Tag Archives: Nominations

Roundup: Those December job numbers

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The big, and well, only real news yesterday in Canada were the release of the job numbers from Statistics Canada, and they blew past expectations. Far beyond them. Analysts forecast somewhere between five and eight thousand new jobs in December, and instead there were 104,000, the vast majority of them full-time, and almost all in the private sector. The unemployment rate edged down further to five percent, which is just barely off of the record low of 4.9% we saw over the summer. This shows that the labour market is still incredibly tight, and the Bank of Canada’s estimation that this level is unsustainable and a sign there is still too much demand in the economy that it’s driving inflation, and it requires some rebalancing to ensure that those job numbers are more sustainable. There have been a lot of fairly torqued readings of Tiff Macklem’s comments, that unemployment needs to be higher to slow inflation, but I’m not sure that captures enough nuance in what he’s trying to say.

The point in the report about record high employment levels for core-aged women, particularly those with small children, is particularly important because of this government’s focus on child care deals with provinces. This is one of the points of it—getting more women into the workforce, and the programme pays for itself with all of the additional revenue generated by those women in the workforce. It may be too soon to draw the straight line between the child care deals and those women going back to work, because in most provinces, the fees have only just started falling, but it does point to why early learning and child care is important, because the tight labour market needs those core-aged women right now.

And then there is all of the talk of the “looming recession.” It still may not happen, and there could be a “soft landing” of slower growth while the labour market rebalances itself, but not negative growth or a significant increase in unemployment. And if there is a recession, it’s not likely to be one with too many job losses because of the tight labour market, and that could reduce some of the pressure, again, while the economy starts to rebalance itself to a more sustainable place. We’re not in the same place we were in previous economic downturns, so things could be very different this time around.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 318:

In spite of Russia saying they were going to enact a thirty-six hour ceasefire for Orthodox Christmas, they nevertheless carried on shelling parts of Ukraine, because that’s who they are. They then said Ukraine was shelling them, but Ukraine didn’t agree to the ceasefire, so…

https://twitter.com/Podolyak_M/status/1611345077871284227

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1611339196391882752

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Roundup: Protecting nominations is corrosive to democracy

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Remember back when Justin Trudeau promised that the Liberals were going to be the party of “open nominations,” because this was good for democracy and all of that? Well, it seems like once again, his party is firming up their rules to protect incumbents from nominations, which is not open nominations, and is very bad for democracy. Very, very bad. Nomination races are one of the only tools that grassroots party members have to hold incumbents to account without voting against the party in a general election. It’s how the party is supposed to hold its own to account, and if they can fundraise enough and keep their memberships above a certain level, they’re being given a free pass rather than the accountability the system is supposed to provide. This is a very bad thing for our democratic system. It’s bad enough that under Trudeau, the Liberals tore up their party constitution and centralized power in his office. Now they are short-circuiting one more accountability measure and keeping tight control over the nomination process, which focuses even more power on the leader (for whom the party constitution states doesn’t have to face a leadership review unless they lose an election). This is not how a party is supposed to be run.

The practice of democracy in this country is backsliding, as much as our parties like to pat themselves on the back. They have been undermining the rules at every turn, and have hollowed out the safeguards and the grassroots participation. And yes, I know that sitting MPs insist that they need protected nominations because they’re not in the riding to fend off any nomination challenges, but a) you’re in the riding an awful lot, because the number of sitting days has been in decline, and b) you have incumbency advantage already, and if you keep up the door-knocking and activities that you’re required to for these protections, you might as well do it for real stakes. Because yes, grassroots democracy matters, and we desperately need to rebuild it in this country before it’s too late. Protecting nominations just corrodes the system even more than it already has been, and the Liberals cannot pat themselves on the back and talk about how good they are for democracy if they can’t even be bothered with the fundamental basics.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 260:

