Tag Archives: Parliamentary Budget Officer

QP: Selectively quoting a PBO report that selectively frames an issue

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With Justin Trudeau away—first to Mississauga to announce the child care deal in Ontario along with his deputy, then off to Vancouver, none of the other leaders bothered to show up in the House of Commons for Question Period today, so happy Monday to you all. Luc Berthold led off, script in front of him, and in French, he regaled the Commons with a tale of how people approached him in the grocery store about complaints about the rising cost of living, and demanded to now how the prime minister intends to feed Canadian families. Randy Boissonnault accused him of creating economic fiction, and recited Statistics Canada data on the growth of the GDP. Berthold railed about the price of gas and what it was doing for inflation, to which Boisonnault praised the child care agreement with Ontario as an affordability measure. Berthold then switched to health care transfers to provinces and the principles the government were attaching to them, to which Jean-Yves Duclos praised their measures to save Canadians’ lives. Kyle Seeback got up and in English, railed about the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report on carbon prices, selectively quoting a report that only selectively looks at a portion of the issue, to which Terry Duguid assured him that the PBO stated that most families will get more back in rebates than they pay. Seeback insisted this was wrong, that the PBO stated otherwise, and Duguid repeated his points.

Alain Therrien rose for the Bloc, and he demanded that health transfers have no conditions and blamed the federal government for underfunding provincial health systems, and Duclos recited some good news talking points about the $2 billion for surgery backlogs. Therrien listed federal failures to insist that they had no competence for healthcare, to which Pablo Rodriguez quipped that the Bloc should invest in shirt-making companies because they keep tearing their shirts every day.

Alexandre Boulerice appeared for the NDP by video and wondered about enforcement of sanctions in Canada, to which Mélanie Joly praised the sanctions and the assets that they froze. Heather McPherson repeated the question in English, and Joly repeated her assurances.

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Roundup: The grifters make nice for the cameras

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The first part of the grifter convoy arrived in Ottawa yesterday, probably 80 trucks in total, and they largely blocked the street in front of Parliament Hill and made a bunch of noise, but that was it so far. Much of the day appeared to be devoted PR—the organizers swearing up and down that they wanted this to be peaceful, engaging with the police to that effect, who are on the lookout for “lone wolves,” telling reporters on the scene the fiction that they were frustrated with vaccine mandates (until you scratched the surface, and they insist that they are tired of the “tyranny” of the current “dictator” Justin Trudeau, whom you will all recall just won a free and fair election).

It’s all bullshit, however. All of it. This whole thing was organized by extremists, some of whom have ties to the Sons of Odin. If anyone with “genuine concerns” is really along for the ride, it’s because they’re a hapless moron who can’t do their due diligence before they got swept up into the grift. We don’t know where a lot of the money collected by the GoFundMe is coming from, but it’s a good bet it’s not all domestic—especially as this has been picked up by agitators in the American media ecosystem, who are seeing this as some kind of mobilisation effort (while repeating the bizarre falsehood that this is somehow 50,000 trucks and 1.4 million people headed to Ottawa, which defies credulity). They have a stated aim of overturning democracy and eliminating all public health orders (never mind that 99 percent of them are provincial or municipal), and it’s never going to happen because it’s impossible, but nevertheless, there are more and more Conservative MPs who keep giving them legitimacy while trying to play cute and insisting that they denounce extremism, even though the gods damned extremists are behind it. Erin O’Toole went so far as to stage a photo op with a supposed trucker family while in an RCAF jacket, which is a pretty dubious statement to be making considering this convoy’s goal is to overturn democracy, which includes him.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1487211790765338628

Meanwhile, Matt Gurney wonders how we deal with the impossible task of marginalizing the extremists, and proposes we actually start fixing the things that can be fixed to show that the system can work. (Not mentioned: Calling out the opportunists who feed the extremists’ irrational anger and the politicians who court them because they think they can use their energy and dollars). Colin Horgan, on the other hand, speaks for all of our weariness, as we are subjected to these conspiracy theorists who are all playing hero in their own minds, and believing their own juvenile bullshit, while even those with “genuine concerns” only make it worse by feeding into it all the same.

