Tag Archives: Parliamentary Budget Officer

Roundup: A dubious plan for the next pandemic

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Erin O’Toole unveiled his party’s pandemic preparedness plan yesterday, and it was very curious indeed. His framing was a lot of revisionist history about border closures, and some outright fabrications about supposed contracts that went to people with close connections to the Liberals, which has not been shown anywhere other than the fevered imaginations of what happened around the WE contract, and the bullshit story they concocted around Baylis Medical. More than this, however, a number of things that O’Toole was critical of were things that dated back to the Conservatives’ watch – including changes to the management structure of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The fact that O’Toole is saying he would essentially undo changes the government he was a part of made – without acknowledging that they made the detrimental changes in the first place – is quite something. The fact that they’re going on about the pandemic stockpile without acknowledging that its management failed under their watch, going back to at least 2010 – and we have an Auditor General’s Report that confirms this – is not unsurprising. Other aspects seem to be dubious at best, such as doing something about pharmaceutical patents and doing away with PMPRB (Patented Medicines Price Review Board) regulations in order to appease these companies in the hopes that they will do more research and manufacturing here seems both unwise at best, and will mean higher drug prices for Canadians going forward.

There were some other things buried in there, not the least of which were contradictions around raising tariffs on PPE in order to ensure they are manufactured domestically, while also trying to “secure the North American supply chain” to reduce reliance on imports – but imports from the US and Mexico are still imports. There were also a number of jabs at China in the document, some of which will limit our ability to have international cooperation around research of emerging viruses, and he managed to wedge in the current drama around the National Microbiology Lab firings into his piece as well. The problem of course is that a lot of this sounds like it makes sense on the surface, but the moment you start reading their backgrounder (which doesn’t appear to be online – just emailed to reporters) and scratching beneath the surface, the more apparent it is that a lot of this is hot-air, blame-shifting, and disingenuous rhetoric masquerading as a plan.

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Roundup: Ambrose’s bill becomes law

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Bill C-3 passed the Senate yesterday and received royal assent. Many of you will know this as Rona Ambrose’s bill to mandate sexual assault training by judges, and it’s been a weird little ride through the parliamentary process, starting with Ambrose’s original bill in the previous parliament, dying on the Order Paper at the election, and the current government resurrecting it in principle, but not the same bill. Why? Because the original bill was blatantly unconstitutional in how it infringed on judicial independence, and was entirely unworkable in terms of how lawyers who wanted to apply to be judges needed to conduct themselves.

In order to make the bill palatable, it had to be rewritten as a hollow shell – essentially a suggestion for future judges, because anything else would be untenable. So we now have a useless but symbolic bill on the books that will do very little to solve the problem that Ambrose perceived, but instead will have new unintended consequences – namely, as former Supreme Court of Canada Executive Legal Officer Gib van Ert outlines here, that it has opened the door to new bills demanding that judges take training on any other area of law or policy that is the flavour of the day, and while they may be important in and of themselves, it is corrosive to judicial independence because it portrays them as being beholden to the whims of the government of the day rather than maintaining a distance and independence from that government’s wishes.

The more concerning aspect of this bill’s particular path however was just how uncritically it was treated by media outlets around the country. Ambrose would appear on the political talk shows every few months to complain that it was being held up by the “old boys’ club,” and not once did anyone mention the list of valid and legitimate complaints and concerns about the bill, in particular its dubious constitutionality. Not once. The first time it happened, I timed myself in that it took me twenty minutes to review Senate testimony at second reading to compile the list of problems that were raised. Twenty minutes of homework, and not one report or producer of a political show bothered to put in the work, and they simply let Ambrose talk about her bill uncritically, and unchallenged. Not one. It’s kind of alarming that something as important as judicial independence was quite literally ignored by every major outlet in the country, because they wanted to promote a feel-good bill about sexual assault training. That’s pretty concerning.

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Roundup: PROC needs to grow up

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I find myself losing all patience with the state of Commons committees in the current parliament, and the shenanigans happening at the Procedure and House Affairs committee right now are really not helping matters – and to be clear, it’s all sides that are to blame here, with particular blame going to the prime minister himself for starting this particular farcical exercise of tabling a prorogation report and patting himself on the back for it, and then watching it all blow up in his face.

