Tag Archives: Pierre Poilievre

Roundup: No, it’s not a mini-midterm

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Because this is sometimes a media criticism blog, I am taking the opportunity to call out some of the absolute worst practices in Canadian political journalism, one of which was on display this weekend courtesy of CBC, where a preview of the forthcoming byelection in Mississauga-Lakeshore was termed a “miniature midterm election,” and my eyes rolled back so far in my head I almost did a full-body flip.

No. Stop that.

It is nothing like an American midterm election, which is a general election for the entire House of Representatives and a third of their Senate. Even Americans have special elections equivalent to byelections, so in every single way the comparison is flawed, and no, you can’t excuse it by trying to claim you’re piggybacking on an American story to tell a Canadian one, because it just perpetuates the false notion that our systems are at all equivalent, and that their politics are more interesting or exciting than ours are (which they are not—theirs are simply more insane, and we should not be looking to mimic or envy that in any way whatsoever). Furthermore, the story goes into the history of the riding and of certain byelections in order to try and carry on the tortured framing device to try and use it as a way of trying to divine messages about the current government, but with a boatload of caveats to say that it might not mean anything at all, in which case, what was the point of this whole exercise? It could have been a profile of the riding, the candidates, the fact that the Liberals once again ignored their own promise of open nominations to appoint a provincial has-been, or about the ground-game the different parties have in the riding as compared to the messages their parties are putting out. There is so much more you could do with this piece that would be useful political journalism than try to put this into some bastardised American context. Honestly, what is the gods damned point otherwise?

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 264:

Much of the news remains the liberation of Kherson, with police officers returning, along with things like television, though the city remains largely without power or water, and Ukrainian forces are trying to stabilise the situation there, which some are calling a humanitarian catastrophe. As well, some seventy percent of that province remains in Russian control, so there is still work to do. Some 2000 explosives have been removed from Kherson and the surrounding region in the past few days, and to the east, Russian forces continue their grinding offensive at Bakhmut.

https://twitter.com/maksymeristavi/status/1591525567698194432

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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: The drivers of food price inflation

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The September inflation numbers were released yesterday morning, and they are still cooling, but not quite by as much as anticipated, in part because food price inflation continues to stay high. While the temptation to conclude that this is entirely the fault of the grocery oligopoly engaged in price gouging, and boy howdy are the NDP trying to make this a Thing, we know from the economic data that it’s not actually the case. And it doesn’t take too much digging to know what some of the drivers of this food price inflation really are:

  • For cereal and bakery products, that’s because the drought on the Prairies destroyed 40 percent of crop yields last year
  • The blight known as “coffee rust” is affecting those crops, and is in large part because of monoculture
  • Drought has also taken out things like the chilis necessary for things like sriracha sauce, or the mustard crops used in condiments
  • Fresh fruit and vegetables are, again, susceptible to droughts in places like California, or the hurricanes that struck Florida
  • Fish and seafood are facing collapsing stocks, which again, drives up prices, and some harvesting seasons have been impacted by hurricanes
  • Dairy and meat has seen higher input costs (again, drought taking out feed crops) and avian flu ravaging poultry flocks is also driving up prices

As you can see, climate change is a big driver for most of these. Our food production is very vulnerable to it, and that is causing a lot of these price increases, and we need to be aware of that and stop couching it euphemisms about “inclement weather” or the like.

Meanwhile, Chrystia Freeland has told her Cabinet colleagues that they need to keep their spending priorities in check, and if they want higher spending, they need to be prepared to find savings in their departments to pay for them. While we have seen that the government’s fiscal stance is already pretty tight, Freeland needs to manage expectations right now—if we do go into a recession, the government can’t keep up the same supports they did during the pandemic, and broad spending programmes could wind up fuelling inflation and undoing the work the Bank of Canada is doing to tame it. It’s unlikely to really blunt any of the attacks from the opposition, and Poilievre in particular because he’ll just make up more nonsense that sounds like economics but is just bullshit, and certain people will spoon it up and legacy media will both-sides it, but regardless, Freeland looks to be steering the Liberals back on a course toward the brand of fiscal prudence and away from trying to capture more of the left, but perhaps that’s because they have put a mark in that territory with things like childcare and know that there are voters at the centre that the Conservatives are abandoning that they would rather pick up instead. Either way, it’s an interesting move.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 238:

As Russians continue to bomb power stations around the country, Ukrainians are facing rolling blackouts. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called out the Iranians for accepting “blood money” for these drone.  Meanwhile, Putin has declared martial law in the four occupied territories in Ukraine, giving his Russian regional governors emergency powers to enact new restrictions.