Russian Forces made a big song and dance about pulling out of Kherson, saying they can’t supply it, but Ukraine is sceptical because it looks like Russia is setting a trap, because they tend to do the opposite of what they say they’re going to. And indeed, they say that they haven’t actually seen signs that Russians are completely leaving the city. Meanwhile, here’s a look at the task ahead of rebuilding Kharkiv after Russian occupation.

https://twitter.com/StratCom_AFU/status/1589649656338067464

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Roundup: Who they gave succour to

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Cast your minds back to summer of 2018, when prime minister Justin Trudeau attended a Liberal rally in rural Quebec and encountered a woman heckling him about refugees crossing the border at irregular points of entry. As part of this, she demanded to know when Trudeau would support “Québécois de souche,” a term tinged with racism as it applies only to those who descended from the early French settlers, essentially considering anyone without those particular roots to be some kind of contagion upon the state. Trudeau called out her intolerance, and she tried to sue for defamation.

A Quebec Superior Court judge dismissed her case, and pointed out the fact that she had tried to use the incident to make a name for herself among far-right circles, all while claiming that she has empathy because she’s a nurse, and will treat anyone. More to the point, the judge pointed out that she was deliberately trying to provoke the prime minister, and was thus the author of her own misfortune, and in dismissing the case, ordered her to pay legal fees.

So why bring this up? Because if you also think back to when the House of Commons returned shortly after this incident, the Conservatives all rushed to give succour to this woman, and tried to frame her aggressive questions and demands as though she was “just asking about the budget.” No, seriously. Conservative after Conservative stood up in the House of Commons to whine that “if Trudeau doesn’t like your questions, he calls you a racist.” Because in their minds, being called a racist is a worse crime than the actual racism that the woman was displaying. And it goes to show what the party is willing to stand up for, and who they are willing to protect if they think they can score points from it.

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Roundup: Counting down to Kenney’s referendum

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Alberta is a little over two weeks away from Jason Kenney’s bullshit “referendum” on equalisation, which won’t actually accomplish anything, but will send his rhetoric into overdrive. (This is also when he will be holding his equally bullshit “Senate nomination election,” which is also blatantly unconstitutional, but that is a rant for another day, and I’ve filed numerous columns on the topic already). This referendum will do nothing about equalisation – it won’t do anything about amending the constitution, and if he thinks he’ll bring the federal government to the table to renegotiate the terms of equalisation, Justin Trudeau will once again remind Kenney that he was sitting at the Cabinet table when Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty imposed the current formula. It’s a waste of time and money, all in the service of Kenney trying to continue to drum up anger at Ottawa as a way to distract the province from his own record of failure.

Meanwhile, here is Andrew Leach with a few thoughts:

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Roundup: Knives out for O’Toole?

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Erin O’Toole’s future is under discussion, as a number of vocal MPs are coming out to support his continued leadership, and former Ontario premier Mike Harris is adding his voice to the call. But this is as other MPs are phoning up journalists, on a not-for-attribution basis, absolutely savaging O’Toole and the fact that he is a lying liar and an opportunist of the highest order, and that ultimately undermined their case during the election. (Threads here and here).

This is going to start resolving itself at the first caucus meeting, whenever that takes place, because it’s when the party is going to have to vote on which provisions of the (garbage) Reform Act they are going to adopt for the 44th parliament, including the provision about having the caucus hold a vote to start a leadership review process. Why this is important is one of the reasons that makes the Act garbage in the first place – it actually makes it harder for caucus to push out a leader because it establishes a threshold of 20 percent of the caucus needing to demand a vote before it can be held. That exposes his critics at a time when he is deciding on critic portfolios and things like committee chairs for opposition-chaired committees, and he can use that fear-or-favour system to punish his critics if they fail to meet that 20 percent threshold. If they didn’t have this threshold or this framework, we’ve seen leaders read the writing on the wall with far fewer MPs/MLAs going public, and resigning as a result. The (garbage) Reform Act provides protection for those leaders where it’s supposed to be putting the fear of caucus into them, and it’s just such a dark irony that once again, attempts to improve the system only make it worse.

