Tag Archives: Maple Crown

QP: Belligerent framing around incompetence or dishonesty

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While both the prime minister and his deputy were in town, neither were present for QP today—very unusually for a Wednesday, where Trudeau normally is present and takes all questions if he’s in town. Pierre Poilievre led off in French, and said that two years ago, CSIS prepared the briefing about threats to Michael Chong, but the prime minister said he wasn’t made aware, though a former head of CSIS said that it should have been, and wondered how the prime minister couldn’t have known. Marco Mendicino said that Poilievre knows full well that the government takes threats to MPs seriously, and that they offered a briefing when they were made aware. Poilievre said that it was impossible to believe that the PM wouldn’t have received this kind of information, and said that he either didn’t know and is incompetent, or he did and is dishonest. Mendicino insisted that the government has been taking the protection of MPs seriously. Poilievre switched to English and tried calling Mendicino incompetent—and got a warning from the Speaker—and railed that Trudeau didn’t answer when Trudeau wasn’t there (but that’s the point—to get a clip for a future shitpost). Mendicino responded that partisan rhetoric doesn’t help Chong. Poilievre repeated his insistence that Trudeau must be either incompetent in not knowing about the allegations or dishonest in saying he didn’t, to which Mendicino repeated that Chong was briefed, and that they have issued fresh instructions to CSIS about this matter. Poilievre then railed that the diplomat named by the Globe and Mail story had not yet been expelled, and Mendicino accused Poilievre of making up laws around diplomatic immunity while the government has provided new powers to intelligence agencies to disrupt interference, before patting himself on the back for the creation of NSICOP and NSIRA.

Yves-François Blanchet led for the Bloc, and accused the prime minister of maligning CSIS, and trie to ask whether more people knew of these allegations including Morris Rosenberg and David Johnston. Mendicino recited the pabulum about how anointing Johnston was necessary for fighting foreign interference. Blanchet went on a wandering path about the prime minister’s brother and it somehow disqualifying him from appointing a public inquiry. Mark Holland insisted that the Foundation is independent and gives scholarships, and any questions should be directed to them.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and in French, asked when he knew about the threats against Chong. Mendicino recited that they rely on independent civil servants and have taken measures. Singh switched to English and insisted that wasn’t really his question, and said that he wrote a letter to the prime minister about calling party leaders together in order to discuss the challenge. Mendicino said that the threat landscape has changed and they are taking steps to deal with it.

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QP: Threats against an MP’s family taken seriously

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Both the prime minister and his deputy were present today, somewhat unusually for a Monday, but we’ll take it, and as a result, most of the other leaders were absent. Pierre Poilievre led off in French, and he raised the Globe and Mail story that there was apparently a briefing prepared two years ago that started that Chinese officials were prepared to threaten Conservative MP Michael Chong’s family back in Hong Kong, and that they consider Canada an easy target for interference, though the story state that it wasn’t clear if the prime minister actually saw this briefing. With this in mind, he railed at the prime minister for allowing this to happen (though again, we don’t know if he saw this) and demanded to know why the implicated diplomat at the consulate in Calgary hasn’t been expelled. Justin Trudeau responded that these threats are unacceptable, and that when he read this story, he tasked officials to find out more about it, and that they would take action. Poilievre repeated in English with a bit more incredulity, and got much the same answer. Poilievre insisted that this couldn’t be the case because it happened two years ago, and demanded that the diplomat named in the piece be expelled immediately. Trudeau repeated again that they are following up and will take action. Poilievre went back again to the fact that this was two years ago, and then demanded to know the date when the foreign interference registry would be created. Trudeau said that they are consulting on the registry to do it the right way, after listing the measures they have taken. Poilievre called this “administrative mumbo-jumbo,” and then said that two of the so-called Chinese “police stations” are still allegedly in operation, and Trudeau noted that the RCMP are dealing with this.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and he railed about Morris Rosenberg’s alleged involvement in the Chinese donation to the Trudeau Foundation, to which Trudeau recited that he hasn’t been involved with the Foundation for ten years and the government has taken measures to deal with interference. Therrien tried to spin a conspiracy theory even harder, and Trudeau told him to wait for David Johnston’s recommendation. 

