Tag Archives: Justin Trudeau

Roundup: Too big to prosecute?

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So, yesterday was a bit of a day, wasn’t it? To recap – the Globe and Mail published a piece that cited unnamed sources that the PMO had leaned on then-justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to direct the Director of Public Prosecutions to abandon the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin as part of an ongoing corruption trial (related to Libyan contracts) so that they could take a deferred prosecution agreement instead – basically a plea deal administered by the courts, which the Director had thus far refused to do. (Note: For the Attorney General to make such a direction to Public Prosecutions, it must be done publicly and published in theCanada Gazette. This is not something that can happen on a whim). The story goes that Wilson-Raybould refused, and coincidentally she was shuffled from the post weeks later. Justin Trudeau refuted this, but because he strictly said that he and his office didn’t direct Wilson-Raybould or now David Lametti on this file, everyone parsed that as not saying he didn’t apply pressure, only for Lametti and every other Liberal put out on the file later in the day to add that he didn’t direct or put pressure on them. For what it’s worth.

https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1093545282858614785

Now, I have questions. If the PMO applied this pressure, it would be a Very Bad Thing. And we don’t know if they did or didn’t. However. The Globe story gets out the red ball of yarn and starts pinning lines between different items on the conspiracy map, and some of those items I have a problem with being there. One of those items is that the government passed amendments to the Criminal Code that enabled there to be deferred prosecution agreements back in the spring, and one of the “sources” that the Globe taps insists that this was done solely to benefit SNC-Lavalin. And I have a problem with that. Why? Because I wrote about those provisions back when they were being debated, and I spoke to a number of lawyers who specialise in white collar crime. If this had been solely for the benefit of SNC-Lavalin, I would have expected them to say that this makes no sense in the bigger picture, but they didn’t. Instead, they said that these changes barely had Canada keeping up with other comparable jurisdictions (and in fact, some said that they still kept us behind). The consensus was that these kinds of changes were long overdue. And there is a record of government consultations about this issue that produced a report. For this to be a “direct line” doesn’t hold any water. “Oh, but they lobbied!” Of course, SNC-Lavalin lobbied. It was in their interest to do so. That’s not a revelation, nor is it any indication that the government actually listened to them. They’re also trying to get judicial review of Public Prosecutions’ decision not to offer them a deferred prosecution, but that doesn’t mean they’ll get it either. We also need to remember the size of SNC-Lavalin, and how many thousands of jobs and billions of dollars they have on the line, particularly in Quebec, and if any party thinks that they’d “get tough” on them with that on the line, they’re deluding themselves. (This is part of the problem with oligopolies in Canada).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1093504225944965122

There is also the point about Wilson-Raybould in this. Many people, pundits included, are suddenly treating this story as some kind of exoneration for her demotion, and ignoring the fact that there were very real reasons for why she was replaced, many of which had to do with the fact that she wasn’t managing her office competently, and she was making questionable staffing choices in her own office. I have my own unnamed sources in the legal community who can point to her incompetence, and this is now being swept under because she’s suddenly being hailed as a hero – which is another reason why I have some suspicions about the source of this story (and why she hasn’t been in a hurry to offer any denials, only a “no comment”). The Globe story and its reporters are also trying to draw a line in her post-shuffle release about the justice system being free from political interference, but again, this was also taking place in the backdrop of the Meng Wanzhou extradition affair, and questions about the rule of law clanging around, so again, I have doubts that there is a direct connection.

So what next? Well, we can expect another few days of communications incompetence from Trudeau and the government because that’s what they do every single time something blows up on them, and eventually they’ll be forced to be more candid, but by then, everyone will have parsed everything to death and filled in the gaps with their own wild theories. Because this is a government that can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, and they make things worse for themselves every single time. There are demands for a police inquiry or a full public inquiry, but I have my doubts that Trudeau would call one so close to an election – but stranger things have happened.

