Tag Archives: Nominations

Roundup: A question with the intention to intimidate

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Conservative MP Chris Warkentin has put a question on the Order Paper asking whether a number of economists have received any government contracts, and for any information about those contracts if they have been the recipient. While Stephen Gordon responds for himself below, it was also noted that all of the economists listed (who include names like Kevin Milligan, Andrew Leach, and Mike Moffatt) are all male, which I’m sure is just a coincidence and not indicative of a mentality that they think there’s no such thing as a “lady economist.”

This having been said, I think it’s important to point out that what Warkentin is doing here, on behalf of the party, is directly out of the authoritarian playbook. Number one of the seven key tactics in that playbook are to politicise independent institutions (and university academics would qualify), while number four on that list is about quashing dissent, and many of these names are economists who signed onto that open letter about the value of carbon pricing (which, to reiterate, was not defending the Liberal policy because it’s not actually carbon pricing, but a carbon levy plus regulation and subsidies). The Order Paper question is a shot across the bow that they are looking for anything to discredit these economists as partisan hacks whose expertise can be discounted for that reason. It’s about as subtle as a ham-fist, but they don’t care because they’re riding high in the polls. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be alive to what they’re doing, because it absolutely matters.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A missile strike in Kharkiv has killed at least seven civilians, as the Russian assault continues. Russians have also taken control of the village of Andriivka, southwest of Bakhmut. Russian jamming has also prevented many of Ukraine’s newer glide bombs from hitting their intended targets.

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Roundup: Five sitting weeks remain

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The final five weeks of the spring sitting of the House of Commons begins today, and it’s going to be raucous, and ugly, and exhausting. The government has  a tonne of bills they need to pass, starting with the implementation for the fall economic statement (no, seriously, it still hasn’t passed), pharmacare, the bill to ban replacement workers, the online harms bill, and maybe the foreign-agent registry, before we even get to the budget implementation bill. It’s a lot, and it will depend on the cooperation of the NDP (and possibly the Bloc) to come to agreements on time allocation for those bills, because the Conservatives will do everything they can to slow them up.

In the middle of this will be the Conservatives continued use of committees for dog-and-pony shows about ArriveCan, the Winnipeg Lab documents, or any other particular witch-hunts the Conservatives want to pursue, and on most of these committees, the NDP and Bloc are game to play along, because they are still keen to embarrass the government at every opportunity, whether the subject is within the remit of that committee or not. Because that’s what Parliament is these days—a content factory for social media.

The lever that the government has is the ability to call midnight sittings, and why that matters is because we have a shortage of interpreters, which means they can’t cover both the midnight sittings and all of the committee meetings, so the Conservatives will need to start making choices—do they want to talk bills to death in the House of Commons, or do they want to hold their committee dog-and-pony shows? This is what things are going to boil down to, so we’ll see how well Steve MacKinnon can wield this power.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces still control about 60 percent of the village of Vovchansk, near Kharkiv, with the fighting being describe as being house-to-house. Ukrainian forces downed all 29 Russian drones launched on Monday night, and all 37 drones launched on Sunday night. At least eleven civilians have been killed in the outskirts of Kharkiv as Russians continue their advance, shelling civilian targets along the way. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did an interview with Reuters, in which he called out the Americans in particular for being a year late with their assistance, especially around air defences.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1792157706737868830

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Roundup: Fix nominations how?

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Over in the Globe and Mail, Andrew Coyne points to Hogue Report’s comments on party nomination races as a possible vector for foreign interference, and declares that they need to be cleaned up, but declines to say how. He disputes that parties are entirely private clubs, because “Their sole purpose is to seek and wield coercive power over the rest of us. How they go about it is therefore a matter of vital public concern, and regulation in the public interest – at the least, transparency – is entirely justified.”

But how exactly does one propose to do that? Involve Elections Canada with all internal deliberations of these parties, whether it’s a nomination contest, leadership race, or policy convention? While I get the temptation, we have to ask ourselves if any of this is practical, not only because when an election happens, there are a tonne of last-minute nomination meetings, but there are hundreds of registered political parties. Should they only concern themselves with parties that have seats in the Commons? Would they create disparate sets of rules for the big four parties than any others? Could they get away with that in the courts? I’m not sold that this is a solution because it would involve a massive expansion of their powers and bureaucracy, and because they are ultimately reporting to an Independent Officer of Parliament who has no real accountability, the potential for abuse if enormous.