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Roundup: The problem with giving everyone a title

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There has been a lot of talk over the past few days about the choices that Pierre Poilievre made with announcing a shadow Cabinet as large as he did, and lo, the CBC had even more commentary over the weekend about it. Suffice to say, I’m not sure I really buy the take of “it gives everyone something to do.” Why? For starters, the whole point of a shadow Cabinet, particularly as it is practiced in the UK, is to have people who are ready to go into ministries if there is a change of government, and these are people who know their files, and can slot into the positions easily and quickly. That doesn’t really happen in Canada because our Cabinets have a lot of other considerations in play, such as regional composition, and balance with gender and other diversity, but region is the big one, and therefore, we can’t really have people ready to go into ministries because we don’t know how the regional dynamics will play at a time when they form government. (This is one reason why I’m not keen on calling critics “shadow ministers,” because they don’t have the same function). If you give everyone jobs that are not related to how Cabinet is composed, you’re not really living up to the purpose, particularly if you’re assigning made-up portfolios to certain MPs to exercise their hobby-horses as a reward for loyalty, even though as a reward goes, it’s not much because there is no added pay that goes with it.

My other problem, however, is that MPs already have a lot of work that they’re already not really doing, and many of them have offloaded those responsibilities on to independent Officers of Parliament, and that’s a problem. Committee work is supposed to take up the bulk of an MP’s time, but if they’re playing “shadow minister” for their hobby horses, they’re spending less time doing the work in committee or elsewhere that they’re supposed to be doing. There is also participation-trophy syndrome at play, where (almost) everyone gets a title (but not pay), even though we should remember that backbenchers are supposed to play important accountability roles in our parliamentary system. If we’re training the caucus to all expect titles and roles and not that they have jobs to do as backbenchers, we’re really weakening the ability of our parliament to do its job, and that is worrying. Not that the current crop of MPs in the Commons seems to care much about Parliament and its ability to function correctly, and this goes for all parties (and it’s really not helped when the prime minister has been a constitutional vandal when it comes to the Senate and the role it plays). This is a problem, and we should be talking about it, rather than patting Poilievre on the back for such a “strategic” move.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 235:

Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk say that their mayor’s office was hit by a rocket, which the Ukrainian military has not claimed responsibility for, while Russian rockets struck the town across from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Over the weekend, a missile strike seriously damaged an energy facility near Kyiv,

https://twitter.com/JimmySecUK/status/1581636027487178754

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Roundup: Freeland’s non-contradictory position on energy

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On Tuesday, Chrystia Freeland gave a speech at the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC, and she outlined some fairly ambitious economic policy that involves a retrenching of keeping our supply chains within fellow democracies, because relying on regimes like Russia and China can prove costly in the end—particularly if you look at what’s happening in Europe with their energy crisis. It also means accelerating the green energy transition, which is also happening at a faster pace. But what got a bunch of people in Canada curious was Freeland talking about fast-tracking energy and mining projects to help Europe with that transition. But there is nuance there, however.

The CBC in particular got excited because they claimed to see some kind of contradiction with what Freeland was saying with the fact that the government won’t do anything to fast-track LNG projects, and that we somehow sent German Chancellor Olaf Scholz packing when he came looking for LNG. Erm, except he didn’t, because he knows as well as anyone that we don’t have the infrastructure for LNG, and so he came looking for hydrogen, which he got. But the CBC’s Vassy Kapelos did an interview with Scholz, where she spent half of it badgering and hectoring him about LNG until he said that he would like Canadian LNG if we had it, and they kept bringing that clip up in isolation. But again, Scholz knows we don’t, that it would take too long to build, and frankly that the market case isn’t there. As I wrote in this column, the timelines for these projects don’t make sense, and frankly, the LNG projects that have been on the drawing table for decades never took off because they couldn’t get commitments from buyers for the project. And while Kapelos was hectoring and badgering natural resources minister Jonathan Wilkinson yesterday about LNG, and insisting that the Americans can get theirs to export and why not us, the difference is that they have been converting LNG import terminals for export, which we can’t do. We have one import terminal in New Brunswick, and it would take two years to retrofit, assuming they could get a steady supply of gas, which they don’t have without importing. That’s why it’s an import terminal. But apparently there are no producers at Power & Politics who can pick up the phone and call a gods damned energy economist who can explain these things before they talk to the minister and not waste everyone’s time.

