Tag Archives: Justin Trudeau

Roundup: O’Toole’s tacit endorsement of conspiracy theories

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At another campaign event yesterday, Justin Trudeau faced another angry mob in the background, and this time they included signs that showed doctored photos of Trudeau at the gallows about to be hanged. Trudeau carried on throughout, but did call out Erin O’Toole to actually denounce this kind of thing, and O’Toole…didn’t really. Not in any meaningful way.

https://twitter.com/supriyadwivedi/status/1432053724281810959

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1432050587860881409

It was pointed out that this particular image of Trudeau at the gallows was also part of one of Conservative incumbent Cheryl Gallant’s videos, wherein she peddled the conspiracy theory that Trudeau was going to call a “climate lockdown” to exert control and that climate change is just some fiction cooked up for these kinds of nefarious plots. And wouldn’t you know it – O’Toole refused to condemn Gallant or her continued attempts to push conspiracy theories. The party ensured Gallant scrubbed her YouTube channel, but their excuse when asked was that the image in question was “out of context,” which is bullshit that nobody should believe.

This isn’t the first time Gallant has been in the media for such things, and O’Toole has been aware of them in the past, and refused to do anything about it – in essence, endorsing the behaviour. And hell, Gallant is one of the reasons why Stephen Harper became so hard line about message discipline – because Gallant’s batshit media utterances about protecting sexual orientation from hate crimes helped to sink the Harper campaign in 2004. That O’Toole has been letting her run free with her accusations that the Liberals want to normalise sex with children, or this “climate lockdown” is a plot – and he knows she’s doing it, because it’s been brought to his attention before and he refused to say anything about it then either – it’s a tacit endorsement. Just saying “I’m the leader and what I say goes” both delegitimises the whole point of having MPs in the first place, and presents the party as monolithic, which it’s not. But to not say anything about Gallant or her conspiracies at all, and to consciously avoid saying anything about it at all is a choice, and it’s a choice that should be pointed out loud and clear as to what kinds of behaviours that O’Toole is willing to tolerate in order to achieve power.

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Roundup: A lack of self-awareness in the face of a violent mob

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The cancellation of Justin Trudeau’s planned rally on Friday evening because of the growing number of angry protesters has given some pause to members of the media about how things got so bad, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of self-reflection on too many people out there. While both Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh have denounced the violent protesters, and O’Toole and local candidate Kyle Seeback kicking their volunteers who were part of the mob off of their campaigns, there remains a complete lack of self-awareness on their part. O’Toole not only endorses the kinds of shitposters that fuel this toxic outrage, but he has gone so far as to hire them, both for his leadership and for the campaign. The actively contributes to this discourse through winking and nodding to them, repeating their conspiracy theories in the House of Commons either directly or indirectly, and he directly contributes to this kind of poisoned discourse. Likewise, Conservative Michelle Rempel Garner is speaking out about being accosted and harassed on her campaign, but there is nary a word of acknowledgement about how she has fed this crowd, or the fact that she sends her own army of trolls and flying monkeys against those she disagrees with (and I know people who have been on the receiving end of this).

Most galling, however, are the media figures like John Ivison, who have essentially blamed Trudeau himself for this state of affairs.

There are others who have been bringing up the testimony of former Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, during the hearings into the Double-Hyphen Affair, when he sounded the alarm about the rising incitements to violence that were happening on social media – statements that were roundly ridiculed by members of the media. I’d say that perhaps we should be looking for some self-awareness out of this, but I have serious doubts that it’s even possible among the majority of them. But maybe I’m just getting cynical.

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Roundup: Singh needs to start giving details

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We have seen plenty of coverage thus far in the election about how popular Jagmeet Singh is, and how authentic he seems to his audience, and plenty about his personal likeability, but I am not seeing a lot that is pushing back against the things he is proposing. We have a couple of such examples yesterday, first with his pharmacare proposal. Essentially, the current government has put in the work, and established the Canada Drug Agency transition office, and thus far has signed up one province – Prince Edward Island. The other premiers have all balked at this, including the NDP premier of British Columbia, John Horgan, which I find mighty interesting in the current context. So, just what would Singh do differently? Well, he won’t say. Per the CBC:

When pressed by reporters on how he would get the provinces to sign onto his plan, Singh was light on details but committed to partnering with provincial and territorial governments. “We’d work with provinces and territories, I know it’s going to be hard work, but it’s going to save families money,” he said.