Peter Julian rose for the NDP, and in French, he returned to that Globe story said that China considers Canada uniquely vulnerable to interference, and demanded a public inquiry. Trudeau repeated that they are taking this seriously and have measures that are in place. Heather McPherson repeated the demand in English, and Trudeau replied that there is a variety of opinions on the value of a public inquiry which is why David Johnston has been tasked with the job.

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Roundup: The scope of the transition

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As Alberta heads into an election, one can be certain that Danielle Smith is going to wield the threat of the supposed “just transition” as a cudgel to attack Justin Trudeau and Rachel Notley. Nevertheless, there are issues around the future of work in the province as the oil and gas extraction industry changes—a process that began years ago, and is currently far more automated than it used to be.

As Andrew Leach points out, the scale of the issue is something that the province will need to grapple with.

Ukraine Dispatch:

The death toll from the overnight strike in Uman has risen to 23, with another two deaths from a separate strike in Dnipro. Ukrainian leadership say that they are “to a high percentage ready” to launch their spring counter-offensive, and that modern weapons will serve as an “iron first.” Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy hosted the presidents of Slovakia and the Czech Republic, while seven foreign ministers met with Ukraine’s foreign minister in Odessa, all of whom were expressing support for Ukraine as Ukraine pushes for more modern aircraft.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1651966751268278272

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Roundup: The campaign leaders testify

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Yesterday was the big day when top campaign officials from the Liberals and Conservatives appeared at the Procedure and House Affairs committee to talk about foreign interference allegations in the previous two elections, and we learned a couple of things. One of which is that Fred DeLorey, the Conservative campaign director, is eminently reasonable and acknowledges they don’t know if there was any actual interference in those ridings they lost, or if it was the result of other factors, like their hard-line rhetoric on China, or gun-control measures (as the Liberal campaign insists). Another thing we learned is that the reporting on the CSIS “warnings” about MP Han Dong were not described accurately, and that they didn’t insist the party drop him as a candidate—which never did make sense if you listened to the actual intelligence experts who said at the time that that didn’t sound right.

There was also talk about how it takes an incredibly high threshold for a party to be able to drop a candidate, so if intelligence agencies had concerns, they would need to come up with something pretty tangible for the parties to exercise that kind of power (and don’t forget that their spending caps are determined by how many candidates they’re running, so if they need to drop one after the cut-off point to replace a name on the ballot, that creates even more headaches). There was also talk about how there needs to be more ongoing dialogue between national security agencies and parties, particularly between election cycles, because these agencies didn’t seem to understand how parties operated, which makes it hard for them to be making determinations about how any interference might be happening (and again, considering that the reported leaks had a bunch of details that didn’t make any sense, this could be the reason why).

Suffice to say, these were the people who should have been testifying the whole time rather than the dog and pony show we had with Katie Telford, which was just a waste of time and resources.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Russian missile struck a museum in Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region, killing one civilian and wounding ten others. As well, a woman died from shelling in nearby Dvorichna, and two others in the eastern Donetsk region. Elsewhere, Ukrainian forces staged raids on the east side of the Dnipro river in order to degrade Russian capacity, particularly in their shelling of Kherson, in a sign that the counter-offensive is near. Ukraine is planning on a “complete transformation” of six war-torn cities that were badly damaged in the invasion, to be rebuilt under an experimental programme according to “new principles.”

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1650769182286331905

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Roundup: Few details on the Canadian coronation

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As the coronation fast approaches, we’re still waiting for details in Canada about what we’re doing here, or what the events happening in Ottawa will be, or who is part of the delegation going to London for the event itself. The level of secrecy is a bit weird, but I have my suspicions that this is trying to be downplayed from the top, meaning PMO.

As for King Charles III himself, the early signs are that he’s looking to be a bit more involved and less removed than his mother tended to be, in part because that was the generation she came from. And what does that mean for Canada? Well, that’s dependent entirely upon the prime minister, because the King can only act on the advice of the PM. And this PM, well, doesn’t like it when the spotlight is away from him. He likes the “ceremonial” aspects of the job, and a lot of that stuff is what the Crown and the Governor General does. So while we’ve just had some incredibly important events in our country as a constitutional monarchy—the loss of the Queen who had been our sovereign for seventy years, and now the installation of the new King—it’s being downplayed in ways that are not healthy for us as a country, but our civic literacy about this is at terrible lows, and there is an organised campaign of misinformation about the role and nature of the Crown in this country, and Trudeau could do something about that, but he won’t, and it erodes the nature of our democracy even more.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian Forces are yet again claiming to have achieved more of a foothold in Bakhmut, while Ukrainian forces continue to insist they’re holding the line. There are also a bunch of denials as to whether or not the Ukrainians have established a foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river in the south of the country. Russian forces are also claiming to have repelled a drone attack against their Black Sea fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1650111231196536832