Meanwhile, Chris Selley points to the shocking levels of cynicism that this whole story displays, while Susan Delacourt notes that the silence around Wilson-Raybould is allowing the “ring of truth” to overshadow a more complicated actual truth (and also hints to possible morale problems in the Liberal caucus). Paul Wells offers some withering analysis of what’s gone on with this, and the way this is reflecting on certain senior PMO staff, which could be a growing problem.

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QP: Treating a gaffe as gospel

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For caucus day, Andrew Scheer decided to show up for QP, and he led off in French, and he immediately zeroed in on yesterday’s verbal gaffe about low-income people not paying taxes, and Trudeau launched into a rant about the Conservatives gearing benefits to the wealthy while he was lowering taxes for the Middle Class™, enriching the Canada Child Benefit and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, all of which the Conservatives opposed. After they repeated the exchange in English, Scheer insisted that taxes were lower under the Conservatives, to which Trudeau said they were misleading the House, and that it was a fact they vote against the measures that would help Canadians. Scheer listed off tax credits that the Liberals cancelled, to which Trudeau slowly enunciate that non-refundable tax credits don’t help the low-income people who need the help. Scheer insisted that low-income people would have benefitted from those tax credits, but Trudeau shrugged off the attacks on his family fortune, before he talked about his choice to serve Canadians. Guy Caron was up next for the NDP, and in French, he railed about a pharmacare system that still lets private plans exist, to which Trudeau rattled off his talking points about their advisory council that was concerned with implementation. Caron insisted that a fully public system would provide economies of scale, and this time Trudeau picked up a script to list the “concrete steps” they took to make pharmaceuticals more affordable. Don Davies repeated Caron’s first question in English, and Trudeau repeated his first points in kind. Davies went again, and Trudeau replied with the English version of his script.

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Roundup: The myth about the tweet

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At a townhall event in Surrey, Andrew Scheer made a very big deal about the border and the “integrity” of our immigration system. At the centre of it is his invention is the mythology that the #WelcomeToCanada tweet two years ago somehow opened the floodgates. It’s ridiculous on its face, and it ignores the context during which that tweet happened – the recent election of Donald Trump, and the talk of the “Muslim ban” that was ramping up tensions and causing a spike of panic among asylum seekers and refugee claimants in the States, as well as a demonstrable rise in hate crimes. And we can’t forget that within days of this tweet, the Quebec City mosque shooting happened, from which there was a direct correlation drawn to the rhetoric of Trump and his surrogates around Muslims. Trudeau was attempting to take a different approach, and to highlight the decision to bring over Syrian refugees when Trump and his surrogates were insisting that it would be bringing in terrorists (recall the “poisoned Skittles” meme), but Scheer is choosing to ignore all of this.

And then there’s the entire mischaracterisation of the immigration and refugee determination systems, and the very deliberate conflation of the two. They’re separate, and are resourced separately, which makes the constant attempt to portray asylum seekers as somehow disadvantaging “legitimate” immigrants a deliberate attempt to turn immigrants against refugees and asylum seekers. Scheer will then insist that he’s not anti-refugee – that he’s met people in refugee camps who don’t understand why other people can cross the border and “jump the queue” – except of course that there isn’t an actual queue, but rather a process. In fact, those in the camps are usually chosen for resettlement by the UNHCR, and often done by private sponsorship – something that Scheer is a big fan of. In fact, during the Harper era, they reformed a lot of the refugee system to try and offload as much responsibility for resettlement onto the UNHCR, and to more heavily weight private sponsorship over government. (Note that Maxime Bernier is making a big deal about taking more responsibility for refugee determination away from the UN, which could create a wedge, or push Scheer to up his tinfoil hattery around the UN’s processes). Again, asylum seekers who cross the border are separate from those processes, and don’t have the same system impact, because it’s not Canadian officials doing most of the work. It’s another artificial dichotomy that ignores the context of the situation of these asylum seekers and seeks to again create divisions between people involved in those separate processes. Nothing about refugee claimants or asylum seekers is actually impacting the “integrity” of the immigration system – it’s a false dichotomy.

