Tag Archives: Justin Trudeau

Roundup: Concern over student measures

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau’s daily presser was shorter than usual – not much news other than the fact that the legislation for student measures would be coming up that afternoon, and oh yeah, the Snowbirds would be doing flyovers across the country as a salute to front-line workers, which immediately got everyone up in arms over how useless it was (but one suspects it’s also about finding a way for them to keep up their flying hours while airshows are grounded pretty much for the rest of the year). During the Q&A, there were yet more questions on trying to goad some kind of federal strong-arming the provinces over re-openings and to have their guidelines include “hard numbers,” whereas Trudeau kept falling back on “foundational elements” and consultations, and of course jurisdictional differences. He also wouldn’t say that he would mandate that meat-packing plants stay open given that there have been outbreaks in several of them (and pre-pandemic, one major plant had been shut down because it couldn’t pass inspection). He also said that there were discussions with the CFL given that they are likely going to have to cancel their season, which again had people grousing about the possibility of a bailout there (though as far as professional sports in this country goes, I would hazard to say that the CFL is one of the least dominated by millionaires).

And then there was the House of Commons. After the “special committee” met in-person in the Chamber for their designated two-and-a-half hours, things shifted to a regular-ish sitting, with the Speaker in robes and in the Big Chair, and the Mace on the table, to discuss the bill on the student measures. This one seems to have been a bit more controversial than other measures, because the Conservatives were demanding that it include measures to ensure that students would still look for jobs (in the middle of a global pandemic, no less) because it’s terrible that they could get paid for staying at home (in the middle of a global pandemic), while the NDP were howling that the measures weren’t as generous as the CERB, forgetting that if students had made more than $5000 last year because they worked enough, they were eligible for the CERB, and this student programme was intended for those who had different circumstances, while also being paired with other enriched benefits. Nevertheless, the government did relent and ensured that a ticky-box would be added to the student application portal to attest that yes, they were looking for a job, while they did increase the benefit levels for students with disabilities or dependants. Crisis averted. The bill heads to the Senate, but not until Friday, for some unknown reason.

I do find the insistence by the Conservatives and the Bloc that these students be forced to work on farms or the like to be problematic because we’ve heard from agricultural producers that this is usually specialized work, and you can’t just send untrained students to do it (which kind of goes to the point about why we should pay the migrant workers with the specialized knowledge more, and ensure that they have pathways to citizenship). As for the pearl-clutching that students might make more on the government wage replacements for the duration of the pandemic instead of taking low-paid jobs that with no guarantee of safety in the course of a pandemic, it does make me wonder if part of that lesson isn’t actually that maybe employers should be offering higher wages rather than demanding that the government enforce their being artificially low. But hey, since when does basic economics enter into the equation?

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Roundup: The Committee Zoom™

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For his Tuesday presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau noted the reports of his mother being sent to hospital when her apartment building in Montreal caught fire, and assured everyone that he had spoken to her and that she is doing fine. There wasn’t much in the way of news to share – noting that new federal modelling numbers for the course of the pandemic would be released shortly (and they were, with the same obligatory dumb questions as though these were predictions and not tools for planning purposes), and that their federal guidelines would also be forthcoming later in the day (and they too were). The Q&A was mostly focused on attempts to get Trudeau to say whether or not he would make any potential COVID-19 vaccine mandatory, some obligatory Francophone outrage that some of the personal protective equipment coming into the country didn’t have French labelling, and several attempts for him to give his personal opinion on whether he would send his kids to school if they were reopened when Quebec’s intend to be (which he dodged repeatedly, talking about science and evidence).

And then came the Great Virtual Committee Meeting – which was not a sitting of the House of Commons as so many people kept calling it. I settled on Committee Zoom™ as what I was going to call it, for what it’s worth. It started off with a ministerial statement from Patty Hajdu, followed by each other party offering a response of equal length, none of which had any bearing on what she was talking about, because we don’t actually debate in this country any longer – we just read prepared speeches past one another. After a brief interruption for petitions, we got down to the questions – five-minute rounds started with Scheer (who was the only leader to ask questions; Jagmeet Singh was wholly absent from the entire day), and then distributed through the parties in what appeared to be the QP rotation list that included obsequious backbench suck-up questions from the Liberals. But it was glitchy – lots of mute button errors, interruptions when MPs didn’t mute properly, constant challenges with the translation channels and which channel the MP was speaking on (some of those points of order leading to huge digressions as points mounted), a couple of Ministers whose connections were poor and made for very bad sound (spare a thought for the poor transcriptionists in Hansard),