This isn’t to say that things don’t need to change, because they do, but it’s not exactly something that external monitors can fix. In fact, the solution on its face is much less mysterious than it might sound, but it goes back to the original sin of Canadian politics—the decision to remove leadership selection from the caucus to the party membership. Restore this to caucus selection, and you can start separating the parliamentary and constituency party powers again, so that the parliamentary party leader can’t exert outsized influence on the nomination races, and the constituency party is motivated to keep a closer eye on the nomination races, particularly because that’s their job rather than the parliamentary leader trying to stuff the races with its parachute or hand-picked candidates. I would also note that the number of races that would be vulnerable to foreign interference is actually very small, given that you’re not going be able to find diasporic communities in most rural ridings, so again, we should beware what we’re talking about here. I think we need to better appreciate the scope of the problem, and ensure that the right incentives are there for the parties to clean up their own messes rather than involving Elections Canada.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian infantry has been trying to breach local defences in the Kharkiv region, but so far, Ukraine has been holding them off. Ukraine is due to start receiving their first F-16s by summer.

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Roundup: Backtracking on capital gains claims

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A number of prominent business lobby groups banded together to write a joint letter to the government slamming the changes to the capital gains inclusion rate, claiming it to be short-sighted, that it sows division, and that it will impact one in five Canadians over the next decade—with more apocalyptic language about how this will hamper economic growth. Because, remember, their ability to engage in tax arbitrage is claimed to be a public good, or something.

There was just one problem—their math was grossly wrong, and they needed to backtrack on their claims, and that really, it’s about 0.13 percent of Canadians who would pay higher taxes on their capital gains. Oopsie. Kind of takes the sting out of their apocalyptic doomsaying, and exposes them for trying to mislead people into thinking that they will be exposed.

Meanwhile, the NDP have been banging on about why the government didn’t introduce any kind of windfall tax or other wealth taxes in the budget, pointing to plans by Joe Biden to increase corporate taxes, apparently not understanding how the American political system works and how that’s unlikely to happen because of how their legislative process works. The bitter irony, of course, is that for a party that keeps aping the American Democrats in their talking points, they also have no understanding of American politics either.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukraine’s air force says they downed all ten of the drones Russia fired overnight, but didn’t say what happened to the two missiles launched. A Ukrainian drone damaged a Russian oil refinery a record 1500 km away from border. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed the head of the state guards after two of its members were found to be plotting his assassination. Zelenskyy also says that with more Western weapons arriving, they’ll be able to halt the Russian advance in the east. In those eastern towns, Ukrainian rescuers are evacuating the elderly and infirm as the Russians close in;

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Roundup: Pre-budget non-advice

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Because it’s pre-budget season, we’re starting to get some of the usual rounds of absolutely useless commentary on it once again, from some of the usual suspects. This week it’s Jean Charest and Bill Morneau, who insist the focus needs to be on “long-term” things like growth, and not “short-term” issues like inflation. But they offer no actual policy prescriptions—just vibes.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1776584499075187102

My dudes. Getting inflation under control was one of the most important issues over the past year-and-a-half, because if not addressed in the short-term, it becomes a long-term problem that nobody wants. That meant slowing the economy just enough to let the steam out of it (the “excess demand”) without going into a recession, and lo, they managed to do just that. Yes, growth is sluggish right now because that was the whole gods damned point. Once inflation is tamed for real, and signs are that it’s getting there very soon, then they can focus on real growth once again, and with a focus on productivity because that’s how we’ll get more growth without fuelling inflation, but nobody wants to put too much heat back into the economy before inflation is tamed, or it’ll become persistent, and nobody wants that. You would think a former premier and finance minister might appreciate those facts.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia launched two dozen attack drones overnight, targeting Ukraine’s south and east, and 17 were destroyed. Two Russian strikes on Kharkiv killed eight early Saturday, while a Russian shell hit a house in the village of Guliaipole in Zaporizhzhia region on early Sunday, killing three civilians. A drone strike against the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has the international community worried about the potential for an accident once again. Ukraine’s energy systems have stabilised in spite of the many attacks on Kharkiv in recent weeks, but president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is warning that they are running low on air defence missiles, and he continues to call on the Americans to get their act together and pass the support package.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1776965218146324857