Great. He’ll “partner” with provinces that have thus far said no, and lo, he’ll do it by next year when it’s going to take years to negotiate a national formulary for said programme – something that seems to be a surprise to Singh, if you go by their stunt of a private members’ bill in the previous parliament, where they essentially proposed a framework where the provinces pay for prescription drugs and the federal government will then sign over a cheque. Yeah, it doesn’t really work like that. But I haven’t seen this being hammered home – you can’t just keep handwaving promises, particularly promises in areas of provincial jurisdiction, and not provide details on how you’ll accomplish it, and no, just promising to “work with” those provinces is not good enough. The current government has been doing that, and if you’re going to complain that they haven’t moved fast enough, then you need to explain how you’re going to do it differently. And no, the fact that you’re not Justin Trudeau is not an answer.

But he didn’t stop there. No, he also opined on vaccine passports, saying that the federal government should just go ahead and implement it federally – but again, didn’t say how they should, given that they don’t control the vaccination data because the delivery of healthcare is a provincial jurisdiction. These particular details matter, and you can’t just handwave them away. We need to start pressing Singh for details, because his answers aren’t good enough, and if he’s going to present himself as a serious contender for government, he needs to be asked the implementation questions so that he can answer them – and be made to answer them.

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Roundup: Curious demands for suspended campaigns

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The situation in Kabul seems to have had a secondary effect during the campaign, which have been repeated calls for the prime minister and/or affected ministers to suspend their campaigns in order to deal with the crisis. While it sounds like a good idea, I can’t help but feeling that this is strictly performative, especially given the situation on the ground.

For starters, having them in Ottawa at this point wouldn’t make that much of a difference, as the vast majority of civil servants are still working from home, and these ministers have just been through a year of remote or hybrid Parliament, and managed to do their duties from home for much of that, so why they couldn’t just keep doing it during this situation – and by all accounts that’s what they are doing – just strikes me as odd, but again, this instinct of performativity – being seen to be looking like they’re doing the job, as opposed to just doing it. And it’s not like they would be micro-managing the civil servants processing these approvals either, so again, I’m not sure why the need to suspend their campaigns is really there. The prime minister attended a G7 teleconference while on the road, other ministers have been providing daily briefings to the press from their homes over the past week or so, so again, there doesn’t seem to be a genuine need to suspend.

Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh is declaring the airlift mission to be a “failure” without necessarily understanding the situation on the ground, while Erin O’Toole, with his military experience, is simply proclaiming that he would have had “a plan,” as though any plan survives the first engagement. It was a fast-moving situation where we didn’t have assets of our own on the ground and were reliant on our allies, who weren’t necessarily dependable in their own right – made all the opaquer by the need for operational security. Of course, their real goal is to make the current government look like they’ve been incompetent on the file, and while I will agree that some of what happened can be attributed to our culture of risk-aversion, I think we need to try and keep some of the context of the situation in mind, rather than jumping to knee-jerk conclusions.

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Roundup: The “brother” meltdown

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Because we’re in an election and it ramps up the absolute stupidity across the board, we had another so-called “gaffe” that made a bunch of people performatively lose their minds, and I can’t even, you guys.

In a press conference about the situation in Afghanistan, Maryam Monsef, the minister responsible for the status of women and gender equality and a former refugee from Afghanistan, who fled when she was a child, made a direct address to the Taliban about letting people out of the country, and used the term “brothers.” And people lost their gods damned minds. She was asked about it and said that the context was cultural and she absolutely considers them to be terrorists, and yet the insinuation persists that, somehow, she was using the term as being sympathetic to a group that is diametrically opposed to everything she is about. WTF.

https://twitter.com/ChrisGNardi/status/1430565362265907205

And I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to suggest that there was a racist or Islamophobic undercurrent in the media even questioning that she was somehow trying to be sympathetic to the Taliban. Because seriously, you think that somehow Monsef personally, or the Trudeau government, is going to be “soft on terror,” or some other bullshit like this? Are these the tropes by which we will repeatedly fall back into, because we have learned nothing over the past twenty years? Apparently not, especially when it’s all being done to put on a show. It’s pretty gross, you guys. Do better.

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Roundup: Cherry-picking and one-upping policy

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There was a definite whiff of cynicism with the Liberals’ latest announcement, this time around housing, and it is starting to look like their election platform is to cherry-pick what the other two main parties have done and try to either one-up those policies, or extend the existing Budget 2021 framework with these rival policies in mind. So that’s going well.

