Tag Archives: Justin Trudeau

Roundup: An unusually partisan report

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The saga of Bill C-48 continues its strange trek through the Senate with the release of the report from the transport committee that recommended that the bill not proceed. Or at least that’s what it should have stated – that based on the tie vote, that the committee could not recommend the bill proceed. What they got instead was a lengthy screed about how allegedly terrible and the bill was for national unity, and it cherry picked comments from witnesses to “prove” that case, and strangely omitted any witnesses that stated – with facts – that the bill would have almost no impact on the energy industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In fact, the report was so partisan that it raised eyebrows among my sources in the Senate, who could not recall the last time that they had seen such a blatantly political document.

Naturally, not everyone on the committee was in favour of this report, and there are accusations back-and-forth about conversations regarding whether those who disagreed could write a dissenting report, and the eventual reluctance to bother because it would likely have tied things up in committee for even longer, as the clock ticks down. (Things are so bad on the Senate’s Order Paper that the need to sit well into July is now pretty much guaranteed). Of course, delaying this bill to death is part of the Conservative game plan, and everyone knows it – in fact, they pretty much have set up a situation where the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, will have to invoke time allocation to get it passed.

The shenanigans with this bill aren’t done yet. There will be a great deal of debate when this report gets debated in the whole Senate, where it is doubtlessly going to be rejected, but not without a great deal of noise and accusations that the Independents are just Liberal stooges, and so on. And it’s going to be so annoying when it’s all over.

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Roundup: Problematic leaked recommendations

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On Monday, the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women will give its final report, and judging from the leaked copy, there will be some consternation with the conclusions, particularly that it considers the deaths as the victims of a “Canadian genocide.” While previous inquiries and even statements by the former Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin, have used the term cultural genocide, this report allegedly drops the qualifier. That will likely be a hurdle because there would seem to be an implication that a genocide implies an organised effort – which there was on the cultural side (because it was inconceivable to think that they shouldn’t be converted to Christianity and “civilised” because that was the dominant cultural framework), but I think it will be hard to stretch that to deaths that are more attributable to poverty and intergenerational violence – we can’t forget that the vast majority of perpetrators of these deaths were Indigenous men (and that there are even larger numbers of Indigenous men who have are missing and murdered).

As for recommendations, the headline one also appears to be problematic – that instances of domestic violence against Indigenous women that result in death be regarded as first-degree murder – and that the use of “Gladue principles” be reviewed with cases of deaths of Indigenous women. That again will be problematic because the Supreme Court ruled on those principles as a way of addressing intergenerational violence that leads to higher rates of incarceration for Indigenous people, and again, if the majority of perpetrators of violence against Indigenous women are Indigenous men, does this recommendation then not demand that more Indigenous men be incarcerated? While the recommendation is rooted in the principles of denunciation and deterrence, I’m not sure that’s sufficient given the broader implications. As well, some of the recommendations like making Indigenous languages official and on par with English and French don’t seem to grasp the practical considerations of ensuring that there be federal services provided in 60 different Indigenous languages.

It also sounds like the government isn’t going to readily accept all of these recommendations Carolyn Bennett has been pre-consulting on what she’s been hearing out of the Inquiry, and she’s not in favour of harsher sentences because it goes against evidenced-based policy as to what is effective. She also noted that their bill on changing child welfare systems for Indigenous communities will do more to prevent the intergenerational violence that the current broken system does. We’ll see what the formal report and its apparent 230 recommendations entail, and what the government’s response will be, but this leak and Bennett’s response sounds like they won’t be endorsing the whole thing.

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Roundup: Alberta sends the wrong (price) signals

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It was Throne Speech day in Alberta, and sure enough, it contained an ambitious laundry list of upcoming legislation designed to undo much of what the NDP had put into place as a means of “restoring” the mythical Alberta Advantage. (Full speech here). Shortly thereafter, the promised Bill 1 to repeal the province’s carbon levy was introduced – pretty much guaranteeing that the federal carbon price will be imposed once the bill is enacted. It doesn’t repeal all of the carbon prices in the province, however – it merely shifts them to the largest polluters, which does nothing about the demand side of carbon consumption, and won’t shift consumer behaviours, nor will it do enough for those large emitters, because for all of Kenney’s talk about looking to protect the energy sector, he just shifted the bulk of the burden onto them. (It also won’t really help consumers because poorer households will be worse off now).