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Roundup: More lying to cover up for the lies

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Earlier in the week, Conservative MP and justice critic Frank Caputo put out one of the party’s signature shitpost videos where he spent seven minutes talking about how he took a trip to the medium-security prison that houses notorious serial killers Paul Bernardo and Luka Magnotta, and it was replete with this theatrical outrage that the facility has a hockey rink and a tennis court. How dare they! Such “luxury”! Caputo also says he got to tour Bernardo’s cell while Bernardo was away, but that he came face-to-face with him after, and that Bernardo ask him something.

Well, it turns out that encounter didn’t actually happen. Correctional Services says that they were at opposite ends of a corridor and may have seen one another but didn’t interact. They also said that the hockey rink that Caputo was complaining about hasn’t been in service for the past couple of years, so as to dispute the notion that Bernardo is spending his days playing pick-up hockey.

Well, the Conservatives didn’t like that. Andrew Scheer accused The Canadian Press of bias for quoting the Correctional Services. Caputo claims that they denied the existence of the hockey rink, which they didn’t. And Pierre Poilievre’s press secretary accused CP of lying to cover for the government, except he was the one lying.

It’s galling just how egregious the Conservatives have lied throughout this affair—both Caputo lying on his shitpost video, and then all of the other Conservatives trying to run interference and lying about CP’s reporting. CP, the most egregious of both-sidesers in order to maintain strict neutrality in all things. But they will say and do anything to discredit the media, both to build their dystopian alternate reality, but to also condition their followers to believe absolutely anything, and to just ignore all of the cognitive dissonance. And of course, their apologists will either keep lying or keep trying to distract from the lies in order to try and whitewash the whole affair. This is the kind of thing that kills democracies, and they’re gleefully going along with it.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say that they have sunk another Russian warship using unmanned sea drones.

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Roundup: A dubious Federal Court decision, but right about judicial appointments

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The Federal Court ruled yesterday that the federal government must start filling judicial vacancies faster because, which is true, but the judgment itself is something of a mess. It’s hard to see how the Court has jurisdiction here, and the judge seems to have invented a bunch of justification and has handwaved around constitutional conventions, and in the end, declared that the government must fill most of those vacancies “in a reasonable period of time,” which is vague and of little value other than the declaration. Emmett Macfarlane has promised a post on this soon, and Leonid Sirota has a thread here taking issue with the reasoning (though not the underlying issue of not making sufficient appointments—everyone is agreed on that point).

I have been writing on this government’s problems with appointments since probably their second year in office, possibly even sooner than that. While you can look up the myriad of columns I have written, the short version is this: The government wants to make diverse appointments (which is good! This is a good thing!) but they insisted on a system of self-nominations rather than going out and nominating people. We know that women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ people routinely don’t apply for positions like this because society has drilled into them the message that only straight, old white men get positions like this. Even the Liberal Party itself gets this in their candidate selection process, where they set up systems to be persistent in getting women and diverse people to seek nominations. And even with that, the federal government has utterly dropped that ball and thinks that they can simply say “We’re accepting diverse applications!” and expecting those applications to flood in. They seem to act like the Sesame Street sketch where Ernie simply goes “Here, fishy, fishy, fishy!” and the fish leap into the boat. That’s not how this works, and when they don’t get enough applications, it slows down the process tremendously. And after seven years, they have absolutely refused to learn this lesson. Refused! It’s some kind of giant ideological blinder that they cannot get their collective heads around, no matter how many times the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court warns them, or the Auditor General sounds the alarm about vacancies on port authorities or the boards of Crown corporations, or even their process for appointing senators. They absolutely refuse to learn the lessons of their failures.

It does bear mentioning that there has been an uptick in the pace of appointments in the past few months, and filling vacancies for provincial chief justices and associate chief justices has also picked up speed (and yes, I have been keeping an eye out for this). That said, making federal judicial appointments faster won’t solve the problems with our justice system because a lot more of them involve provinces not properly resourcing provincial courts or superior courts, where you have a lot of cases where there are no court rooms or court staff available, and that causes as many if not more problems. The issue of federal appointments, however, is low-hanging fruit so it’s taking a lot more attention than it should, and once again, premiers are being allowed to skate because of it.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians have struck a hospital and apartments in Selydove in eastern Ukraine, killing three people. Here’s a look at how Ukrainians are decoding Russian battle communications to save lives on the front lines. Russia is pulling old tanks out of storage and refurbishing them after having lost more than 3000 in the fighting in Ukraine over the past two years. Ukraine’s military intelligence is now saying that Russia has been buying Starlink terminals by way of “Arab countries.”