On the other side, you have both Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh proclaiming that Trudeau had that six years could fix the housing affordability crisis, because apparently, it’s that easy to solve – and while Justin Trudeau did call them out in saying that anyone who thinks it can be solved in a snap doesn’t understand the depth of the crisis, and he’s right. He’s also right to point out that they had a big hill to climb when it comes to re-engaging the federal government on housing with agreements with the provinces, and they’ve been getting there, and accelerating a lot of that funding through the pandemic, but there has been little acknowledgement that the biggest bottlenecks to building more housing is coming from the municipal governments. It’s one of the reasons why the federal dollars for housing aren’t getting spent – projects can’t get approved at the municipal level. Now, the Liberals do have something to address this in their platform, which is a $4 billion fund that essentially seeks to bribe these councils into approving projects, but it is being argued that this won’t help those municipalities where this is a problem by very much, and it may be easier to go to the provinces to amend their own municipal parent legislation to remove some of these regulatory barriers from their end. Of course, that’s another case of “working with provinces,” though in this case, they may be more motivated than on other files.

This being said, nothing any of the parties are going to do is likely to help affordability anytime soon – especially because the problems for increasing the housing supply are dependent on eliminating those bottlenecks, and ensuring there is sufficient labour to build the houses, and in the major markets where this housing is most needed, that may be a problem in and of itself (especially if you want to attract that labour from other provinces, but they can’t afford a place to live when they arrive). And especially because nobody wants to piss off existing homeowners, who want their current home equity to keep appreciating, never mind that it just continues to make the problem worse. But politics is about tough choices, so we’ll see who can make reasonable ones.

In the meantime, here’s Jennifer Robson in this long thread recounting the last time a federal government tried a home buyers’ savings account, and Mike Moffatt gives his take on these announcements.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1430253010618355727

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1430254029729378307

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1430254668458991620

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1430255115085156356

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1430256554561974276

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Roundup: Considerations on the private delivery debate

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The accusations and sanctimony from that video continued to reverberate around the campaign yesterday, with the Liberals defending the video and its edits, while the Conservatives wrote to the Commissioner of Elections to have it taken down, and really, we’re all the dumber for it.

It did keep the debate on healthcare going throughout the day, and while I do have a column on this coming out later today, I’ll make a few additional observations, which is that there are nuances to the debate around private delivery, and one of them is how stringently the federal government enforces the Canada Health Act when it comes to that enforcement. There are concerns that the Conservatives’ pledge to increase health transfers with no strings attached is a signal that they are willing to allow more private delivery, whereas the Liberals are starting to resume clawbacks of health transfers in proportion to fees collected from private delivery, as they paused those clawbacks during the pandemic so as to give provinces as many resources as possible (though one could argue that the federal government could have played harder ball). An example is Clinic 554 in New Brunswick, which is a private abortion clinic as the province won’t pay for its services, citing that the province is already sufficiently covered with the three hospitals that provide the service (which is disputed as the Clinic is in Fredericton, where the service is not provided publicly). The federal government was clawing back health transfers related to fees that people paid to the clinic, but stopped when the pandemic hit. It looks like this is going to start in Saskatchewan and Manitoba with private delivery of services in those provinces.

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Roundup: Debating the “manipulated media” tag

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Because this campaign is already reaching levels of stupid that are hard to comprehend, we got into the supposed health care debate portion over the weekend, with Chrystia Freeland tweeting clips of Erin O’Toole responding to a question where he praises certain elements of privatizing healthcare – apparently to help “drive efficiencies” – but what the clip didn’t show was him saying that he still felt universal healthcare was paramount. And while this raged back and forth over social media, Twitter slapped the “manipulated media” tag over the French version of the video (but not the English, leading to some speculation that it was because of the subtitles), and lo, did all of the Conservatives on social media have a field day.

Of course, said field day simply outlines their own hypocrisy, as they went into the weekend widely sharing shitposts of Justin Trudeau saying he doesn’t think about monetary policy – while having truncated the clip so that you don’t hear him talking about affordability. It’s a game they’ve long played (hello, the truncated quote of “budgets balance themselves” anyone?) so they can’t claim to be the wounded party here, and their wounded tones about Freeland proving she wasn’t such a statesman after all is all partisan bullshit, and yet, we’re in a campaign so it’s not wholly unexpected. But seriously, guys, tone down the sanctimony – and the gloating.