Of course, everyone’s takeaway seems to be just how civil the whole thing was, and that there was no heckling. The closest we got was when Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner was fairly aggressively asking questions and interrupting the responses she felt were taking too long. But without the clapping (which needs to die regardless) and the heckling, everyone has taken up with the impression that this was somehow preferable to QP. It’s not. Sure, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith has a point about the questions being generally better, but this was also the function of it not being on a 35-second clock, which QP needs to do away with as it is. That would help matters immensely. But the flip-side of this format is that ministers were able to give non-sequitur talking point answers that had nothing to do with what was asked of them (particularly the ones around tax havens), which is one of the places where heckling in the Chamber would actually help get that point across. Heckling doesn’t need to be just the jeering, hooting baboons that it can be (and yes, it absolutely can be). As well, there is a need for some theatre in politics, and I don’t see the long-term benefit of being robbed of it by trying to make this a more permanent feature as people are already salivating at the prospect of. The unintended consequences will be far worse than you can possibly imagine.

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Roundup: Commercial rent relief on the way

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For his Friday presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau at long last unveiled the details of the commercial rent relief programme, now that they have ironed out the details with the provinces (considering that it’s their jurisdiction), which is essentially that commercial landlords (for properties where the rent is below a certain threshold) need to offer 75 percent discounts on their rent from April to June, and the federal government would provide non-repayable loans of up to fifty percent of said rents. From there, he mentioned that they were deploying Canadian Armed Forces personnel to certain long-term care facilities in Ontario and Quebec, and that they were working to beef up the salaries of existing long-term care workers. He also said that they were working with provinces and territories to establish guidelines for when they re-open their economies, but that people need to pay attention to the local rules and not those in other jurisdictions, because the outbreaks are different in each region. (During the First Ministers’ weekly teleconference later in the day, there was some agreement to this, and apparently each province and territory will be submitting their plans to the federal government).

Of course, with the news that there was an agreement on commercial rents, we got some fairly usual voices caterwauling that all rents needed to be dealt with, not just commercial ones. The response to that, of course, is to talk to one’s premier, because that’s where the responsibility lies – Trudeau can’t just swoop in because landlord and tenant legislation is strictly provincial, and the mechanisms they employed for the commercial rent relief are not necessarily suited for residential properties. And there was word today that Doug Ford wants the federal government to step in on residential rents – after he has been spectacularly unwilling to do anything and tells people to work it out with their landlords – so if there is more uptake with his fellow premiers in the next few days, they may try to design something, though I’m not sure exactly what, because I worry that there may be a bigger domino effect throughout the banking sector, but there are no quick fixes. And no, the national housing strategy does not give federal jurisdiction over rents, nor does the Canada Health Act provide a template for rent either, because there are no funding agreements with the provinces, nor would the federal government simply be transferring a pot of money to the provinces for residential rents. It’s complex, there are big jurisdictional issues, and Trudeau can’t and shouldn’t do everything. The provinces have a role to play and they should play it.

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Roundup: Sorrow and motions

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As the various party leaders lined up, one after another, to give their positions before the microphones on yesterday’s return of the House of Commons, prime minister Justin Trudeau devoted his presser to the mass-shooting in Nova Scotia and the loss of an RCMP constable, including a direct address to children as part of his speech. More controversially, Trudeau made a plea to media not to name the killer and give him the “gift of infamy,” which became the subject of many a column the rest of the day. During the Q&A, he insisted he didn’t want to fight about the return of the Commons, while also saying that the government was not backing away from its plans to enact further gun control measures.

