And because it was too spot-on, here’s Brittlestar’s take.

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Roundup: False narratives about the Q2 GDP

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The figures for second quarter GDP were released yesterday, and they weren’t as good as had been expected. There was a surprise contraction of 1.1% annualized, which caught economists off-guard (and perhaps Statistics Canada as well, as their flash estimate a month previous had still shown growth). The majority of these declines were in the months of April and May because of the third wave, as June had shown robust growth in nearly all sectors as economies around the country re-opened – and those declines were largely in the areas of home resales and exports. To an extent, the home resales was a bit of a correction – after giant increases in previous quarters, most especially Q3 of 2020, the market slowed down.

For Erin O’Toole and Pierre Poilievre, however, these figures were a cataclysmic sign that Trudeau can’t “manage” the economy, and that it’s deficits that are leading to inflation, which is insane. A lot of the weakness is attributable to the Third Wave and its associated lockdowns, and that is squarely the fault of premiers who opened up too soon, reduced restrictions too fast, and then were too slow to re-impose them (and we’re going to get more of that in the oncoming fourth wave). More than anything, it’s reflective that O’Toole and Poilievre aren’t even bothering to read the data beyond the headlines, and are slotting it into pre-arranged talking points which are so divorced from reality that it should be concerning to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. The fact that Poilievre is goading the Bank of Canada over Twitter is a Very Bad Thing. He’s continuing to politicise them, and feeding into a bunch of poisonous populist narratives, and O’Toole is joining him for the ride. This is a very bad thing for our economy, and it doesn’t matter that they’re doing it all for show and that they probably will keep things status quo should they form government – the fact that they are polarising the debate and riling up these same toxic mobs that have been following Trudeau’s campaign around is absolutely a problem. This kind of rhetoric should be disqualifying for anyone who seeks higher office in this country.

Meanwhile, as you may have heard, Erin O’Toole reiterated his promise to balance the budget without making any cuts (in spite of promising earlier to cut things like the CBC) because he’s going to grow the economy enough. Why does that sound familiar?

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1432799152266694657

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Roundup: Handwaving about tax loopholes

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The narratives about “closing tax loopholes” never really die, and lo, they have come back yet again on the campaign, as Jagmeet Singh hopes to use this as a campaign plank, and to basically start extracting a dollar figure from them. The problem? Well, that’s basically misunderstanding the problem with these “loopholes” – they’re a game of whack-a-mole. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t tackle them, because you should, and successive governments have been doing that for decades, but as soon as you close one, the well-funded tax preparation industry finds another that they can exploit, and all of that money that a government may have been hoping to recoup doesn’t appear.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1432361687361933312

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1432362354314993667

Additionally, Singh alleged that Justin Trudeau was somehow directing the CRA to not go after large corporations, and that he isn’t charging the “super rich” tax evaders. But again, this distorts reality – the CRA is an arm’s length agency from government, and free from political direction, and don’t direct audits or collection activities. Yes, the current government has provided more funds for CRA to undertake those activities, but they can’t tell them who to audit. Additionally, when CRA finds a file that they deem suspicious, they forward it to the RCMP, and if they feel that there is criminality, they forward it to the Public Prosecution Service – which, again, is arm’s length and not subject to political direction – and they decide whether or not to lay charges. Thus far, they have not with some of the high profile investigations into the Panama Papers, or other such leaks, likely because they know their chances of a successful prosecution are slim because these particular practices wind up being legal in the long run, no matter how often governments try to crack down on them. Regardless, Singh trying to portray this as either cronyism or a lack of political will is not reflective of reality.

Also not reflective of reality – some of the hand-waving he’s been doing in other interviews, such as this one where he says he’ll “get it done” on ending the deferral period for blood donations for men who have sex with men – never mind that Canadian Blood Services is arm’s length from government and not subject to their orders. You can’t Green Lantern your way through government. Implementation of your ideas matters – a lot.

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