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1650012022371753984

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Roundup: Listening to diasporic communities

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Because we’re still talking about the allegations of foreign interference in elections, journalists are now officially in the “badger and hector” stage of demanding the government call some kind of independent inquiry, which Trudeau refuses to do (for good enough reasons), and he’s getting a bit exasperated and even snappish in his replies to the same questions, over, and over, and over, and over again. (Oh, the memories of journalists demanding he invoke the Emergencies Act every single day at the start of the pandemic). More to the point, Trudeau did make a point of saying that it’s often diasporic communities, and the parliamentarians who come from them, that are at greatest risk of this foreign interference, and there has been a fairly tremendous silence in the media from those voices. It’s not just Chinese influence we need to be on guard for, but Hindu nationalism is also becoming a worrying force within Canada. Nevertheless, Power & Politics did get one activist on the air yesterday, and actually did some critical self-reflection and media accountability along the way, which is virtually unheard of, so please do check out that interview.

Meanwhile, Morris Rosenberg is now doing interviews about his report, and he talked about the recommendation to lower the threshold for making public these attempts at interference. Also, a reminder that we can’t assume that the leaks being fed to media are from CSIS—merely someone who has access to their reports.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1631670700338446336

Meanwhile, there is a very good point being made that while NSICOP should be the venue by which these issues are being discussed, the government has not exactly acted on their recommendations in the past, and that remains a problem.

https://twitter.com/Dennismolin11/status/1631779724841066506

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian Forces claim that they have nearly encircled Bakhmut, and are blasting bridges out to the west, but Ukrainian forces have not given up their positions just yet. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reiterated his call with American and European officials that Russia needs to face war crimes prosecutions for is actions during its invasion of Ukraine. On a related note, a village outside of Kyiv is still digging up bodies from their brief Russian occupation.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau says an Indigenous Commissioner of the RCMP is an “excellent idea,” and no. It’s the same toxic structure and culture and would change nothing.
  • Mélanie Joly and her Chinese counterpart had a testy exchange at the G20 meeting in New Delhi over the allegations of Chinese interference in elections.
  • The government plans to finally—finally!—start debate on their digital privacy bill after letting it languish on the Order Paper for the past nine months.
  • An autopilot software glitch has been identified as the cause of a military helicopter crash in 2020, and a fix has not yet been implemented across the fleet.
  • The Senate Speaker and two other senators are facing criticism for meeting with the Speaker of Israel’s parliament, who is a far-right figure in that country.
  • Surprising nobody, Google’s CEO is not accepting the summons to appear at the Commons’ heritage committee, but will send his country manages instead.
  • The Northwest Territories is calling out Alberta for not notifying them of an oil sands tailings pond spill into their shared waterway.
  • That BC company is walking back some of their claims about getting a licence to produce and sell cocaine commercially.
  • Stephanie Carvin gives a primer on what we’re talking about when we talk about intelligence (and why it’s not evidence, since people have difficulty with that).
  • Jessica Davis gives an explainer on just what constitutes foreign interference, and lists three recent examples of what does and doesn’t qualify.
  • Shannon Proudfoot imagines Pierre Poilievre through the lens of the Mr. Men books, and how he went from Mr. Mouth to Mr. Nothing to See Here.
  • Chris Selley points out that as of yet, nobody has bothered to challenge Quebec’s blatantly unconstitutional law to opt out of the Oath to the King.
  • My Xtra column wonders why the government hasn’t appointed a special envoy for LGBTQ+ issues, as many of our contemporaries have.
  • My weekend column points out that we shouldn’t need a public inquiry into election interference if MPs would be grown-ups and use NSICOP like it is intended.