So no, Freeland didn’t contradict anyone. They are putting a focus on mining critical minerals in Canada—Trudeau made such an announcement earlier in the week. They are focusing on hydrogen, some of which may come from natural gas, which again, is not LNG, but is an energy project. “Energy project” is not simply code for LNG, guys. It’s only slightly alarming that the gods damned public broadcaster can’t be bothered to do their homework to put things in context before they start hyperventilating, but this is apparently the era we’re living in.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 231:

Ukrainian forces say that they have recaptured five settlements in the southern Kherson region, while the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has lost external power for the second time in five days, which puts stress on the cooling systems.

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Roundup: New sanctions on Iran, new enforcement resources

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Mid-afternoon, on the Friday before a long weekend, the prime minister and deputy prime minister hastily called a press conference and announced new sanctions against the Iranian regime—the top 50 percent of the IRGC will be permanently barred from Canada under powers in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which have thus-far only been applied to genocidaires from Bosnia and Rwanda. As well, more sanctions to other individuals have been announced, but even more importantly was the announcement of $76 million to establish a new sanctions bureau at Global Affairs so that we have the capacity to actually monitor and enforce these sanctions we’ve been applying.

Is this a declaration that the IRGC is a terrorist entity? No, because it would still be impossible to monitor and enforce, and would capture too many low-level conscripts. Will the Conservatives continue to yell and moan about it? Of course they will. There is some commentary that if applied properly, these measures could be more effective than listing them under the Criminal Code, but again, this depends on it being properly applied, and it will take time to build the capacity in the aforementioned sanctions bureau. It also bears noting that this all seems last-minute, reactive, and like this government doesn’t know how to get ahead of issues, so even if they do the right thing, it comes off as being pushed or shamed into it, which doesn’t help the narrative that this government is getting tired.

Danielle Smith

In the wake of her leadership victory, Alberta’s incoming premier Danielle Smith has agreed to run in a by-election for a seat of her own, and one of her MLAs is resigning to accommodate her (and had not planned to run again in the next election), and for Smith, it’s a mostly rural seat, because that’s her base. There is also a vacant seat in Calgary, but Smith would have a harder time there, and also plans not to hold that by-election in advance of next spring’s general election, which is indefensible under political norms. But hey, she’s willing to pretend the whole constitution is free to be ignored, so why should political norms matter? Yeah, this is a problem.

Meanwhile, here’s Jason Markusoff’s lengthy profile of Smith and her reinvention. Ken Boessenkool considers Smith to be a kamikaze mission into modern conservatism itself (and yet it’s almost like the bastardised way in which we now run leadership contests basically makes this an inevitability). Colby Cosh tries to put some context into Smith’s comeback and her outlasting all of her political rivals. Andrew Coyne sees storm clouds on the horizon with both François Legault and Danielle Smith looking to be constitutional vandals. My weekend column previews some of the absolute constitutional chaos, right up to the suspension of the rule of law, if Danielle Smith tries to get her own way.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1578497923016699904

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 226:

There have been explosions in the Kharkiv region, as Russia concentrates attacks on the city while they are being driven back elsewhere in the country. More mass graves have been found in the Kharkiv region, on top of those already found at Izium and in Lyman.

https://twitter.com/TetySt/status/1578462615994368000

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Roundup: Tagging the misogynists to own the Libs

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News broke yesterday morning from Global that videos on Pierre Poilievre’s YouTube channel contained hidden tags including #mgtow (Men Going Their Own Way), which is considered so misogynistic that even Reddit has banned it. This anti-feminist movement includes incels who have perpetrated mass murder in this country. But it’s not like Poilievre hasn’t been playing footsies with other extremist elements in this country, right? Right?