Meanwhile, a couple of reminders when it comes to the healthcare debate:

https://twitter.com/tammyschirle/status/1429525317866115079

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1429546698184003589

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Roundup: Let’s just ignore the toxic spring

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We are coming out of the first week of the campaign, and we still see a bunch of pundits and talking heads questioning why the Liberals called it in the first place, and I have to wonder just how much they paid attention to what went on during the last session of Parliament. It was a toxic environment – the most toxic I have seen in over a decade. Non-money bills didn’t advance for months because of procedural warfare, and at least one pandemic support bill was months late in being able to deliver for people who needed it. Committees were holding witch-hunts and the civil service was busy sending millions of pages to committees on wild goose chases. But did anyone bother to explain this? Not really, because then it would become a “process story,” which we are supposed to be allergic to. Putting the events of the spring into context, along with some of the considerations about timing (there are municipal elections in Quebec and Alberta in October) should be part of the media’s job, so that we’re not just being stenographers to what the parties are telling us (so we can then both-sides it). But that might be too much effort.

Of course, this is Justin Trudeau, and while he was perfectly happy to point out the obstruction on the days leading up to dissolution, once the campaign started, he was all about his upbeat, positive narratives, and talking about people being given a say in the “most important election since 1945,” because that’s his campaign persona and style – upbeat, upbeat, upbeat. Happy-clappy at all times. That doesn’t mean that those of us who follow Parliament can’t look past it and point out what was going on.

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Roundup: A debasing “debate” on inflation

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Because sometimes this is a media criticism blog, I find myself outraged at the hack job that Power & Politics has been doing on this bullshit story about inflation, and it’s turned to being completely irresponsible. Yesterday was a perfect example of how shows like this are more interested in horserace bullshit than they are in economics, and lo, for an MP panel, the host wanted each party to give a single example of how their party would tackle inflation, even if it’s a complex issue, and lo, each MP gave a pitch to their party’s platform. Nothing about monetary policy and the Bank of Canada and its mandate – nothing. Just parties serving up their talking points to one another. So enlightening! Later, during the “Power Panel,” said host kept saying “we’re not going to talk about monetary policy” when talking about inflation, and that makes about as much sense as talking about climate change while declaring you’re not going to talk about GHG emissions. It’s kind of central to the point.

More to the point, the show – and several other outlets – used a truncated quote from Justin Trudeau to frame his response in a misleading way. To wit, the question he was asked by Bloomberg:

 You mentioned the Bank of Canada’s mandate, that mandate is expiring at the end of this year. If re-elected, the review, or the extension of the mandate is probably the first big economic policy decision you will make after the election. There is some talk of allowing the Bank of Canada to make some tweaks to its mandate to give it the flexibility to tolerate higher inflation and help the economy a little bit more at this difficult time. Do you have a position on the mandate? Would you support a slightly higher tolerance for inflation?

And Trudeau’s answer:

I don’t know. When I think about the biggest, most important economic policy that this government, if re-elected, would move forward, you’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy. You’ll understand that I think about families. When we first got elected in 2015, the very first thing we did was raise taxes on the wealthiest one per cent so we could lower them for the middle class. Similarly, if re-elected, the Liberal government will continue to invest in supports for families, for students, for seniors. Investing in housing, because we know that it is not right that so many people right here in the Lower Mainland and indeed across the country can’t afford their first home. We know that these are the policies that make a difference in the growth of our country, in the jobs people get, and the opportunities people have to grow and prosper. That is what we will stay focused on.

The clear implication is that he’s not focused on the Bank of Canada’s mandate, but on his own affordability agenda. But all anyone picked up on was “I don’t think about monetary policy,” and turning that into him being flip, and the host of P&P went so far as to compare it to Trudeau saying that budgets balance themselves – itself a truncated quote, where the original line, when asked about a commitment to balancing the budget, was: “The commitment needs to be a commitment to grow the economy and the budget will balance itself.” Which is true. Erin O’Toole is making the same pledge in his platform.

While I yelled at the TV over Twitter, my reply column filled up with assertions that the show was in the tank for the Conservatives, or that they were out to get Trudeau, but that’s not really the case. They’re not really in the tank for anyone – they want to get clips that will generate headlines and simplistic narratives, and that’s why they ask inflammatory questions designed to give explosive answers, and why they truncate quotes to be as sensational as possible. Part of this is the current host’s fault – she’s a reporter who is geared toward getting a “gold quote” out of people rather than a nuanced understanding of the situation. A bigger problem is the people who produce the show, who are more concerned with partisan talking heads giving simplistic and facile responses than actually understanding what is going on, and they’ve chosen the laziest, least-effort format to fill air time and generate some kind of spark of interest, which is usually partisans sniping at one another. Yes, it’s a big problem for our civic literacy, and it hurts our media literacy as well. Nobody was served by the “debate” on inflation, particularly as there was no context to what it was about, or what monetary policy means, and all it did was make everyone dumber. This kind of “journalism” has become a scourge.

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