The notion of a “prorogation report” was always stupid. I get that the idea was supposed to be about trying to increase openness and transparency, and finding a way to demonstrate that tactical prorogations would be avoided, and so on, but it was dumb. The better alternative, as I pointed out in my book, was to restore prorogation ceremonies, where the government would have to have a public accounting of what they accomplished in the session and outlining how they felt that they accomplished the goals set out in the previous Throne Speech, before they set out for a new one. You get public accountability, and you get some pomp and ceremony from the Governor General or the deputy reading that speech (and it should be the GG – the practice of it being the Chief Justice is another one of those particular pieces of historical trivia that is infuriating in how it perverted norms that were carried on unthinkingly). But Trudeau didn’t go that route, despite having publicly mused about it, and here we are today.

The fact that the Liberals are filibustering at the committee is everyone’s fault. Yes, Trudeau should appear at committee to testify why he decided to prorogue – it’ll be a useless exercise in him delivering talking points, but it’s his decision and he should be questioned for it if this is the route that he chose to go. But trying to get Katie Telford violates the issue of not calling staffers because of ministerial responsibility, and summoning the Kielburgers and the people who run Speaker’s Spotlight to testify as well is beyond ridiculous, because they have absolutely nothing to say about the prime minister’s decision. Sure, the prime minister quite likely prorogued because of the constant WE Imbroglio circus going on – but those particular figures aren’t going to say anything useful to the committee about the prorogation report, which is what they are supposed to be debating. It’s all about trying to keep the WE Imbroglio in the spotlight for as long as possible, never mind that most Canadians have long since moved on from it, because the opposition parties think they can still use it to score points. Nobody is doing their jobs anymore, the notion of a prorogation report is a sham, and this whole exercise is just wasting parliamentary time, and exhausting the limited resources of hybrid sittings (especially the interpreters). Everyone needs to grow the hell up, and maybe, just maybe, Trudeau will have learned his lesson that this report was a dumb idea and he’ll do the right thing next time and restore the prorogation ceremony instead.

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Roundup: Ford’s sick days deception

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The issue of paid sick days went completely sideways in Ontario after the murderclown government, thinking they were clever, tried to propose that the federal government simply double the payout of the federal sickness benefit programme, promising that they would cover the difference, and leave it at that. Not surprisingly, the federal government said no, because the federal sickness benefit is not paid sick leave, and everybody knows it. Doug Ford knows that, because he repealed the paid sick days that were legislated in the province, at the behest of business owners (because when Ford says he’s looking out for “the little guy,” he means the business owner). Reinstating them is a simple fix in the province’s labour code, unlike “fixing” the federal benefit, which is an impossibility because a) it’s not their jurisdiction, and b) they are limited by their back-end IT infrastructure, which in no way could allow them to have seamless paid sick days the way amending the provincial labour codes would allow. (The federal government could do more when it comes to the sick leave provisions in federally-regulated workplaces, but they are not starting from zero like provinces are).

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While on Power & Politics, Ontario’s labour minister, Monty McNaughton, did let slip that they didn’t want to implement actual paid sick days because it would be a burden on businesses, which were already suffering from the pandemic – as though having an outbreak in their facility won’t hurt them even more, or having their employees die of COVID. That, and they have options available to them, such as using the wage subsidy to pay for their employees’ sick leave – that’s one of the reasons it’s there. The whole gods damned point of the federal sickness benefit is for those who don’t have employers, like the self-employed, who could need some kind of income support if they can’t work because of COVID. It was never supposed to replace actual paid sick leave, but premiers decided that they could try to get around their own obligations with it.

Meanwhile, BC premier John Horgan is putting on a song and dance of reluctantly implementing paid sick leave in BC – fourteen months later – and making a theatrical production of trying to claim they wanted to make this a national programme. This, dear readers, is horseshit. Labour codes are provincial jurisdiction in 94 percent of workplaces, and if the federal government had tried to come up with a national paid sick leave programme pre-pandemic, every single premier would have cried jurisdiction and refused on principle. For Horgan and other premiers to now try and claim they want a federal programme is a lie, and an attempt at giving themselves cover. They are trying to avoid the wrath of the business lobbies, and the small business lobby in particular, and trying to use a federal programme designed primarily for the self-employed as their fig leaf.