Not far away, the Commons resumed its sitting with a skeleton complement, kicking off with Green MP Paul Manly immediately launching a point of privilege to complain that their health and safety was being jeopardized by the sitting, and it impacted on the ability of MPs who faced travel restrictions to participate. (Manly’s point was later rejected by the Speaker). After a very surreal QP, and more speeches on the Nova Scotia shooting, the vote was held and it was decided that there would be in-person sittings on Wednesdays starting next week, with planned 90-minute “virtual” sittings on Tuesdays and Thursdays – you know, assuming that they can actually get them up and running. Also, those sessions would not be regular sittings of the Commons, but would qualify as “special committee” sessions that would be devoted to two-and-a-quarter-hour-long sessions to ask questions of the government.

Throughout this whole debate, I keep shaking my head at the fact that they insist that they don’t want MPs to keep travelling, or how MPs from regions with travel restrictions can’t participate, but nobody can apparently fathom that MPs could travel to Ottawa, and then *gasp* stay there! You know, like they have housing allowances and per diems that facilitate it. This insistence on once-per-week sittings means that there will be all kinds of unnecessary travel, travel that MPs from those regions can’t participate in (or at least not easily), and it needlessly complicates this whole affair when we could have more easily kept a skeleton parliament with these MPs who stay in Ottawa present, and just ensured that you had a representative sampling that includes MPs from those otherwise hard-to-travel-to-and-from regions so they don’t have to travel back-and-forth. It’s revolutionary, I know. None of this is rocket science, and yes, it involves some sacrifice on the part of these MPs, but no worse than some of our essential healthcare workers who also can’t see their families during this crisis.

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Roundup: Some kind of return to Parliament

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For his Sunday presser, as news from Nova Scotia was filtering in, Justin Trudeau largely delivered a greatest hits compilation – but the kind where there aren’t any new tracks, just a remix. He mentioned the creation of a disability advisory group and that the Canadian Rangers were headed to two more Quebec Indigenous communities, but that was it for news. But the real question was about whether Parliament would indeed be returning today or not, and Trudeau tried to paint a completely disingenuous picture that unless a deal was struck – and the Conservatives were not budging – that all 338 MPs would be on planes to come back to Ottawa.

Erm, except that wasn’t true at all. The parties had already decided that it wasn’t going to play out that way, and that only a handful of MPs would return to Ottawa regardless of the circumstances. As for virtual sittings, Trudeau said that they proposed one in-person sitting and one virtual sitting per week, later bumped up to two (apparently to be set up like the UK is doing – a hybrid of some MPs in the Chamber, the rest coming in by video), but oh wait – they’re not actually set up to do that anytime soon, nor has the Procedure and House Affairs Committee set out any provisional rules or guidelines for that to happen. And then there’s the problem where a number of MPs have spotty Internet to begin with – which is made worse by the strain on the system by everyone staying home and streaming Netflix or other video – and you have a recipe for more Privilege violations as MPs can’t participate in sittings like they’re supposed to.

But here’s the thing – everyone claiming that this is some kind of Conservative trap, and even some of my more credulous colleagues claiming that this could mean that the Conservatives could suddenly have enough MPs to pull a non-confidence vote, doesn’t have a basic grasp of parliamentary procedure. The government still controls the agenda, and any opposition party would need to provide at least 24 hours’ notice of a motion of non-confidence if they were foolish enough to try and propose one in the middle of a global pandemic. And even though Andrew Scheer may be a smirking, braying doofus, he’s not so suicidal as to try to topple the government in the middle of a global pandemic (especially when he’s no longer the permanent party leader). No, the Conservatives can’t hold up any business because most of what’s going to happen is some quasi-Question Period “accountability sessions,” probably under the aegis of Committee of the Whole, and if – big if – they’re feeling ambitious, they can debate some of the other bills on the Order Paper, but that’s unlikely to be the case. Everyone needs to calm the eff down. Parliament is an essential service, and MPs can do it with proper physical distancing better than the grocery store workers out there right now.

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Roundup: Trying to blame the WHO

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Andrew Scheer was again out first yesterday morning to repeat his call for in-person sittings in the House of Commons (which Elizabeth May somehow claims is mere partisanship, which I don not grasp), before Scheer went off on tangents about the WHO, because apparently he thinks that following Trumpian logic is a winning plan. (The Conservatives on the Commons health committee have also been aggressively trying to “get answers” on misinformation from China laundered through the WHO).