But it’s a wedge, and one built on lies, which is what Scheer is hoping for. Is there a cost to asylum seekers? Yes, absolutely. But we also need to remember that Canada is getting off extremely lightly by sheer virtue of our geography, surrounded by ocean on three sides and the US border on the other, which filters out the vast majority. Scheer shouldn’t expect sympathy from anyone about the influx we’ve seen (which, I remind you, is not out of step with historic norms). In a world facing a migrant crisis, with more displaced people since the Second World War, there are far more who would argue that Canada isn’t doing enough, and telling lies to make it look like we’re under siege because of a single tweet is more dangerous than he realizes.

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Roundup: To travel or not to travel?

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There’s a battle brewing in the Senate over Bill C-69, and some of it seems like a concern trolling on the face of it. Given that the bill – which aims to reform the environmental assessment process – is contentious among certain sectors, and has been subject to a misinformation campaign by the Conservatives (who have dubbed it the “no more pipelines bill” based on zero actual evidence), there is a push by Conservative senators to have the Senate’s energy and environment committee take hearings on the road. You know, to hear directly from those affected. The bill’s sponsor, government whip – err, “liaison,” Senator Mitchell, resists that, and it looks like he’s got the leader of the Independent Senators Group, Senator Woo, more or less backing him, Woo saying that travel is unnecessary when you can videoconference.

The Conservatives are looking to delay the bill, likely to death, given that the number of sitting days in this parliament is rapidly dwindling. Never mind that many affected industries are behind the bill, or that most others say that they would rather see amendments at this stage than a whole new process because that just increases the uncertainty (and it should be pointed out that the current system, which the Harper government implemented, has not worked and has resulted in a number of court challenges). And to add to that fact, the senator who chairs the committee is inexperienced (and many will openly say that she doesn’t know what she’s doing), and the Conservatives on that committee haven’t been cooperative in getting the hearings up and running because they are protesting the fact that she appears to be taking dictation from the Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative,” Senator Harder. So, this is all turning into a giant mess. And did I mention that the number of sitting days is rapidly dwindling? I suspect this is going to get ugly.

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Roundup: Getting mad at algorithms

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While the Conservatives spent their day in the House of Commons using their Supply Day motion to lay an unsubtle trap for the Liberals – demanding that they table a balanced budget and a written pledge to not raise any taxes, certain that the Liberals would defeat it so that they could turn around and say “See! Look! Trudeau is planning to raise your taxes!” – Andrew Scheer spent his afternoon getting angry at Google’s search algorithms.

The problem (other than the dangerous level of computer illiteracy) is that this was something that originated on a reddit thread that Scheer immediately latched onto.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1090332359650672641

https://twitter.com/cfhorgan/status/1090326614536146944

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1090333969319641089

Despite the afternoon of tweets pillorying Scheer and mock Google searches that put his image up for searches like “People who will never be prime minister,” it does actually score a deeper underlying point about this kind of virtue signalling over social media.

And this is part of the problem – we’ve seen this before with the issue of the UN global compact on migration, that Scheer started adopting tinfoil hat conspiracy theories to try and reclaim those votes that are suddenly gravitating toward Maxime Bernier. (I’m also not unconvinced that part of this Google search panic is some leftover James Damore “Google is full of social justice warriors!” drama that inhabits certain corners of the internet). The creation of this kind of alternate reality of conspiracies and lies that that they then turn into attack campaigns against media who fact-check and debunk their false claims, is them playing with fire. Making people believe disinformation may seem like a good idea to win a few votes in the short run, it has very long-term negative consequences that they seem utterly blind to. And yet, this is their current strategic vision. No good can come of this.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1090370788694192128

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1090361590858371075

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Roundup: We join you now from West Block…

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And so, the Big Move is complete, and the House of Commons has settled into its new home for the time being. Many MPs were still trying to find their way around the new building, going through wrong doors, coping with more cramped quarters, but they did make some history with the first instances of simultaneous interpretation of Cree in the Chamber thanks to Liberal MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette. The changes were all cosmetic as the partisan rhetoric on both sides largely remained the same dichotomy of pabulum from the Liberals, and lies from the Conservatives.