Even more to the point, I cannot abide how pretty much every single media outlet has framed this issue, painting it as either federal-provincial “finger-pointing,” or even worse, claiming that Ford’s proposal as being some kind of “compromise.” It is not a compromise – it’s more deception that these media outlets are spooning up. And they keep offering Doug Ford political cover. I cannot stress this enough. By trying to be “neutral” and both-sidesing the issue, they are providing Ford with more ability to try and pin this on the federal government when it’s his issue, in his jurisdiction, and he needs to own it.

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QP: Believing a phone call could solve it

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On a fairly lovely day in the nation’s capital, the prime minister was present in the House of Commons, with the usual Liberal in attendance, Mark Gerretsen, a couple of rows behind him amid otherwise empty benches.  Erin O’Toole led off in person and in French for a change, and he listed the people who knew about the allegations against General Jonathan Vance, and whether he knew. Justin Trudeau said that they knew there was an allegation but were not privy to details. O’Toole tried again in English, and Trudeau repeated the answer before he embellished with the talking point that when O’Toole himself heard a rumour of allegations against Vance, his staff went to Privy Council Office, and the same process had been followed, while the current government had done more about changing the culture in the armed forces. O’Toole tried yet again, insisting that emails showed that the phrase sexual harassment was used, and Trudeau more forcefully insisted that they did try to investigate but could not go further which was why they were putting more measures into place. O’Toole tried yet again, with more bluster, for which Trudeau started sermonising about doing more for women and marginalised people in the military.

Yves-François Blanchet rose for the Bloc, and insisted that the prime minster could have personally picked up the phone and stopped the Port of Montreal strike, for which Trudeau insisted that if the Bloc wanted to take action on behalf of Quebeckers, and pass the bill so that they can set up a neutral mediation process. Blanchet again insisted that the prime minister needed to pick up the phone, and Trudeau stated that they tried negotiating for two-and-a-half years, and it was for naught, and he demanded support for the bill.

Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and in French, he demanded the government withdraw the back-to-work legislation for the Port of Montreal, and Trudeau insisted that they did try negotiations, and that this bill would not impose a contract but rather neutral mediation. Singh then switched to English to demand the government improve the federal sickness benefit — oblivious to what that entails — and Trudeau reminded him that the best leave is the one from employers and that the NDP voted against them implementing it for federally-regulated sectors.

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Roundup: Stay-at-home again, complete with feigned surprise

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Ontario is now back under a “stay-at-home” order, issued its third state of emergency, and lo, there has been movement on vaccinations in that they are now going to start targeting high-risk neighbourhoods and essential workers, like they should have started weeks ago, so that’s positive. Oh, but still no paid sick leave because Ford and company continue to mislead people by claiming the federal sickness benefit is the same thing, which it absolutely is not. What most assuredly is not positive is the fact that the provincial government knew this was coming. They have been warned for weeks that this was going to happen, and they were explicitly told that loosening restrictions in the face of the new variants would be a disaster. There was that press conference on February 11th that said just that – and they didn’t listen, and now they have the gall to pretend to be surprised that the numbers are exceeding their worst-case scenarios? Sorry, but no. Get out of here with that bullshit.

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And here’s Supriya Dwivedi which lays out why Ford has completely ballsed this up and created this Third Wave and all of the illnesses and resulting deaths as a result.

Meanwhile, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization has decided to stick with their advice that second doses can be delayed for up to four months – and the “up to” is key – but given increasing vaccine supplies, that interval is likely to be less. And the reason why they’re saying this is because they are looking at the balance of ensuring that as many people get a first dose as soon as possible in order to have at least some level of protection. The problem is that this isn’t being effectively communicated by most media outlets (the Star piece linked here is actually doing a decent job) and even on Power & Politics last night, after the head of NACI patiently explained all of this, Vassy Kapelos still characterised it as NACI recommending a four-month delay, omitting the “up to” and creating a false impression of the advice, and it makes it easy for certain parties like the Conservatives to deliberately misconstrue NACI’s advice for partisan point-scoring. I do not understand what CBC thinks they are doing by reporting this way. It defies sense.