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1578020907876249600

In the wake of the revelation, Poilievre was forced to address it in Question Period, where he denounced the “organisation,” which isn’t an organisation, and said that he denounces misogyny, and then began engaging in whataboutism and trying to attack the prime minister instead. There was no actual apology, and his insistence that because he ensured that the tags were removed and he denounced misogyny, that’s enough. His caucus was telling media on their way out of the West Block that Poilievre “took responsibility” and that was more than Trudeau ever did, which is wrong on both counts. There was no responsibility taken—mere hours later, Poilievre’s office said they weren’t going to investigate and basically shrugged about who could have possibly done this (the answer is starting to look pretty obvious), and he has done zero work of trying to remedy his tendency of flirting with these extremist elements, whereas Trudeau has put in the work when it comes to combatting racism.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 225:

Russian forces shelled an apartment block in Zaporizhzhia, in spite of the fact that they “annexed” the territory, while the Ukrainian counter-offensive continues. Sweden, meanwhile, has found evidence of detonations along the Nordstream pipelines, pointing to Russian sabotage.

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Roundup: Taking the blame, children’s cold medicine edition

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There has been a concerted effort to try and make the shortage of over-the-counter children’s cold and fever medication the federal government’s problem, even though they have precious few levers at their disposal. The Conservatives are trying to demand that Health Canada lift restrictions on imports that aren’t labelled in English and French, though I’m not sure that would really help if these shortages (which are due to high demand because COVID isn’t over!) are more widespread, and even there, that would require a lot of provincial coordination because pharmacies are also under provincial jurisdiction. But apparently the minister can’t just say that people need to talk to the provinces—that simply won’t do.

I had a bit of a debate over Twitter about this last night, and I will concede that part of this is a problem with the government’s inability to message and get ahead of these kinds of issues, or leverage some righteous anger and direct it to the provinces to do their gods damned jobs for once—but this government doesn’t like to do anger, and it really doesn’t like to blame the provinces for the things that the provinces aren’t doing when they should be, because they want to be “nice,” and “cooperative,” and “not divisive.” But that’s not helping anybody, and so we get more platitudes and feel-good pabulum that doesn’t actually make anyone feel good. I do have real problems with everyone—particularly media—trying to make every problem the federal government’s, but the government need to get better at messaging around this tendency, which they steadfastly refuse to do.

 

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 224:

As Russia’s president signed papers that purport to annex territory in Ukraine, Ukrainian forces continue to press ahead in their counter-offensive in both the east and the south, collapsing Russian lines even further. And those new troops Russia has been conscripting to send to Ukraine? Much of them come from the country’s ethnic minorities, which is a calculated move. Ukraine, meanwhile, is making a bid for the 2030 FIFA World Cup as a way of survivors of the invasion healing from the war.

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Roundup: Marinating ideas or wasting precious time?

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As his weekend think piece, the CBC’s Aaron Wherry extolled the virtues of MPs who aim high with their private members’ bills, even if they don’t go anywhere. I am of particular mixed feelings about this, because while I can get behind the notion that sometimes the big ideas need to marinate in the public consciousness for a while, whether that was cannabis legalisation, single-event sports betting, or trans rights, we also need to be cognisant that a whole lot of private members’ business is, well, a giant waste of everyone’s time, particularly when you have MPs who table dozens of bills and motions in any single session that will never see the light of day, but consume time they should be spending doing their actual jobs of holding government to account, as well as media attention for something that is dead on arrival.

It’s hard not to conclude that PMBs aren’t being abused in the current iteration of the Standing Orders. We’re seeing a growing number of bills that need royal recommendations still get debated all the way up to the final vote, which essentially means that everyone’s time has been wasted because it’s not going to proceed, and that MP could have used their spot for something that could have gone somewhere instead, rather than hoping that the government was going to grant the recommendation that late in the game. There is a never-ending supply of bills to amend riding names and declare national days, weeks, or months about some ethno-cultural group or cause, individual tweaks to the Criminal Code that have distorted all semblance of proportionality in our sentencing principles, or attempts at tax expenditures that are a loophole to the prohibition against proposing spending (because the rubric is that you are forgoing tax revenue, as though that didn’t come with its own costs), and when you do get the big issues, I’m really not sure that two hours of scripted speeches being read into the void is really exercising the national consciousness on the issue.