Meanwhile, here’s Andrew Leach to explain why Kenney’s repeal of the carbon price is handing a rhetorical victory to Ontario, and why the reliance on magical technology from the future to reduce emissions won’t happen if there aren’t proper price signals to spur its development.

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Roundup: Rationalizing a deciding vote

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Yesterday, Independent Senator Paula Simons wrote a piece for Maclean’s to explain her vote last week that essentially ensured that the Senate’s transport committee would not vote to report Bill C-48 (the west coast tanker ban) back to the Senate without amendments. It’s a mere delay to the bill, ultimately, and it’s likely that the full Senate will vote to reject the committee report and may entertain another amendment or two at Third Reading, but I would be mighty surprised if this bill didn’t get pass largely unmolested. But as much as I do respect the good Senator, I will take exception to a few of the things she wrote in her piece.

The biggest thing I will always, always object to is when senators say that it’s not their job to defeat bills passed by the democratically elected House of Commons. That’s false – it’s absolutely their job under the Constitution – that’s why it has an unlimited veto. The question is when they should use it, and I’m not sure that this is a good example of a bill, because it doesn’t fail any particular constitutional tests (Jason Kenney’s nonsense rhetoric aside). But for as much as Simons prevaricates on the question of how appropriate it is to block bills in the newly empowered “independent” mindset of the Senate (insert more back-patting about the lack of whips here), she then says that the other tradition is to defend her region, which she did. I have reservations about this line of thinking, because it gives rise to parochialism and some of the flawed thinking that gave rise to a bogus school of thought that believed that a “Triple-E” Senate could somehow force the hand of a government with a majority in the Commons (rather than just become a repository for 105 new backbenchers). If she really were defending her region, she should remember that her region includes BC, whose northern coast the bill is intended to defend. As well, her concerns ignore the process that Trans Mountain has been undergoing for the past year – just because it hasn’t started construction doesn’t mean it won’t, and trying to provide an alternate route that was proved far more problematic in the past – witness the Federal Court of Appeal decision regarding Northern Gateway – I’m now sure that she’s doing anyone any favours by letting the rhetoric of Kenney and the oil industry dominate her thinking.

In the meantime, we should brace ourselves for another round of obnoxious talk about the “Salisbury Convention” (which doesn’t apply to Canada and never has), and about the original intent of the Senate. It won’t be edifying.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1130956002029916162

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Roundup: An economic vision without an economic case

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Andrew Scheer gave the second of his policy keynote speeches yesterday, this one on his economic vision, and as could be expected, it was full of hyperbolic declarations about the size of the deficit (it’s tiny in comparison to our GDP), and the state of Canadian household finances (which have been growing). He promised that any new spending programmes would have to be paid for out of government “savings,” and in his pledge to balance the budget in two years, that would mean cuts. Of course, Conservative mouthpieces say this is easily enough achieved because they did it before (forgetting of course that the previous government had a habit of booking savings that were never going to be achieved for the sake of getting to a paper balance, like Shared Services Canada, or the Phoenix Pay System). The Liberals, incidentally, were quick to put out Bill Morneau to put a price tag on those cuts and warn that they would come out of families, and with the spectre of seeing what Doug Ford is doing to those families in Ontario, well, it’ll make things harder for Scheer.

The part that everyone talked about, however, was his grand vision of an “energy corridor” across the country where pipeline projects would magically cross the country with buy-in from Indigenous communities and everyone would be happy and prosperous, and we would have energy security and would never had to import oil from Saudi Arabia ever again. The problem with this fantasy picture, however, is largely economics. Even if Energy East were to get built, by some miracle, it would not have an economic case given that it wouldn’t be used for domestic oil in the eastern provinces as it would be far more expensive than the oil they’re importing. In fact, Energy East did not make it off the drawing board because there was no economic case – it wasn’t because there was opposition in Quebec (which has already achieved some kind of mythical status), but because there was no economic rationale for the company given that Keystone XL was back on the table. Scheer’s promise (other than the fantasy of it even happening) is that Alberta will either have to take a huge discount per barrel of oil, or oil prices in the eastern provinces start taking a major jump because they’re paying a lot more for it, and upgrade it from heavy petroleum and refine it (in refineries that would have to have been refitted, likely with yet more taxpayer subsidies). But since when should logic or basic economics be part of an “economic vision”? That would be silly.