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Roundup: O’Toole’s hand-wavey five-point plan

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Erin O’Toole gave his keynote speech at the Conservative convention, and it was…serviceable. It was no rhetorical or oratory feat, but it wasn’t the stumbling, breathy mess that Andrew Scheer tended to deliver either, so there was that. But while he laid out his “five-point plan” for economic recovery, it was mostly hand-wavey and gave no real indication of just what exactly he planned to do, or how. Or, as one description put it, it was all tell and no show. But for as much as saying that the country has changed and the party needs to doesn’t really say how. Reaching out to private sector unions? Okay, sure, but just telling a bunch of blue-collar workers that you’re not “woke” isn’t going to cut it when you’re arguing against better wages and benefits. Trying to appeal to Quebec by out-Blocing the Bloc? I’m not seeing exactly what kind of broader, more inclusive party he’s trying to build other than his usual lip service about wanting more Canadians to see a Conservative when they look in the mirror.

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While you can see my thread responding to his speech here, the party put out a backgrounder on their “Canada Recovery Plan” shortly after the speech, it’s still pretty hand-wavey. In short:

  1. Jobs – What government doesn’t promise jobs? O’Toole promises to recover the million jobs lost by the pandemic, just as Trudeau has, and while O’Toole says that includes women and youth, he literally spent the rest of the speech deriding the Liberals’ inclusive growth plan as being “picking and choosing who gets ahead,” and a “re-imagining of the economy.” Pick a lane.
  2. Accountability – Promises for new anti-corruption laws miss the point. Stephen Harper rode in on the white horse of accountability, and all it did was drive away talent from political staff jobs. Trudeau’s “ethics scandals” have largely been penny ante, and stem from a belief that so long as they mean well that the ends justify the means. Even more laws aren’t going to change that, and this is just populist noise, trying to rail against “elites.”
  3. Mental Health – I will give O’Toole props for mentioning that this will require the cooperation of the provinces, but he’s also already promised increased health transfers with no strings attached. So, again, pick a gods damned lane. As for his “incentives for employers to provide mental health coverage,” we all know that means another tax credit. As for the national three-digit suicide prevention hotline, the Liberals already started this process, but it’s going to take up to two years to implement.
  4. Secure the Country – Partner with pharmaceutical companies to increase capacity for medicines and vaccine production? Erm, what are you willing to capitulate to them? Blow up PMPRB? Give them longer timelines for intellectual property to keep out generics? These kinds of measures would increase drug prices, and would hugely impact provinces and health plans. More domestic production of PPE? You’re talking about subsidising industries to do that, which doesn’t sound very Conservative, and it sounds like picking winners and losers.
  5. Economy – Winding down emergency supports and targeting stimulus are pretty much exactly what the Liberals are promising. There is no daylight here. As for promising to “grow the economy again” and claiming there was slow growth under the Liberals is 100 percent fiction – the Liberals needed to provide some kind of economic stimulus because Conservative austerity was dragging economic growth. This claim is complete bullshit.

Meanwhile, Paul Wells is heartened that O’Toole has woken up to the reality that his party can no longer continue being a cargo cult for Stephen Harper – but also notes that his plan is light on calories, for better or worse at this stage.

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Roundup: Pandora’s Box is open

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With the agreement of all House Leaders in the Commons, MPs have finally done it and wrenched open the lid of Pandora’s Box (which is actually a jar) and have let loose evil into the world. That evil is their remote voting app, and Parliament will forever suffer for it.

Am I being a drama queen about this? Hardly. Because we’re already seeing the demands to make these hybrid sittings permanent. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was asked to report on “savings” of this set-up, and in spite of the increased IT and staff costs (and almost no mention of the human costs of the interpreters burning out and suffering cognitive injuries at a horrific rate), he figured that it would save about $6.2 million a year, mostly in travel costs, as well as some 2,972 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions. And the senator who commissioned the PBO report was so enthralled with the result that she wants to make hybrid sittings permanent, with the “bonus” that parliamentarians can spend more time in their “ridings” (erm, except senators don’t have ridings because they represent the whole province, Quebec’s senatorial districts notwithstanding).

What I have been warning about this whole time is that MPs would use the pandemic to normalise hybrid sittings and remote voting, because some of them – the Liberals especially – have been pushing for this for years with little success, and with the pandemic, they are not letting a good crisis go to waste. They know that once it’s over, they will contrive excuses to keep these “temporary” measures permanent, starting with the excuse that it’ll be beneficial for MPs on parental leave, and then it’ll be for those with work-life balance issues, and finally it will because they just have so many things going on in their ridings that they couldn’t possibly be in Ottawa – and now they have the added justification of cost savings and reduced GHG from flights. Parliament is facing de-population, and it will become like a homeroom that everyone attends once or twice a year, and that’s it.