And while there are a bunch of voices (especially over on the CBC) who seem to think that Andrew Scheer was pushed out for his loss, they have all apparently forgotten that he resigned, particularly after his use of party funds came to light. Whether that was an excuse is not really the point – it wasn’t simply because he lost the election.

Programming note: I am taking the weekend off of blogging entirely because I am exhausted from the election and need to catch up on some sleep. See you next week.

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Roundup: Stripping the riding associations

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In the wake of the election, we are starting to see a few post-mortem thoughts bubbling up, and this one caught my eye over the Twitter Machine on what went on in the NDP campaign:

https://twitter.com/JessaMcLeanNDP/status/1440360899949182976

https://twitter.com/JessaMcLeanNDP/status/1440366348341694465

This is troubling in several respects – it gives some context as to why the NDP couldn’t get the ground game in ridings where they thought they had a chance to pick up seats, and it explains why their campaign spent as much as it did. This shouldn’t be a surprise for the party however – they are a very centralised organisation, and 2011 was ample demonstration that they have very few grassroots organisations in whole swaths of the county. That’s why when the “Orange Wave” happened, you had a tonne of candidates who had never even visited their ridings – the riding organisations were pretty much just on paper, much like the candidates. A proper riding organisation would have held a nomination race for someone from the area, not a McGill student who signed up on a form and spent the race working Mulcair’s riding in Montreal. They didn’t nurture those grassroots, as shallow as they were, and lo, they lost most of their Quebec seats in 2015, and all but one of them in 2019, nor did they regain any in this election.

Ground game matters, especially in an election where getting out the vote is crucial. Grassroots organisations matter. They may have them in a few of their stronghold ridings, but it really doesn’t look like they have it very well developed in large parts of the country, especially in places where they think they have a chance at winning. But if they’re simply stripping their riding associations of resources – and from the sounds of it, carrying on with the centralised nominations – then that’s a sign of an unhealthy political culture, and not a surprise that they aren’t getting the traction that they’re hoping for.

Good reads:

  • Several of the tight races may not have definitive conclusions until the end of the week. In one of them, ousted Liberal candidate Kevin Vuong remains in the lead.
  • The defeat of fisheries minister Bernadette Jordan has both sides of the Indigenous fishing dispute saying that this points to the need for a resolution to the situation.
  • The Star profiles ten of the new MPs that won races on Monday.
  • Here are a few thoughts from Liberals and academics as to where Trudeau goes now that he’s returned another hung parliament.
  • George Chahal has won a riding in Calgary, which essentially makes him a shoo-in for a Cabinet position.
  • It sounds like Erin O’Toole will encourage caucus to vote for the (garbage) Reform Act provisions that allow a leadership review to be triggered.
  • O’Toole has also triggered a campaign review to see where they went wrong.
  • Jagmeet Singh thinks his leadership is secure, and wants to press Trudeau on wealth taxes in exchange for his support.
  • François Legault doesn’t regret his endorsements in the federal election, even though they amounted to little change.
  • Kevin Carmichaels gets some economic reaction to the election results, and posits that there is now more political certainty for the markets to react to.
  • Chantal Hébert makes her observations about the election results, including that Trudeau will start entering the “legacy phase” of his time in office.
  • Robert Hiltz remains unimpressed by what was on offer in the election, and in the results.
  • My column looks at why the election was not an unnecessary effort, and what some of the underlying narratives that didn’t get explored were.

Odds and ends:

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Roundup: Bracing for election night

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With voting day just days away, we’re starting to see a few “reminder” stories about how our system works, so that we can have some reasonable expectations about what the outcomes might look like on Monday, and why it will mean things like the current government staying in place and having the first chance to test the confidence of the new Chamber once it’s been summoned. There is an interview with Emmett Macfarlane here about how any decision will unfold on Monday night and why Trudeau will remain prime minister until he chooses to resign, which is good. There is also a piece from the Canadian Press which maps out different scenarios about how the evening may play out and what these scenarios might mean.