Odds and ends:

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Roundup: Inquiry report and influence reports

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Justice Paul Rouleau delivered his final report from the Emergencies Act public inquiry yesterday, and in it, he concluded that the government was justified in invoking the Act, albeit somewhat reluctantly because of failures at every level, particularly with policing, but also most especially from Doug Ford and the Ontario government, whom he reserves some particularly even-toned scorn for. There was also some blame apportioned to Justin Trudeau for his “fringe minority” comments as having hardened the resolve of occupiers (erm, except it was true what he said). There was plenty of blame apportioned to the Ottawa police, as well there should be, and he did reject the occupiers’ claims that they were peaceful.

Rouleau made 56 recommendations, including better intelligence coordination and coordination among police, as well as to make changes to the Act, which Trudeau has promised to study and come up with a response to, and that he regrets the phrasing of his “fringe minority” comments (which, I repeat, were true). Pierre Poilievre, predictably, went before a microphone and insisted that Trudeau created the whole mess by “attacking his own population,” and went on a tear about inflation (which was not a pressing concern when the occupation happened), and then went on a rant about the CBC for daring to ask him a question, and around and around we go.

https://twitter.com/stephaniecarvin/status/1626702909017554945

In pundit reaction, Susan Delacourt filters the report through the weaponization of the term “freedom,” and what it represents and misrepresents. Paul Wells offers some of his initial thoughts on the report. Justin Ling has his own perspective of the report based on his own reporting of the occupations’ membership and the role of disinformation that fuelled it. And of course, the Beaverton gets the last word.

Chinese Interference

The Globe and Mail published a story where their two journalists had been shown CSIS documents (illegally!) to show how Chinese officials were trying to interfere in the last two elections, and how their Vancouver consul was claiming to have defeated two Conservative incumbents in the last election. And it sounds concerning…but details don’t add up for me. The Chinese say they wanted a Liberal minority, but targeting eleven ridings cannot give you that kind of outcome. And the section on political donations doesn’t make sense given the rules around them, so I have a lot of questions that this story doesn’t answer.

In response, Justin Trudeau says that whatever Chinese officials claim, the election result was unaffected (and given how the alleged Chinese scheme doesn’t make much sense, I am giving this a bit more weight). Pierre Poilievre says that Trudeau turned a blind eye because the interference was to his advantage (again, how?) One of the defeated Conservatives says he fears the country has become an “open market” for foreign governments trying to sway elections (again, how?)

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 360:

Ukrainian soldiers fighting near Bakhmut make the direct plea to western countries to send more weapons, while president Volodymyr Zelenskyy made similar requests of assembled allied leaders in Munich. American intelligence is estimating that Wagner Group mercenaries (most of them convicts) have suffered more than 30,000 casualties in Ukraine, with about 9,000 of them killed in action.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1626559600110469125

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Roundup: Warning signs of grassroots demise in Ontario

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The Star profiles the four potential leadership candidates for the Ontario Liberal party, two of whom are sitting MPPs, the other two being sitting MPs, and I had a couple of observations. One is that the whole piece is framed in the absolutely toxic discourse of looking for a messiah to resurrect a party’s fortunes, which is one of the big problems in Canadian politics in the current era, and a big part of that is because we have devolved leadership contests into pseudo-presidential primaries, the result of which has been to hollow out parties and turn them into empty shells to be inhabited by leaders like hermit crabs. Those leaders turn that hollow shell of a party into a personality cult, until their time is done, and then the next leader does the same again. It’s also worth noting that the Ontario Liberals are currently one of the few remaining parties in the country that still used delegated conventions for the leadership—yes, a problem, but not as bad of one as one-member-one-vote systems. Of course, the article also derides delegated conventions as favouring “party elites,” which is a load of bullshit. Delegated conventions are better at engaging grassroots than OMOV because the riding associations need to get together to elect the delegates, who are then trusted to carry their wishes forward on subsequent ballots.

The other observation I see is that it largely glosses over the fact that the grassroots party in the province has crumbled, and many of its riding associations exist only on paper. This is absolutely shocking, because this is an admission that the party has completely failed in keep up the absolute basics of how our democratic system is structured. This is what leader-centric parties have led to, where the grassroots are seen only as votes for a leadership contest, donors, and a pool of volunteers at election time rather than the people who make up the party, who do the policy work, who run the nominations, and who do the work of accountability at the local level. The grassroots riding associations are supposed to be the interface between the riding and the caucus, especially in ridings that the party doesn’t hold currently. The fact that the party leadership (and I’m guessing Steven Del Duca most especially was part of the problem here) allowed things to atrophy this badly is a really worrying sign about the health of democracy in this province, but also this country generally because these trends are across parties and provinces, because we have failed to learn our lessons when it comes to the basics of civics. This is the kinds of things that people should have learned about in school (and why I wrote my book).