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Roundup: The extremists weigh in

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As the grifter convoy 2022 gets closer to Ottawa, it is attracting more online attention from some unsavoury circles. Some of them have been calling for this to be Canada’s January 6th insurrection, which one might think would give some Conservative MPs pause, but nope. No denunciations have yet been forthcoming. Another group associated with the convoy, calling itself “Canadian Unity,” seems to think they can force the government to sign some kind of quasi-legalistic “Memorandum of Understanding” that would essentially force the all governments, federal, provincial and municipal, to rescind all public health measures and dissolve the government so that said group can rule by fiat. Erm, yeah, that’s not going to happen.

One of the organizers (who has the GoFundMe in her name) says she won’t tolerate extremist rhetoric associated with said grifter convoy, but yeah, good luck with that. And if things do turn violent, well, that could trigger anti-terrorism financing laws to everyone who donated to those GoFundMe accounts.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1486064285361086469

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1485976603918315525

Oh, and the federal government isn’t budging on the vaccine mandate, and if they think a convoy like this will change the Americans’ minds for their own mandate, well, good luck with that delusion.

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Roundup: At long last, the mandate letters

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On what turned out to be the final sitting day of 2021 for the House of Commons, the prime minister finally released the mandate letters for his ministers, nearly three months after the election, and two after they were sworn in to their new jobs. I’m not sure how well I can articulate the utter absurdity of the situation, because there is really no excuse why it took this long (let along why it took him as long as it did to swear in his Cabinet or to summon Parliament). The fact that they were released after the House agreed to rise at the end of the sitting day means that there can be no interrogation of these letters by the opposition until January 31st, which is way too long.

As for the letters themselves, there is a theme among them about building a more inclusive and fair country, and for tangible results to be better communicated to Canadians (you think?). Some of the highlights include:

  • Ordering several ministers to take a harder line on trade tensions with the US
  • Resurrecting legislation on CanCon requirements for the internet and having web giants pay news outlets, as well as modernising the CBC
  • Renewed action to fighting systemic racism, along with a number of initiatives directed toward the Black community
  • Implementing UNDRIP in all decisions
  • Developing a new cyber-security strategy

No doubt more attention will be paid to these letters over the coming days, and we’ll see how much misunderstanding comes from them (recall the line about not creating new permanent spending programmes from Chrystia Freeland’s previous letter which people took to mean all rather than in the context of COVID supports). It also looks like we’re getting talking heads grousing about inclusivity as though it were somehow a distraction from economic growth when inclusive growth is where the country needs to be headed to head off economic challenges plaguing us since before the pandemic.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1471544703212404736

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Roundup: A costing document with too-rosy projections

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The NDP released their platform costing document at 4:30 PM on a Saturday – the second day of advanced polls – a time of day where most of the population will have tuned out already. This was a choice, much like the Conservatives releasing theirs right before the debates – so that attention would be elsewhere. Why? Because as much as they might dress it up, there’s not a lot in there that is credible.

There is some $215 billion in proposed new spending, some of which is difficult to see is feasible, such as their plans for a basic income for the disabled – they have no costing details for it from the PBO, and that is largely intersecting with provincial benefits programmes, and one economist who looked at the number said it’s way too low. Their revenue projections in particular are very, very rosy, and an expert I reached out to said it’s impossible to get that money, especially in the first two years, because of the amount of administration necessary to capture it. So that blows their projections out of the water. But wait, they will say – we got the PBO to cost it and got his stamp of approval! But he was working with their inputs and assumptions, and implementation matters (which is why he shouldn’t be costing platforms in the first place, because implementation involves political decisions). If they tell him that revenues can start in the next year, he has to operate on that assumption, even though it’s not possible, so they get figures that won’t bear out in reality, but they can wave them around and say they have a stamp of approval. It’s a problem, and it’s another example of how parties play games with promises that they don’t spell out how they’ll implement, which increasingly means that those promises are hollow (and yes, all parties are guilty of this).

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1436825763806957574

Meanwhile, on the subject of the Conservatives’ “carbon savings plan” and the points they claim you’ll accumulate in lieu of a tax rebate, here’s energy economist Andrew Leach on how impossible that will be to implement. It’s a long thread, but a worthwhile one, because once again, implementation matters. And this is clearly a plan that there is no intention to actually implement (especially considering that their costing document claimed its costs would be negligible – another fiction).

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Roundup: An insubstantial gong show of a French debate

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So, that was the French “Commission Debate.” Honestly, they should just burn this whole format down. The questions from “ordinary Canadians” are the kind of bullshit that TV executives think that people will spoon up (in spite of the stone-faced eleven-year-old unimpressed with the leaders pandering to him). Getting talent from each of the participating partners to ask questions is branding nonsense that adds little, especially when these same journalists can ask questions of the leaders in media availabilities daily. Packing in a list of topics that needs to be choreographed to the second means that the moment a leader started to get on the ropes about something, oops, time was up, next topic. Ridiculous.