Just what kinds of falsehoods were being peddled? For one, the Conservatives leaned heavily on the notion that the Liberals had “raised taxes” on most Canadians, which isn’t actually true – it’s torque that comes from a Fraser Institute report that considers increased CPP contribution taxes (they’re not), and similarly calls the cancellation of non-refundable boutique tax credits in favour of the (non-taxable) Canada Child Benefit to be “tax increases.” Scheer lied that the government the government’s “own documents” show that they plan to raise the carbon tax to $300/tonne, which is also false, and as Alex Ballingall debunks here, it’s based on redacted documents that point out that higher prices will be needed to meet emissions targets, but don’t say that they are actually planning to do so. And Michelle Rempel also tried to make partisan hay of the fact that the government’s yearly quota of applications for family reunification immigration spaces was open for the space of eleven minutes before it maxed out and tried to equate this as somehow being the fault of asylum seekers who cross the border irregularly – another complete falsehood that Althia rage debunks here, and more to the point, Rempel is engaged in concern trolling – her own government did not prioritize this immigration stream and limited to 5000 cases per year while the Liberals increased it to 20,000. (They also tried to make the small number of spaces “fairer” by attempting to do it on a lottery system rather than one where high-priced immigration lawyers were able to get their files in faster, but that lottery system was abandoned this year). So yeah, the House was mired in bullshit today, but would the government refute most of this on the record? Not really – we got plenty of bland talking points instead that allowed most of these distortions to remain on the record. Slow clap there, Liberals.

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert enumerates the government’s many self-inflicted wounds as the new sitting gets underway. John Ivison notes the same old fear and division being peddled by both sides despite the new digs. Paul Wells makes us feel bad for thinking that things might be different in the new locale. I was on Kitchener Today yesterday to talk about John McCallum, China, and the return of the House of Commons.

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Roundup: Sixty-nine day countdown

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The House of Commons comes back on Monday, in the new chamber in West Block, and with an election on the horizon. That means it will soon be a frantic scramble to get bills passed before June arrives, and there are a lot of constituency weeks between now and then. The count is sixty-nine sitting days officially left on the calendar, but from that you need to remove a prescribed number of opposition-controlled Supply Days, plus the budget. Add to that, more days will need to be subtracted for bills that the Senate will send back to the Commons – and there will be bills they will send back, and that will eat into the calendar – especially in the final days of the sitting in June, when everyone wants to go home.

The agenda still has a number of big items on it, with Bardish Chagger having identified their poverty reduction bill, the reform of the Divorce Act, and the bill to eliminate solitary confinement in federal penitentiaries – and that could prove the most difficult because there have already been judges weighing in on what they’ve read and they’re not impressed. That could set up for more back-and-forth from the Senate if they don’t make enough of the big fixes to that in the Commons sooner than later.

And the Senate really is going to wind up being the spoiler or the wildcard in all of this. They’re already underwater on their Order Paper, and the Chamber will be late in returning from the break because of the construction delays, and there has been very little movement from most of the committees on getting back up and running now, in order to make progress on the bills that are before them. (In one case, where the bill is highly contentious, the Conservatives have not been cooperating because the Independent senator who chairs the committee has basically been doing the bidding of the Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative,” Senator Peter Harder, so they wanted to send a message). The national security reform bill, sat at second reading for the entire fall sitting when it should have spent far more time at committee given how extensive and far-reaching the bill is. They need some serious adult supervision to get them back on track, and I’m not sure where that’s going to come from, so we’ll see how this plays out over the next few weeks.