Maybe I’m just horribly cynical, but I don’t see the benefits of this particular exercise like I would if there was an actual grassroots process to formulate policy that the party adopts (and I especially have a problem when MPs use their spots to put forward policy positions because it surrenders their rights and privileges as MPs for the party’s sake, most especially if it’s a stunt on the party’s behalf—looking especially at you, NDP). Time is one of the most precious resources in Parliament, and the amount of time and resources that gets wasted on these bills that will never see the light of day just makes a mockery of the process.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 221:

After being encircled by Ukrainian forces, Russians retreated from the city of Lyman, which has been a logistics hub for the Donetsk region. In the meantime, Russians have targeted humanitarian convoys, because of course they did. Meanwhile, ten torture sites have been found in Izium, which Russia controlled for six months, and at least thirty people found in the mass grave outside of the city bore marks associated with torture.

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1576248108690079745

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Roundup: No breach of privilege for horse jokes

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Our long national horse-joke nightmare is over. The Speaker of the House of Commons ruled that said tweet didn’t impinge on Garnett Genuis’ ability to do his work, and was not a prima facie breach of privilege, and the matter is dropped. I’m just surprised that it took him three days to determine that, but here we are. I was able to return to the House of Commons without fear that I would be removed by security (because the privilege complaint got the Sergeant-at-Arms involved), and things went as they have for pretty much the past almost fourteen years. Sure, Andrew Scheer gave me a death stare, but he’s not going to keep me from doing my job.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1574767434145447940

With that in mind, a few notes and observations—while I might have preferred a stronger statement from the Press Gallery executive, I have come to learn that there was a lot of backroom pressure being exerted by certain Conservatives, so the Gallery didn’t relent to that, which is a positive sign, but still worrying about the overall implications. I am under no illusions—this was a targeted attack on me, and this was a test case for what the Conservatives hoped they could get away with in their attempt to go to war with the media. They figured that I was vulnerable, because I’m a freelancer without a corporation and a newsroom backing me up, and I’m gay, and they hoped it would count against me. It didn’t. The Gallery rebuffed their attempts, and I wasn’t about to let the Conservatives bully or intimidate me. But this was pure intimidation, and We The Media can’t kid ourselves. I was one of the first, but I will not be the last. We’re going to need to get a lot better at solidarity in the months and years to come. Am I going to recycle this horse joke yet again? Probably not. But I’m not going to stop calling out their bullshit, either in print or over Twitter.

The bigger warning sign is about what this says about the state of politics. For Scheer and Genuis, this is just a game, and they are more concerned with scoring points than they are in doing the work of being an MP, whether it’s actual accountability, or policy work, or any of it. And the sad reality is that this is where politics has been headed under the current generation for a few years now. Friends of mine who used to be staffers got so discouraged by this attitude about point-scoring—and this is from all parties, not just the Conservatives—that they wanted out. Their going after me was just another attempt to score a point, and that’s why I’m not going to laugh this off and say “It’s just politics.” Because it’s not “just politics,” and this is not a game. We need to break this mindset, and return to this being a serious place with serious people. Garnett Genuis and Andrew Scheer are not serious people. Oh, and if they couldn’t parse the grammar of that tweet, then they have no business scrutinizing legislation.

And finally, a big thank you to all of my supporters and followers over the past week. It was very heartening to get your messages of encouragement throughout, even as I dealt with an influx of trolls who apparently have nothing better to do with their time than stalk my Facebook, or click on my YouTube videos in order to down-vote them. (Guess what guys—the algorithm counts those clicks, down-votes and shitty comments as engagement in my favour).

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 216:

Russia is claiming to have won overwhelming majority votes in their sham-referendums (conducted at gunpoint) in occupied regions of Ukraine as a pretext for annexation, which no Western country is going to view as legitimate. Meanwhile, Russian men at risk of conscription are fleeing the country, and a Russian-backed disinformation network trying to spread propaganda about the invasion has been shut down.

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