The problem, of course, is that television news in this country is abysmal, and we’ll spend the night listening to inane banter that pretends that there is no sitting government (exacerbated by the fact that they are currently observing a convention that refers to the prime minister as the “Liberal leader” in order to have an exaggerated sense of “fairness” around his incumbent status), and they will throw around terms like “prime minister-elect” even though we don’t elect prime minister (it’s an appointed position) and the fact that if it is the incumbent – which it’s likely to be – he’s already the prime minister and won’t require an “-elect” or “-designate” title to go along with it. We’ll also no doubt hear talk about him getting a “mandate” even though that kind of thing is utterly incompatible with our system of government. And no matter how much people like me will call it out over social media, nobody will care, and they will continue to completely misinform people about our basic civics without any care in the world, because that’s the state of media in this country right now.

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Roundup: Ill-equipped to combat weaponised cynicism

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I’ve been thinking about something Trudeau said during the “debate” on Thursday night about cynicism being the enemy of progressive politics, and in this piece by Aaron Wherry, he listed some of the attacks made against Trudeau in his discussion of said cynicism. It has not gone unnoticed that this has been a tactic that Jagmeet Singh has been cultivating for years – undermining any progress the government has made on tough files, and pretending that difficult things could be accomplished with just a little more willpower, or that things under provincial jurisdiction could just be done with more applications of that willpower. The truth is that it can’t be, and that hard things are hard – which is also why the “you had six years!” talking point is hard to take too seriously. It has a built-in assumption that a government has infinite capacity to do the work, that the House of Commons has infinite time on its calendar to pass all of its legislation, and it also assumes that premiers will sign onto anything the federal government waves in front of them. But that’s not how real life works (especially when your capacity is being sapped by needing to deal with Donald Trump for four years).

But complexity and nuance don’t belong in debates, which is what Singh, Annamie Paul, and even to an extent Erin O’Toole are counting on when they list Trudeau’s so-called “failures.” He didn’t meet the 2020 climate target? If he had started in the fall of 2015, moving to meet that target was pretty much impossible without cratering the economy, and Singh knows it. You can’t lower emissions on a dime, and even bending the curve – which Trudeau has done – takes enormous work, and it’s work he had to go to the Supreme Court of Canada to defend. Boil water advisories? There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and each community has a unique issue that requires a unique solution, which each community is taking the lead on, and the federal government pays the invoices. But again, these solutions take time, even with money being thrown at the problem, which Singh and others seem incapable of recognizing because it suits their narrative. “Taking Indigenous kids to court?” Again, it’s a more nuanced issue where the government has agreed to pay the compensation, and is in the process of negotiating how much in concert with two other class action lawsuits (which went directly to settlement – the government didn’t contest them at all) – but there are very real legal issues with the precedent that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal might set, because their award appears to contravene a previous Supreme Court of Canada decision. Again, Singh should know this because he’s a lawyer, but he has no interest in the truth because it allows him to score points (and frankly, the media has utterly dropped the ball on this file because they only talk to one party in the litigation and don’t find out just what “jurisdiction” issue the minister refers to). These are all things whose narratives have been torqued to drive a sense of cynicism in Trudeau’s government, which Trudeau is frankly ill-prepared to dispute because he keeps sticking to happy-clappy talking points rather than being frank about problems and solutions. When someone offers you platitudes and doesn’t explain their homework, it makes it all too easy to let cynicism fill in the cracks, and Trudeau really has only himself to blame here.

Meanwhile, here is the video the five leaders released encouraging people to get vaccinated.

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Roundup: Promising to take credit for work already accomplished

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Erin O’Toole released his plan yesterday to ensure that the country would reach 90 percent vaccination rates – voluntarily! The centrepiece of this campaign? A series of mail-outs that would appeal to Canadians’ patriotism in order to get vaccinated. Because appealing to “personal responsibility” has worked so well in Alberta. O’Toole’s plan has some additional tinkering around the edges, such as free Uber and Lyft rides to vaccine appointments, or reimbursing employers for the time off to get it done – things that should not be the responsibility of the federal government, quite frankly.