Chris Selley offers a critique of Scheer’s rhetoric, but finds it more astonishing that it’s the Liberals’ own self-inflicted damage that is putting Scheer in a position where he has a reasonable shot of winning.

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Roundup: A blow to the tanker ban bill

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The Senate’s transport committee voted last night to not proceed with Bill C-48, which bans tankers on BC’s northwest coast, but before anyone gets too excited, I would caution that it’s not the bill’s end. We just saw the Senate’s national security committee recommend changes to the gun control bill that would gut it, and those got overturned by the Senate as a whole, and I suspect we’ll see a repeat performance of that with this bill – but the Conservatives will put up a fight, and because this was one of the bills that they did not offer a final vote timeline in their agreement with the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, they will dare him to invoke time allocation on this. (I plan to write more about this in column form later).

In the meantime, Independent Senator Paula Simons was one of the deciding votes on this, and she explains it all over Twitter.

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Roundup: Fighting on the economy

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There are a couple of interesting threads out on the wires right now about the direction that the government is headed in as we head toward an election, and one of them is that Liberals in Ontario would rather their party fight the election based on the economy rather than the environment – this as the Liberals and NDP are trying to compete as to who can talk a better game on climate in order to head off the surge in Green Party support in the polls, and the recent Green by-election win. I’m sure this is going to be a very lively discussion behind the caucus room doors, and in the party’s election planning meetings, but that sentiment is clearly there.

At the same time, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Business Council of Canada are expressing some displeasure with the government, but as Paul Wells notes here, some of it is a bit…dubious, such as demanding balanced budgets and lower taxes while the Americans are fuelling their tax cuts with trillion-dollar deficits. Wells also noted that both of these lobby groups aren’t really acknowledging that much of the drag on our economy is caused by outside forces – namely the brewing trade war between the US and China, and before that, Donald Trump’s threats to tear up NAFTA – and that these groups have studiously avoided talking about climate and the need to deal with our emissions. Nevertheless, there is a malaise between Corporate Canada and the Liberals possibly because the party seems to be setting their Blue Liberal base loose as they try to move further to the left in order to claim the space the NDP usually occupies, and that may wind up costing them in the longer term, if history is any guide.

Kevin Milligan, meanwhile, finds himself a bit puzzled at how little these same Corporate Canada voices have acknowledged the very significant changes that the government made in the fall economic update to deal with the US tax changes.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1127275895859716096

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1127278184821444608

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Roundup: Surprising job numbers

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There were surprising economic numbers out yesterday – record job creation, and historic unemployment rate lows in Quebec, and nearing lows for youth unemployment. The government had obviously been preparing for the threshold of a million jobs created since they took office, because once it happened with this morning’s release, they were all over it, and everyone of them was pushing insufferable memes over their social media channels, and trying to wedge it into QP when they got bored of the Mark Norman scripts. And before you ask, no these jobs weren’t all in the public sector, but the majority were in the private sector and were full-time jobs, and were broad across different sectors that tested well, meaning that the data has less chance of being suspect as the month-over-month data can be.

This will set up a few different narratives as we careen toward the election – from the Liberals, it will be seen as proof that their plan for “investing in the middle class” is working, which will be key for their re-election message. While Andrew Scheer has attempted to claim that there was a jobs crisis in this country on several occasions – based in part on deliberately misconstruing StatsCan data – it’s never really stuck. Likewise, this pours a lot of cold water on the claims that the federal carbon price is a job-killer (though they would say that it remains too soon to tell). It also is on the road to completely disproving that said carbon price will drive the country into recession – in fact, it looks like the economy is picking back up steam after the slowdown related to the most recent oil price crash (which the Bank of Canada had always stated was due to temporary factors, though it spread a bit further than initially anticipated). That these job figures had other strong indicators like good wage growth in them, it bolsters the picture of that recovery, which should be back to solid growth by the time of the election. Of course, the Conservatives will try to point to the fact that the Americans are showing bigger job growth than we are, but it also bears reminding that they’ve juiced their economy with a trillion dollars in annual deficit spending, which puts Trudeau’s very small deficits in favourable comparison.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1126925907908808704