The problem is that Parliament is a face-to-face institution. Some of the most important work that happens is actually on the margins of committee rooms, in the lobbies behind the Chambers, or in the corridors. Ministers can be button-holed by MPs in the Chamber waiting for votes, which is incredibly valuable. Relationships are built with stakeholders and witnesses who appear at committee, and that happens face-to-face. And more importantly, MPs need to actually be in the same room for collegiality to happen. When MPs stopped having dinner together in the Parliamentary Restaurant three nights a week after they ended evening sittings, collegiality plummeted and has never recovered. If MPs aren’t even in Ottawa with one another, they will be fully ensconced in partisan bubbles that make it easy to treat one another as the enemy rather than as fellow MPs who can play outraged in the Chamber and go for a drink together afterward (which is becoming rare enough as it is). This is antithetical to what Parliament is. And not enough of them are getting it, so they’re allowing this to go ahead full-steam ahead, and boasting about “modernisation,” and so on. It will kill Parliament, and not enough people will actually care, which is the worst part.

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Roundup: O’Toole’s use of stock photos is telling

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You may have noticed that Erin O’Toole has been launching a new social media campaign about the dire state of our economy, using stock photo images to illustrate his points. Over my years in journalism, I have come to be very wary of the use of stock images by parties in their advertising, because much of it is inherently deceptive or manipulative (aside from being cheap to slap into their products) – and I will fully credit Glen McGregor for this.

So, what have we seen with two of O’Toole’s posts? One of them was about January’s brutal job numbers, accompanied by a stock photo of a young white guy in a hoodie, looking somewhat distressed. The problem? Those same job numbers showed disproportionate losses among women and visible minorities because the most affected sectors were wholesale and retail trade, as well as accommodation and food services – which makes sense given all of the closures in the second wave. In other words, the images he put up was not only tone deaf, but speaks to just who he thinks his voter base will respond sympathetically to, which says a lot. (The only upside here is that he model was actually Canadian and not a Romanian, but when said model found out about it, he chimed in).

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O’Toole posted another one yesterday about standing up for Canadian workers, using a photo of a (white) construction worker. But again, if you look at last month’s job numbers, construction jobs were actually up – they were the main driver of goods-producing jobs (which were a net gain rather than a net loss on the month). Again, though, this is about what O’Toole is signalling what kinds of jobs he thinks matters, and it’s not where the losses have been. As he starts to make a lot of noise about his recovery plans and supposed economic dream team, he is sending very loud signals about what he thinks the recovery should look like, and it appears to be pretty divorced from what everyone else thinks it should look like, and that is something worth paying attention to.

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Roundup: A freak-out over vaccine math

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With things in a particularly…fragile state around the vaccine rollout, leaking numbers without context should be seen as a Very Bad Thing, and yet that’s what happened yesterday morning, when it appeared to look like Pfizer was cutting the number of vials they were sending us before the end of our Q1 agreement, and there was a freak out. Premiers started demanding federal action (as though Justin Trudeau can just strong-arm Pfizer into producing more doses somehow), or badmouthing Pfizer itself (because that’ll help). And it turns out that it was all for naught.

It turns out that with the possibility that the vials of vaccine will be re-labelled to say that they contain six doses instead of five (which apparently is not uniform, and requires either a skilled operator or different syringes which are in short supply right now), Pfizer decided to rejig the math so that there are the same numbers of doses, but just in fewer vials. Health Canada has not agreed to this re-labelling, and has no timeline on when such a decision could be made, but Pfizer apparently jumped the gun in sending new numbers that got misinterpreted (and misrepresented once the context was actually known), and this government can’t communicate its way out of a wet paper bag at the best of times, so its inability to properly communicate these new figures only made things worse (especially as they didn’t smack it down during Question Period). And if Health Canada doesn’t relabel the vials? Pfizer still sends us the contracted-for number of doses. So the freak-out was for nothing – except maybe yet another kick in the ass for this government to get in the game when it comes to getting ahead of these things.

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Meanwhile, we also found out that Ontario had mis-reported its vaccination figures, and they’ve only vaccinated half as many as they said they did, which really puts the province’s hue and cry into the fact that it was running out of doses into a new light – and also the fact that they have been so desperate to blame the federal government for everything. It’s the “look over there” strategy, that certain members of the media seem to keep falling for, every single time. The absolute incompetence of the Ford government never fails to astound.

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