I will add that I would really prefer if the two MPs didn’t jump into this race, and that they stayed in Ottawa and did the work here rather than try to be saviours for the provincial party, especially because voices like Nathaniel Erskine-Smith are so necessary in Ottawa and being a “rogue” in the caucus, which I fear would be swamped and workshopped to death if he were to try to apply that to leadership. But maybe I’m just being cynical here.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 334:

Russian forces have increased shelling outside of their held territories in the East, particularly around Zaporizhzhia. The head of the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk region says that he visited Soledar, which the Russians claim they captured but Ukraine still denies. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with families of the victims from the helicopter crash earlier in the week. Zelenskyy is also promising further action to root out corruption, with key decisions coming this week, given that this continues to be one of the sticking points for Ukraine in joining with the European Union and other alliances. Elsewhere, here’s a look at how organisations are working to counter Russian disinformation about the war.

https://twitter.com/melnykandrij/status/1616832357826265091

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Roundup: Not recognizing one of our most important events

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Yesterday was Statute of Westminster Day, but you wouldn’t actually know it given how little attention it receives. My Apple calendar does mark the occasion, but how many people understand its significance? And they should, because it was probably the most significant development in our country’s constitutional history—arguably more significant than confederation itself, or of patriation in 1982. Why? Because the Statute of Westminster in 1931 was the creation of the Crown of Canada, as a separate and distinct entity from the Crown of the United Kingdom.

https://twitter.com/Canadian_Crown/status/1601987723476275202

This matters because it gave us control of our own foreign policy, and domestically, it centred the Governor General as taking advice only from the Canadian prime minister, no longer reporting to the UK’s foreign office like they used to do. There are fewer developments that are more important in how we have been able to operate independently as a sovereign country with our own sovereign at the head. So how did the various political parties mark the occasion, particularly in a year where the Crown of Canada has been in focus because of the transition to the new King?

Only the Conservatives put out a statement, and it didn’t even mention the Crown of Canada. So, that’s where we are. One of our most important constitutional developments as a country, left by the wayside. It’s a sad indictment of our history and civics knowledge that this happens year after year.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 292:

Odessa is mostly in the dark after Russian attacks, and it could take a month to restore their power grid. As the battle in the eastern part of the country grinds on, the city of Bakhmut is essentially destroyed. And a month after being liberated, Kherson is still in the process of clearing the booby-traps Russian forces laid for civilians in the area.

https://twitter.com/strategywoman/status/1602012251543982080

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Roundup: The ideas guy versus the kludge

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The rules around the kludge that is being called dental care are released, and lo, it’s about as bad as was expected, possibly even worse, because the CRA was always the worst way possible to deliver this benefit (particularly after some of the trust-but-verify problems surrounding pandemic benefits that the Auditor General illuminated earlier in the week), and ye they bullied ahead with it because the NDP didn’t care about implementation, so they put an unrealistic timeline in their agreement with the Liberals to prop up the government, and an expectation that this should be a federally-administered programme rather than an agreement with provinces like every other federal programme (most recently with early learning and child care).

And no, this is not something that could simply be added into existing healthcare systems because that would require provincial buy-in, and every premier who was asked about this balked, some of them because they have existing programmes for low-income households, and all of them because they really, really do not want another federal programme to manage and contribute to, or be on the hook for when a new government comes to power and starts to axe it.

But remember, the NDP are the “ideas guy,” who never worries about implementation, and who takes credit for the work the other guys did, because he came up with the idea, don’t you know? This is all going to go so badly because it was rushed and had really stupid conditions imposed on it, but they can crow that they got dental care.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 290:

It looks like Russian forces may have kidnapped two senior employees of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant as part of ongoing pressure tactics to get them to sign the plant over to Russian authorities, which they have refused to do. Meanwhile, Belarus told the UN it would allow passage of Ukrainian grain through its territory to Lithuanian ports without conditions, but given that Belarus is a Russian puppet stage, we’ll see how much they actually uphold the deal.

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