Prime minister Justin Trudeau was up next for his daily presser, wherein he laid out plans to expand the CERB to those who make less than $1000 and seasonal workers, as well as those whose EI has run out, and promised wage top-ups for those essential workers who make less than $2500/month, but still no news on help for students and commercial rent (which one assumes is in partnership with the provinces). He also noted the assistance that the Canadian Forces as providing in Nunavut and in Northern Quebec. During the Q&A, Trudeau refused to get involved in the WHO debate, for what it’s worth.

Meanwhile, the issue of long-term care in Ontario was getting much more scrutiny, and it turns out that out of 626 facilities in the province, a mere nine got an inspection last year. Nine. Because the province moved to a “risk-based” system, which apparently means that there is only an investigation after a complaint is filed. So that’s totally fine, and one more sign about the complete mismanagement of the Ford government (that people seem to be forgetting when they praise Ford “stepping up” to the current pandemic challenge).

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Roundup: Long-term care and quarantine

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Andrew Scheer was out first this morning, saying that he was trying to get some kind of a deal with the government on how to bring parliament back next week as they are scheduled to, and that he wants in-person sittings of some variety to ensure ongoing accountability (and he’s right). But when asked about bringing his family on that flight when they weren’t planning on them being there (and apparently Senator Don Plett had to get a different flight because it was suddenly full with Scheer’s family), he brushed off said questions. He then spent the rest of the day raising “serious concerns” about the WHO and its recommendations (recall that Jason Kenney on Monday accused Dr. Theresa Tam of repeating talking points from the People’s Republic of China), because what the world needs right now is to hew to the Trumpian instincts to undermine international institutions.

Next up was prime minister Justin Trudeau for his daily presser, in which he announced that four planes full of N95 masks have arrived and are in the process of being validated and distributed, before he brought up $130 million of new funding for the northern territories, including more money for healthcare, for Nutrition North, for northern air carriers, and money for the CanNor development agency. He also noted that they were working to enhance the Canada Emergency Business Account programme and were looking into something about commercial rent (though that’s provincial jurisdiction, so not sure what the federal government could do). As if that weren’t enough, he also raised that they were strengthening some of the measures under the Quarantine Act, as well as boosting the capacity of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, particularly when it comes to ensuring there are more inspectors on the line. Oh, and he didn’t offer any apologies for his trip to Harrington Lake on the weekend, so there was also that. When asked about the issue of long-term care facilities (which is provincial jurisdiction), Trudeau did say they were working with the provinces to see about sending some additional funds to bolster salaries, so there’s also that.

Meanwhile, Vancouver’s city council tried to meet “virtually,” and here’s how that went down, in case anyone thinks it would actually go any better with 338 MPs in parliament.

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Roundup: Playing gotcha with the leaders

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Yesterday had no presser from prime minister Justin Trudeau, but did have a ministerial presser featuring Marie-Claude Bibeau and Deb Schulte. Bibeau laid out additional measures and funding for employers of temporary foreign workers in the agri-food sector so that they can properly quarantine those workers when they arrive, and eventually properly explained the measures taken with the arrivals that the Bloc lit their hair on fire about on Saturday (which the government could have done three days ago had they been more competent in their communications). Schulte spoke about the new federal guidelines for long-term care facilities, but because it’s provincial jurisdiction, they’re hoping the provinces implement said guidelines (but no, they don’t really have any levers to force them because of the constitutional division of powers).

Of course, all anyone could talk about today was the fact that Justin Trudeau *gasp* went to see his wife and kids at Harrington Lake (where they have been staying since Sophie Grégoire Trudeau’s recovery) over the weekend, which people claim is in contravention to public health dictates. Erm, except that’s not really true because Harrington Lake is an official residence that is 20 minutes outside of Gatineau. It’s a gods damned suburb where people live year-round. It’s not cottage country where you have small populations and poor public health services that people are attempting to flee to and exposing the locals when they raid the area store on the way up. That was the behaviour that Public Health was warning against, but hey, let’s try to play gotcha.