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Roundup: McCallum’s gambit

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A political firestorm kicked off yesterday when it was revealed that our ambassador to China, John McCallum, held a media availability with Chinese-language media on Tuesday and didn’t inform Canadian media, and then he made comments about how Meng Wanzhou had a “strong case,” and laid out some reasons why, including the fact that Donald Trump politicised her arrest. There seemed to be some genuine confusion among the Canadian foreign affairs community about what exactly was going on here, including whether McCallum was freelancing or going on a limb, but during his own media availability later in the day, Trudeau didn’t distance himself from the comments – though he certainly danced around them a fair bit (though parliamentary secretary Arif Virani later went on Power & Politics to say that the government stood behind McCallum). And then the reaction – Erin O’Toole accusing McCallum of throwing the Americans under the bus, and Andrew Scheer insisting that he would fire McCallum if he was prime minister (for what good that would do).

It’s worth remembering that our extradition system always has the element of political discretion, in that the minister of justice has the final say once the court processes are over and have determined whether the case is viable. (Full explanation of the process here). Also, here’s a video of lawyer Michael Spratt explaining the process.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne says that McCallum put doubt into peoples’ minds about the rule of law, and will be seen to indicate a preference for the outcome, before wondering if McCallum was just freelancing or buying time with the Chinese. Given the swift media reaction in China, there may be more of the latter than the former in the calculation, but it’s hard to know at this point.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1088187071204941827

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1088095085886140416

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Roundup: Explaining the intractable

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Over at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative economics blog, Stephen Gordon grapples with the problem of how to explain carbon taxes to Canadians in a way that’s more meaningful and easier to comprehend rather than economics jargon. It’s a perplexing problem, and one that some economists on social media are trying to address – something made more difficult by the constant narrative of lies put forward by the likes of Andrew Scheer and his provincial conservative allies, for whom the verifiable benefits of pricing carbon are lied about and derided as making life unaffordable, or that rebates won’t change behaviours. Except that we have data that they do, but communicating those data is a challenge, and possibly an intractable one.

I would add that oftentimes, journalists don’t help because we largely have an allergy to anything that looks like math. If it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, we immediately default to “it’s complicated” and shrugging, rather than figuring it out and communicating to people. I think we need to do better as well, and I try and to my part (for which I am rewarded with taunts that I am some kind of Liberal apologist, despite that carbon pricing is the favoured tool by virtually every single major economist and anyone who favours market solutions over government regulation), but it can be challenging, particularly when you are confronted by those who actively do not care about the truth. If we’re going to call out dishonesty in politics, we journalists need to do a better job of calling out these lies as we do with other false talking points – which means doing more than letting The Canadian Press write up a Baloney Meter™ article every now and again.

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Roundup: The data for the debunking

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I love a good takedown of some tired talking points, and lo, we have another doozy. You know how Andrew Scheer’s whole schtick and electoral campaign strategy is that carbon pricing makes life unaffordable for people because it drives up costs? This is the narrative he’s pinning his fortunes on, and lo, we find more data that it’s simply not true. Data from Alberta, which implemented its carbon tax two years ago, found that the inflation levels weren’t any different from other provinces, meaning that carbon taxes didn’t drive up prices. Mind you, having data won’t stop Scheer’s carousel of lies, because lying to people to make them angry is what he thinks is going to win him the election (and it might), but it’s still a lie, and we have yet more proof that it’s a lie.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the other side isn’t being sloppy with its own messaging. Rachel Notley is trying to go after Jason Kenney talking about tolls, but she undermines her own arguments for a carbon tax because it’s the logic works the same way. But that’s the attempt at populist messaging for you. Unfortunately.

Meanwhile the Yukon has come up with their carbon pricing system, which involves a certain level of rebates, with higher levels to those in remote areas – something that is of particular concern for those living in any of the Territories.

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