With this in mind, it was another night of no real winners or losers, because it was just so insubstantial. Sure, Erin O’Toole choked on the child care question, but will it matter? Who knows? Same with Singh getting hit with the assertion that Jeff Bezos is in the United States and not Canada, or Annamie Paul getting a stake through the heart with the Greens having lost their raison d’être. They were good lines for the journalists who asked them, but will that actually have an effect? Doubtful. I can’t believe that they’re still trying to make “why are we having an election?” an issue in week four, and I still can’t believe that Justin Trudeau refuses to point out that Parliament was toxic and dysfunctional and couldn’t pass legislation for five months. And that he hasn’t called out the disingenuous “we need to work together” entreaties when these were the same leaders whose MPs were engaged in procedural warfare. But hey, “happy warrior” and all of that. And now we get to do it all again in English tonight.

Meanwhile, here were some of my reactions watching it all unfold.

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Roundup: The PBO’s dubious stamp of approval strikes again

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With less than two weeks to go in the campaign, the Parliamentary Budget Officer says he has returned 75 of 100 costing requests, but the Conservatives have not authorised release of any of theirs yet. The Liberals appear to have released most of theirs, and the NDP have only released two so far – but theirs are both fairly problematic.

Their first costing was for their pharmacare plan, basing it on Quebec’s 2016 formulary, and drawing their assumptions out from there for five years, and presumes that they could get a national plan up and running by next year using that formulary as an example. That’s a virtual impossibility, and a national formulary still needs to be negotiated (which the Canadian Drug Agency Transition Office is set up to coordinate once more provinces sign on), but hey, they got the PBO’s stamp of approval. Their costing for their wealth tax is also loaded with plenty of poor assumptions, has a huge uncertainty around a behavioural response – tax avoidance is a whack-a-mole problem – and most importantly, the base assumption is for a tax on “economic families,” when our tax system is built around individual filers. They would need to create a whole new tax system to capture this one percent of net wealth. And as Lindsay Tedds points out, there is no way this could be administered to get revenues for the current taxation year, but hey, the PBO put his stamp of approval on that one too.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1435346365228400643

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1435349658805624834

The notion that the PBO should do platform costing because he’s “neutral” is a poor move, because costing is an inherently political exercise. It requires implementation decisions that have huge effects on what is being projected, and those are decisions that he should be far away from.

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Roundup: No knockouts in the TVA debate

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The first official debate took place last night – TVA’s “Face-à-face” which was a debate in a slightly more behaved format than we tend to see with the consortium/commission debates. All four leaders displayed adequate French – though Erin O’Toole’s accent and pronunciation started to degrade the longer it went on – and it was broadly organized around three particular themes: the pandemic, social policy, and the Canada of tomorrow. As with most debates, there was no “knock-out punch,” the leaders largely held their own, and unlike 2019, no one got cornered and slaughtered as what happened to Andrew Scheer.

There were contentious issues – early on, the other leaders tried to gang up on Trudeau about the “unnecessary” election, which Justin Trudeau countered Yves-François Blanchet’s accusations with a reminder that on four occasions Blanchet voted non-confidence in the government and obviously wanted an election. O’Toole also claimed that Parliament was working together and that made the election unnecessary, but that was a complete lie, and there were five months of procedural warfare brought on by his MPs to drive that point home. Trudeau also made the point that the twenty percent of the population that remained unvaccinated shouldn’t be able to stop democracy, and that our institutions were robust enough to deal with it. Blanchet laid into O’Toole about his plans to cancel the child care programme and withdraw the promised money from Quebec in exchange for tax credits that won’t help create any child care spaces. Blanchet and Jagmeet Singh also got into it on a few occasions, particularly around who called whom a racist in the House of Commons, and on any issue that touched on race, Blanchet kept insisting that Quebeckers weren’t racist. It being a Quebec-centric debate (as opposed to inclusive of francophones outside of the province), it had its moments of parochialism, like the moderator demanding assurances from each of the leaders that the future Moderna plant will be built in Quebec and not Ontario.