One of the more galling aspects of his “plan,” however, is around booster shots, and insisting that they will “prioritize the signing of contracts” for booster shots – erm, except that the Liberals already did that. They have a contract with Pfizer to provide additional doses through 2024 if need be, which O’Toole is either lying by omission about, or he’s making a somewhat sexist attack against Anita Anand and slighting her work on this file – while literally promising to take credit for the work that she did. Either way, it’s both misleading and a bit gross, but when has it been anything but over the course of this campaign. (Oh, and his promise to “accelerate homegrown development and production of vaccines” pretty much ignores how vaccine development and production works, but hey, this is also the election where leaders keep promising a Green Lantern Ring to solve all of their problems).

Meanwhile, I can’t help but roll my eyes as Conservatives are clutching their pearls that the Liberals are releasing “negative” ads about them. The party has spent the past number of years going on a strategy of shitposting at every opportunity, and of giving their MPs free reign to proffer conspiracy theories like saying that the Liberals want to “normalise sexual relations with children,” and they get the vapours when the Liberals put out attack ads? Girl, please.

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1434194410263220225

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Roundup: Cynicism and paid sick days

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a couple of election promises yesterday that felt a bit cynical, and one of them is federally problematic. The first promise was to implement ten employer-paid sick days in federally-regulated workplaces. This was something that he should have done some 18 months ago, but given that they had mandated three employer-paid sick days previously – the highest in the country – they felt they were in good standing, and tried to persuade provinces to do the same. They did not.

After Trudeau made the announcement, Jagmeet Singh went on a tear about how “disgusted” he was that Trudeau had made this promise when he’d been calling for it for over a year. But there are differences here, and yes, they matter. Some of you may recall that Singh wanted the federal government to give paid sick leave to everyone in the country, but the federal government can’t do that. They can only mandate employer-paid sick leave – which is the best kind because it means that there are no interruptions on pay cheques and job security is maintained – in federally-regulated workplaces, which account for six percent of jobs in the country. That’s it. The provinces have to amend their own labour codes to cover the remaining workplaces, and Singh consistently refused to acknowledge that reality. Meanwhile, the government recognized that there were people who didn’t have access to employer-paid leave because they’re self-employed or part-time, so they created the Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit, which was a kludge – you had to apply for it, and only after you missed half of the week, and it took more time for the money to arrive. Singh demanded that the federal government “fix” that programme, but there wasn’t much more they could do to it – there are limits to the federal back-end IT infrastructure used to administer the programme, so it couldn’t be seamless like employer-paid sick leave. And the premiers, for whom the other 94 percent of workplaces are under their jurisdiction? They balked, especially because business lobbies like the CFIB lobbied heavily against mandating more sick days, so they forced people to rely on the CRSB, or created their own temporary kludges to mimic the CRSB. For Singh to now claim that Trudeau is doing what he demanded is not true – yes, Trudeau should have mandated more employer-paid sick days federally, but this is not the same as CRSB, and the two should not be equated like he’s doing here (and yes, it is cynical politics for him to claim otherwise in order to drive disillusionment).

As for the promise around school ventilation, it’s too late for this school year, and at first blush it looks like a federal overreach into provincial jurisdiction. The backgrounder states that this is just extending the Safe Return to Class Fund from August 2020, and they’re basically giving money to provinces with the slenderest of strings attached, which I’m not really a fan of. Because we’re in an election, we’re back to the constant state of promises – from all parties – that rely on provincial cooperation, and there are a lot of loaded assumptions that they’ll play ball, which seems to be fairly rare (and before you raise child care, the success there is in part because there was too much money on the table for provinces to ignore, which is not how it has played out with pharmacare). The Liberals are mostly more careful in their language, citing things like “While a Liberal government will always respect provincial-territorial jurisdiction…” unlike the other two platforms, but this certainly isn’t being picked up on nearly enough by the reporting, and it creates expectations that perhaps it perhaps shouldn’t.

https://twitter.com/JenniferRobson8/status/1428860564676222981

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