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1126929298563244032

I’m not sure that this will undo all of the damage the Liberals have been doing to themselves, and they’re going to inevitably be arrogant in how they communicate this economic good news, but they can at least point to good numbers.

https://twitter.com/SkepticRod/status/1125431876670255104

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Roundup: Beyak suspended

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It was inevitable, but the Senate has voted to suspend Senator Lynn Beyak without pay for the remainder of his Parliament in accordance with the recommendation from the Senate’s ethics committee after the findings of the Ethics Officer that letters Beyak posted to her website were racist and breached the ethics code for senators. Beyak got her chance to defend herself yesterday before the vote, and she insisted that she has done nothing wrong, that there’s nothing racist about the “truth” (as she sees it), and she thinks that her website is a beacon of positivity because she’s trying to assert that residential schools for Indigenous children weren’t all bad.

In terms of next steps, Beyak will likely reappear at the start of the next parliament, following the election, where she will be given another chance to apologise, and prove that she understands why those letters were racist (something she has been completely incapable of comprehending to date – and the Ethics Officer did point out that this was an issue of comprehension, not malice). At that point, if she still refuses to see the error of her ways, the Senate could revisit the matter and vote to suspend her again for that parliamentary session (meaning until there is a prorogation or dissolution), and if that extends past two years, there is the possibility that they could declare the seat vacant at that point. More likely will be pressure to simply vote to expel Beyak for the Senate because she has been unrepentant in exposing the Senate to disrepute for her racist actions – at which point she may get the hint and do the honourable thing and just resign, but she does seem to be sticking to her guns here. Regardless, this suspension is now the first stage in a two-stage process of dealing with the problem. But those who want Beyak to be out immediately will need to be patient, because the power to expel a senator can’t be used casually.

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Roundup: Green wins, and the AG’s report

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After the Green Party won their second seat in Monday night’s by-election in Nanaimo–Ladysmith, it was inevitable that we would be subjected to a litany of hot takes about what this means for the upcoming federal election, most of which I’m not going to bother reading because frankly, I’m not sure it means anything at all. The Greens have been doing well provincially on Vancouver Island, where this riding is, and more than that, this particular candidate was once an NDP candidate who was booted from the party (apparently for views about Israel), and when the Greens picked him up, he won for them, while the NDP vote collapsed. Add to that, Green wins in BC, New Brunswick and PEI were also predicated by incumbent governments who had been in place for a long time (well, in New Brunswick, it was a constant PC/Liberal swap), and that’s not necessarily the case federally. While Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh tried to spin this as “proof” that Canadians care about the environment (for which both will try to tout their party policies on the same) we can’t forget that Canadians want to do something about the environment in the same way that they want a pony – it’s a nice idea that nobody has any intention of following up on because it’s a lot of effort and mess. This has been proven time and again. I would also caution against the notion that this means that “progressive” votes are up for grabs, because the Greens, well, aren’t all that progressive. If you read their platform, it’s really quite socially conservative, and they had whole sections essentially written by “Men’s Rights Activists” because they have little to no adult supervision in their policy development process. So any hot takes you’re going to read about the by-election are probably going to be full of hot air (quite possibly this one as well).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1125798043905818624

Auditor General’s Report

The big news out of the Auditor General’s report was of course the backlog that the Immigration and Refugee Board faces regarding asylum claimants in Canada. The Conservatives, naturally, have jumped on this to “prove” that the current government has somehow broken the system, but every single expert that was cited over the day yesterday said that the Liberals inherited a system that was already broken (some went so far as to say that the Conservatives deliberately broke it in order to force a crisis that would allow them to adopt more draconian measures – though those backfired in a spectacular way, worsening the backlog), and that they have taken steps to increase the IRB’s resources. I wrote about some of these issues a while ago, and the IRB was starting to streamline some of their processes and start making use of technology like email (no, seriously) that cut down on some of the bureaucracy they were mired in – but as with anything, these kinds of changes take time to implement and have an effect. But expect the narrative of the “broken” system to continue in the run up to the election. Meanwhile, here are the other reports:

  • Half of Canadians who call a government call centre can’t get through, which is blamed on technology that was allowed to go obsolete
  • The RCMP are still not adequately prepared to deal with active shooter situations.
  • Our tax system hasn’t kept up with e-commerce and needs modernization
  • The mechanism to prevent governments from doing partisan advertising has little documentation and rigour.

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