While everyone is going to assert that either Blanchet won out of natural advantage, or that their own preferred leader “won,” just because I did want to make a couple of observations. Trudeau is still having difficulty articulating the need for an election – most especially around the toxic parliamentary session in the spring. Erin O’Toole kept repeating that he has a plan, and that he has a “contract with Quebec,” and just repeating those assurances, ad nauseum. He also did most of the interrupting and talking over others throughout the evening. Blanchet was chippy and peevish for much of it, while Jagmeet Singh would dodge direct questions in favour of his usual tactic of reverting to some kind of an anecdote about someone he allegedly met. And here are a collection of quotes from the evening, for what it’s worth.

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Roundup: Questioning the housing numbers

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The Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report yesterday on the federal government’s programme spending on housing affordability, and I have questions, both on the report, and on the responses to it. On the report itself, I’m having a hard time seeing how this is necessarily within his remit, and not that of the Auditor General. This is not exactly fiscal or macro-economic analysis – it’s evaluating programme spending, which is the Auditor General’s job. (Once again, the PBO is not a “budget watchdog” or a “watchdog” of any kind, per his enabling legislation). This doesn’t appear to have been at the request of any MPs in particular, though this updates his 2019 report which was requested by an unnamed MP at the time, but again, not really his wheelhouse. “Providing economic and financial analysis for the purposes of raising the quality of parliamentary debate and promoting greater budget transparency and accountability” is being taken a little too broadly.

The findings of the report are that the funds allocated to housing are being underspent, but doesn’t really delve into why, other than noting that some of the spending was related to having to renew bilateral agreements with provinces that were allowed to lapse in 2015, and that CMHC’s programmes have both faced “implementation delays” and that their shift toward funding capital contributions instead of affordability supports spread that funding out over the life of projects. Those “implementation delays” probably deserve a lot more exploration – the fact that municipalities in particular aren’t spending the dollars available fast enough because the projects are bottlenecked in their own jurisdictions (and Vancouver is most especially guilty of this) – and that’s a lot of what this report seems to be light on details about. Housing is largely a provincial responsibility, and aside from providing money, the federal government has very few levers at its disposal, and when municipalities can’t get their acts together, that’s not really a problem the federal government can solve.

As for opposition reaction, it was predictable in that it read the PBO’s topline and not much else. The Conservatives complained that the housing plans haven’t met their targets and that they need a plan that “gets homes built,” which again, is pretty hard to do with the very few levers available at the federal level. The NDP, meanwhile, accuse the government of dubious accounting and broken promises, as per usual, again based largely on topline figures and not the fact that many of the problems exist at the provincial and municipal levels. Federal dollars only go so far and can only wield so much influence, and these are details that matter when it comes to implementing promises.

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Roundup: No, fixed election dates don’t give the GG unconstitutional powers

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The “debate,” if you can call it such, over Jagmeet Singh’s decision to undermine Her Excellency Mary Simon by publicly writing her and telling her to refuse the advice of the prime minister who commands the confidence of the Chamber just got more ridiculous, as Andrew Coyne decided to weigh in yesterday (and no, I’m not going to link because hate clicks are still clicks). Coyne contends that the fixed election date law empowers the GG to turn down such a request, and “proves” it by quoting testimony from former justice minister Rob Nicholson at the Senate committee.

No. Just…no.

The logic in Coyne’s argument can’t hold because the Governor General’s role in accepting the advice of the prime minister who enjoys the confidence of the Chamber is the very basis of our constitutional framework under Responsible Government. The only discretion she might have over dissolution is when a request is made shortly after an election – that’s it. Nothing a simple statute, like the fixed election date law, can change a constitutional element, and there is jurisprudence to back this up, particularly the doomed attempts at trying to get the courts to uphold the fixed election date legislation, which they dismissed (including the Supreme Court of Canada). Fixed election date legislation is an empty shell – a bit of theatre and attempt to Americanise our system, and is antithetical to how Westminster systems operate – it shouldn’t be on our books as a result. There is no way that it could empower the GG to do away with constitutional norms to refuse dissolution, and if she did refuse, the prime minister would be obligated to resign, and we’d be in an election regardless. It’s ridiculous and wrong to suggest otherwise.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1422914814494584833

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1422925735472271369

What is even more ironic about this whole situation is that Jagmeet Singh and Coyne himself will often rail that the “undemocratic Senate” shouldn’t be allowed to exercise their constitutional powers to veto legislation, and yet they are demanded that an appointed Governor General exercise powers that she doesn’t actually have under the constitution. It’s bizarre, and it’s a lot of bullshit masquerading as principle.

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