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Roundup: Reviving the NEP to own the Libs?

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It’s kind of amazing how little thought goes into some of the slogan-laden thinking in so much of the politics in this country, and no party is exempt from it. It’s also funny how some of these policies are just rehashing of old programmes that they hated before. Case in point? Alberta trying to make hay about New Brunswick importing oil rather than getting it from Alberta.

Or as I like to say:

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian drones hit a petrol station in Kharkiv, causing a massive explosion. The new commander-in-chief wants to regain momentum in the conflict, but problems with manpower and dwindling ammunition remain structural challenges for him.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1756210514835722290

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Roundup: More of a stage than an institution

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The House of Commons is back today after the Christmas break, and you can pretty much guarantee that there will be a level of awfulness to the discourse, because that’s where things are right now. In fact, when asked over the weekend, former prime minister Joe Clark correctly noted that the House of Commons is “more a stage than an institution” these days. You’ve heard me bang on about this more times than I can count, but it bears repeating—MPs are no longer debating ideas. They are reciting prepared talking points into the record, because those are being used to generate clips for social media. It’s not even for the benefit of news media anymore, like it used to be (which caused its own particular problems with how QP works), because they all think they can just bypass legacy media and speak directly to their own audiences over their socials.

It’s no longer politics—it’s theatre. Bad theatre. The kind where people can’t even memorise their lines, but are full-on reading the script in front of them during the performance, not even on cue-cards that are far enough in the distance, and most of them can’t even be ashamed of their own amateurishness as they adhere to their party’s message, do what is expected of them, and continue to pretend that this is all normal.

And that’s why our democracy is in trouble.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Security officials in Ukraine say that defence ministry officials conspired with employees from an arms firm to embezzle nearly $40 million that was earmarked to buy mortar shells. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has disclosed his own income as part of a drive for transparency and combatting corruption.

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Roundup: Official silence around Lewis’ most recent nuttery

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There has been some attention paid lately to the fact that Leslyn Lewis is promoting a House of Commons e-petition that calls on Canada to withdraw from the UN, in the name of our “sovereignty.” Which is ridiculous, because the UN doesn’t impact on anyone’s sovereignty (which is partially why it’s such an ineffective body), but not unexpected. Lewis has peddled many a conspiracy theory around the WHO, or the World Economic Forum (which is a particular conspiracy theory that leans heavily into antisemitism), and has not only not received any rebuke from her party, but they actively encourage some of these same conspiracy theories—particularly those around the World Economic Forum (and then turn around and wonder about the rise in antisemitism. Gosh).

This largely went unmentioned in legacy media for a few days (but hey, a lot of people are still on vacation), but I do find the absolute silence from the Conservatives to be interesting. Some of their former staffers have tried to offer a bit of polish to this, but you can’t actually polish this. (And no, she’s not even data-mining on this kind of petition because it’s through the House of Commons’ portal, not her own or a party website). The simple fact of it is that the Conservatives are more than willing to engage in this kind of nuttery because they think that these are accessible voters in the next election, because these have tended to be people who didn’t used to vote, but then Maxime Bernier offered them something to vote for, and they flocked to his banner, and now Poilievre wants them under his, so he’s willing to entertain this dangerous nonsense and to keep shifting the Overton window in order to try and win those votes, even though it’s almost certainly a fool’s errand because they can see how hollow he really is. Nevertheless, he won’t stop trying, and we can expect more of this kind of nuttery going forward, because that’s who they are these days.

Ukraine Dispatch:

While there has been little movement on the front lines, long-range attacks back-and-forth carry on, with the Russians having acquired ballistic missiles from North Korea, while Ukraine has launched drone attacks both against military targets in occupied Crimea and the around the Russia city of Belgorod. A Ukrainian parliamentary committee is debating changing the rules around mobilisation, and increasing sanctions for draft evasion.

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