And then there was Andrew Scheer, who decided to bring his wife and kids with him back to Ottawa on the government jet sent to pick him up for the Saturday sitting. It was supposed to be Elizabeth May, Carla Qualtrough and Scheer, where they could each physically distance on the plane, but with Scheer bringing his family (to spend the rest of the current pandemic period at Stornoway rather than in Regina, where they had been) at the last minute, and May and Qualtrough opted not to be dicks about saying no. (May and Qualtrough were flown back to BC after Saturday, for the record). It may say something about Scheer’s particular sense of entitlement, and that perhaps he should have made arrangements clearer beforehand so perhaps a different plane could have been sent, but the accusations between partisan camps over this is about as mature as we’ve come to expect during a global pandemic.

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Roundup: Disconnected speeches before swift passage

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The daily routine of our pandemic times got a bit of a shake-up this morning as the ministerial presser took place at 11:15 instead of the prime minister’s, and topics included questions on temporary foreign workers being quarantined (or not), and discussions with the provinces about taking action on long-term care facilities, which have been hit hardest by this pandemic.

Shortly thereafter, the skeleton parliament met for its emergency legislation deliberations, if we can call it that. Justin Trudeau led off, raising the history of Vimy Ridge, his own grandfather’s service of going to war while still serving as an MP, and talking about how we needed to protect the Greatest Generation who are now in these long-term care facilities, vulnerable to the pandemic. Andrew Scheer followed with his own address, raising the spectre of the size of the deficit before patting himself on the back for all of the suggestions he’s offered the government this package. The other leaders followed in turn, before the Commons resolved itself to committee of the whole to question ministers in a quasi-Question Period for a lengthy period (the only real news being that Carla Qualtrough stated that they were looking at how to ensure that seasonal workers would also be able to benefit from the CERB), followed by speeches which seemed terribly disconnected from the substance of the bill. In fact, when the speeches ended, and they passed the bill at all stages by unanimous consent, it could be quite noticeable that they didn’t actually debate the bill itself – merely the current pandemic situation.

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The bill then headed to the Senate, where the only minister that Senators grilled for a couple of solid hours was Bill Morneau and his senior associate deputy minister, again largely on the generalities and not the specifics of the bill. Once Morneau left, they adopted the bill at Second Reading and then moved to the speeches during Third Reading, and it seems to me that pretty much every senator present got their own turn, some of them more disconnected from the bill than others. Eventually it too passed, and went on for a swift royal assent. The Senate did come to an agreement on two committees to meet virtually to provide some oversight – now that they allow non-affiliated senators to sit on them – as well as agreed to strike a special committee later on to provide a definitive post mortem on the pandemic.

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Roundup: More flexibility, no candour

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For his daily presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau announced that they were making their wage subsidy more flexible so that more employers can benefit, and that they were making changes to the Canada Summer Jobs Programme so that they will extend the work period to the end of February 2021 and subsidise the full wage. He also said that he was going to be attending Cabinet in person, his period of self-isolation now over, but that he would still continue to work from home most of the time. During the Q&A portion, the question came up for him a couple of times, and again during the ministerial presser, about why the government didn’t go with the “send cheques to everyone” model, and both Trudeau and Jean-Yves Duclos gave lousy responses. Trudeau said that they looked at different designs, and figured that the CERB was the best way to reach the largest number of affected workers, while the wage subsidy would keep people connected to their jobs, and with those in place, they could look at filling the gaps that people still fell through. Duclos acknowledged “holes” in the social security system that they were working to address and hoped that they would have a better understanding of those coming out of the crisis.

The problem with these responses is that they aren’t what is needed. They’re talking points that stick to happy and good news elements but they don’t offer the kind of candour that is needed around capacity issues and the fact that there is no magic database that has everyone’s SIN and address. You literally cannot just send money to everyone, and cutting cheques to the whole country would literally take months. (More from professor Jennifer Robson on those challenges here). And this lack of candour is a problem – a big problem that they keep shooting themselves in the foot over, and why I wrote my column on this over the weekend. But this government’s penchant for self-inflicted wounds is something to behold, because they are completely incapable of communicating their way out of a wet paper bag.

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Meanwhile, it sounds like the hold-up for the recall of Parliament to pass the wage subsidy legislation is that the Liberals want it to be done “virtually” (even though the Speaker says it could be weeks before that could even be feasible – though I would argue it’s not constitutional) while the Conservatives want the House to come back for regular sittings in a reduced capacity (which is what I’ve been arguing for weeks). Parliament is an essential service. The Liberals are being unreasonable on this one.

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